by Claudia Siefen-Leitich

With her seemingly never-ending energy, there is a moment when you experience the painter and filmdirector Mara Mattuschka in peace and in almost frozen concentration, and that is while eating in a restaurant. As a performance artist, painter, author, actress, professor and even singer, Mara Mattuschka surprises her audience time and again and is one of the figureheads of Austrian avant-garde cinema. The body is at the centre of Mattuschka’s work, quite conscious in its impulsiveness and defectiveness, through which the unconscious seems to burst forth and leap at us. If one allows it to. Born in Sofia in 1959, she studied painting and animation with Maria Lassnig at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, but began to explore the medium of film at an early age.