Swiss artist Elianna Renner works with the intersections among biography, fiction and history. Her multimedia approach circles around performance and audio-visual installation, which are sometimes combined with film and photography. The core theme of her work revolved around memory, the archive and the recovery of histories. Elianna Renner likes telling stories that are linked to everyday life and contain biographical elements. This technique creates moments that are shifting between objectivity and subjectivity – humorous and thought provoking at the same time.

In her recent projects, she questioned historical narratives and their inherent areas of omission – always striving to uncover the power structures behind these “untold” or “incommunicable” histories. Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of  “unthinkable history”, Renner believes that we all need stories to fill in the gaps books will never teach us.

Taking a subjective stance on history, she reinvents moments that seem to be taken out of reality, only to slightly bend them into fiction. She approaches this central idea through multimedia installations where photography, performance, video and audio-tracks intertwine, whilst enmeshing the audience in an intimate dialogue with the artist.

Read more about the project in the ARTISHOCK magazine article