Barbis ruder
Barbis Ruder, born 1984 in Heidelberg, Germany, lives and works in Vienna. She is a performance and media artist, musician, and cultural manager. After her education in international cultural management at the ISW Business School Freiburg, Germany, and Breda University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands, from 2006 to 2009/10, she studied Transmedia Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna with Brigitte Kowanz and graduated in 2015. Thereafter, she built up the Angewandte Performance Lab (APL) together with an interdisciplinary team of artists, where she has been working as a Senior Artist from 2020-2023. Since 2023 she is Senior Lecturer in the department TransArts - Transdisciplinary Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
In her promotion 2023 in Artistic Research at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under the guidance of Hans Schabus and together with her research team “Phantom Lab,” she developed sculptures at the interface of medical and body techniques.
In both her artistic and research work, the body forms the departure point of her investigations. Drawing on topics such as economy, labour conditions, intimacies, and social conventions, she examines and develops cultural techniques of the body, which find expression in video and sound works, sculptures, as well as spatial installations. Parallel, she continues to work in theatre, writing and directing stage plays, and is part of the glam-pop band What’s Inside a Girl.
Her work has been awarded, among others, the H13 Lower Austria Prize for Performance by Kunstraum Niederoesterreich (2014), the Art Prize of the Archdiocese of Freiburg (2015), and an honourable mention from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (2015). In 2017, she was a scholarship holder of the Baden-Württemberg Arts Foundation, received the START scholarship for media art from the Austrian Federal Chancellery – Arts and Culture Division, and was nominated for the Kardinal König art prize. In 2024 she receives the state's scholarship of the Austrian Federel Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport.
Her performances and sculptural works have been shown at numerous festivals and museums, including Künstlerhaus Wien, Landesgalerie Linz (today’s Francisco Carolinum), Neue Galerie Graz, Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Foto: Jana Enz