When I draw myself, I exist threefold

"Freedom is not given to you ­– you have to take it". What Meret Oppenheim once proclaimed could also serve as the unifying principle of the generation of female artists to whom Christiana Perschon has dedicated her film portrait cycle initiated in 2014. And it makes sense that no two portraits are the same: Perschon's cinematic approach to each of her "chosen soulmates" is the result of an empathic collaboration, each time requiring the finding of a new form. In When I draw myself, I exist threefold, Perschon's camera focuses on the painter and drawing artist Florentina Pakosta as she sits before her age-old mirror and mediator of a lifetime of self-portraits. The artist wears a grotesquely distorted self-portrait mask, while Perschon's camera watches the reflection of the artist watching herself watching. The resulting multiplication of the gaze probes and questions the extent to which identity is constituted through the gaze of the other. What Pakosta describes in the film as an indispensable means of self-assurance in her past struggle for social and artistic independence - her artistic self-mirroring - here becomes a visually performative act of liberation by the now 90-year-old artist. She is captured in strictly constellated visual details, in which Pakosta inscribes herself within the framework of mirrors and paintings. The result is an homage to a feminist pioneer (among the first women elected to the Secession's board of directors) who has created the necessary freedom to determine her own image. Self-determined, flirtatious and playful, she chooses different poses and masks as transformations of her self and as means of reinventing herself again and again along the way. When Pakosta asks at the end, it is put in a nutshell, "The camera is rolling, all the time". Laughter. (Heike Eipeldauer)