Visual artist Elianna Renner, born in Switzerland in 1977 and living in Germany, works at the interface of biography and history. Her focus is always on stories of women, often those that do not appear in official historiography at all or only marginally. Renner creates an aesthetic-visual approach to the examination of (oral) history. Her aim is to make the story(s) perceivable as constructions that are presented in a new way depending on the narrator. Scientists are constantly confronted with the question of how they can deal with the never-ending demand for truth in history. Renner seeks to expose this claim to truth as illusory. In her works she imagines, reassembles, links fiction with the “real” and uses a variety of artistic media such as film, photography, audio, text, sketches and installation. With her works she reminds us that not only personal memory processes are inevitably incomplete, but that cultural memory and official historiography also produce (in)avoidable gaps that refer to the construction of history(ies) in general.
