Elke Silvia Krystufek charts a confrontational terrain where the personal, political, and performative converge. Working across painting, drawing, photography, video, performance, and installation, she uses her own body as both material and motif, producing art that unflinchingly addresses sexuality, identity, and power dynamics. Krystufek frequently appropriates language—both poetic and autobiographical—overlaying text onto imagery to break narrative boundaries and provoke direct engagement with the viewer. Her work interrogates art‑historical conventions through citation, staging, and meta‑archival practices, revealing the social and institutional underpinnings of representation. Performance remains a core strategy: from early participatory acts rooted in Viennese Actionism to later embodied gestures, Krystufek's art creates tension between exposure and agency, visibility and taboo. She also curates from her own archives—transforming private motifs into public rituals and questioning archival authority and legacy. Krystufek’s oeuvre is sustained by a refusal to separate the artist from the subject. Her work insists on situating desire, critique, and self‑invention center stage—with an urgency that demands viewer complicity and provocation. ...
