Annja Krautgasser

Annja Krautgasser lives and works in Vienna. She studied Visual Media Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (with Peter Weibel) and Architecture, and has long been active as an artist working across experimental film, drawing, performance, and video installation. Her work has been widely exhibited and awarded, including the Paul Flora Prize and the City of Innsbruck Art Prize.

Her artistic approach is essayistic, reflective, and often autobiographically grounded. Krautgasser’s work focuses on peripheral zones of society, media representation, the culture of memory, and the interplay between the personal and the political. Through a precise layering of language, image, and sound, she explores forms that blend documentary material with performative and installative elements.

As part of her residency in Vilnius, she plans to realize the project From Afar, a personal investigation into her own family history — specifically the relationship with her late father. The project is based on around nine hours of private video messages that were exchanged between them over the course of several years. Combined with old letters, textual fragments, and drawings, this material will form the basis for a short film exploring memory, silence, storytelling, and emotional inheritance.

The geographical and emotional distance provided by Vilnius is intentionally chosen as a space of retreat and contrast — a neutral ground from which to confront intimacy, loss, and the shifting narratives of one’s own past. The project becomes a poetic experiment in how absence, solitude, and presence can be retranslated into visual and artistic language.