Constanze Ruhm (born 1965) is an Austrian filmmaker, screenwriter, artist, author, professor, and curator. Her works include films, videos, installations, photographs, texts, and digital projects.
She graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 1996, she has been teaching internationally as a professor of film and video art. In 2006, she became a tenured professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Ruhm began studying visual media design with Peter Weibel at the Academy of Applied Arts in 1987.
In the early 1990s, she moved with Weibel to the Städelschule in Frankfurt, where she became increasingly exposed to film and media theory discourses from Germany and France. During this time, she worked as a research assistant for artists such as Dara Birnbaum and Matt Mullican. She received her diploma from the Academy of Applied Arts in 1993, while continuing to work at the Städelschule until 1994.
In 2005/2006, she was appointed professor of film and video at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Since 2006, she has held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in the Department of Art and Digital Media.
From 2007 to 2011, alongside her work in Vienna, she was an adjunct professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2017, she founded the queer feminist concept choir Mala Sirena with musician Florian Paul Ebner.
In 2023, the Austrian Film Museum dedicated a retrospective to Ruhm's film and video work.
Ruhm's style, technique and themes
In her artistic work, Ruhm explores film, other media, and archives, as well as feminist historiography.
Her practice is characterized by an interest in dramaturgically open and networked figures, in the reciprocal constitutional processes of theory and artistic production and, in authorship, in the transition between cinema and new media. Ruhm's work oscillates between a decoding of representational chains and performative shifts.
She often accompanies her films with installations that expand on the films' ideas, themes and references.
Early digital work
Ruhm's initial work was in digital art: at the time she was working with Weibel, Birnbaum and Mullican—creating 3D environments for the latter—it was a field that "appeared unbelievably promising and exciting." The culmination of this period in her work was her collaboration with Peter Sandbichler[de] on an installation for the Venice Biennale of 1995. But shortly after this project, her interest in narrative cinema came to the fore, though still filtered through her background in digital art, as she reworked and re-envisioned the presuppositions of the earlier form by means of the new medium.
"Since the late 1990s, [Ruhm's] work has been characterized mainly by references to certain films." Apartment (1998), while still a digital piece, explicitly evokes a classic film of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (Le mépris), foregrounding "the representation of female characters within the cosmology of this male-dominated auteur cinema." In Ruhm's reworking of the breakup between the characters played by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli,
I digitally reconstructed the apartment where this separation takes place[...]. A tracking camera moved through this digitally created architecture, following Brigitte Bardot's body and her patterns of moment, so that all the paths she takes in this key scene are reflected in the continuous movement of the virtual camera. Thus, the gaze of the camera is turned away from the female body as an object and represented as a subjective perspective. [...] Much of what I would be dealing with later was already being applied here: the focus on the female figure in cinema, a dislocation in the staging of the gaze, analysis of the relationship between director and representation, staging and representation, as well as the interest in cinematic architecture, which would later become very important.
A move to working with actors and scripted features; the "seven characters"
In 2001, Ruhm started the process of moving "to real, analogue space, to work with real people, with actors[...].". This provided a better match with her literary background: "[M]y works develop not least from a writing practice, from text, and through narrative storytelling, or rather through the script." But one last digital work, A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (2002), named after a Joyce poem, served as a bridge between the digital period and the shift toward working with actors. Like Apartment, A Memory is built upon a digital reconstitution of a set from a narrative feature, in this case Irvin Kershner's Eyes of Laura Mars. But the narration of Ruhm's work is based on an assemblage of the dialogue of female characters from that film as well as from several other films—what Ruhm calls her "matrix films." In the decade to come, she will return regularly to these characters and films in her projects. In addition to the character of Laura Mars played by Faye Dunaway in Kershner's film, these characters include:
A Memory exists both as a standalone 26-minute film and as an installation. In a review of the installation, Michael Hall noted that Ruhm "sifted through this popular suspense film and eliminated nearly all the pertinent information, except for the elements that most interested her[...] leaving an obscure digital picture that looked neither real nor fake." In this process of "emptying out" the original film, "Ruhm's main concern centers on how the space of cinematic narratives and the stories invented by others can add to the understanding of our own social reality."
X Characters / RE(hers)AL (2003) was Ruhm's first film with on-screen actors. Here all seven of the characters appear in the flesh and interact with each other. Ruhm worked out the script in a collaborative process with seven friends, each focusing on one of the main roles. The film was shot in Berlin, with help from colleagues such as Harun Farocki, a fellow professor at the Academy in Vienna. In the film the seven characters,
due to a series of flight delays [...] find themselves stranded together in an airport lobby and strike up a conversation. It's about the question of how fictional protagonists can survive their supposed death and continue to exist in other versions beyond the end of the film.
Ruhm had originally planned on naming the series of films X Characters in Search of an Author, alluding to the Pirandello play. As for the "X" with which the titles of this film and the two next ones begin, normally it "is used in theater and film production to mark the position of an actor, and is applied with chalk or tape to a usually black-painted wooden floor. In her films, Constanze Ruhm turns the 'X' into a protagonist, into a transmitter between character and space."
X Characters is also her first film in which rehearsals play a key on-screen role. The exploration of the world of rehearsals—the postures, the gestures, the struggles, the shifts in identity—will become an integral part of nearly all of her films up to the present day. "The rehearsal as form and method forms the basis for most of my works."
X NaNa / Subroutine (2004), in which Farocki has a small role, was the first in an intended series of standalone films about each of the seven characters—thus a "subroutine" of the main "program" featuring all seven. X NaNa imagines Godard's Nana (who prefers spelling her name with two capital "N"s) working in a record shop while participating in hacking operations and interrogating her creator via an Internet chat screen. The soundtrack echoes her name through judicious selections from various pop songs.
Ultimately the only other film made in the series of standalone films was X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String (2007), centered on Giuliana. Here the "X", drawn on a piece of black cloth used in film shoots and called a "flag," figures physically and prominently as Giuliana, now an actress, not only plays herself but also Bree and Hari, "creating a kaleidoscopic fragmentation of identities." She is often obliged to act with the flag as her only partner (this is an evocation of a real film shoot during which Maureen O'Hara often had to perform love scenes alone with such a flag while her co-star Errol Flynn was too drunk to function). The director, also a woman, is a relatively overbearing, unfriendly presence, often criticizing Giuliana's acting. Only Nana, who has become a script supervisor in this film, tries to give Giuliana constructive advice.
Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot (2010) was the last of Ruhm's films to feature any of the seven characters. Here, those remaining are Hari, Nana, and Giuliana, who has become "Julian" and is played by a male actor (wearing a slip). Although it is not presented as such, the film could be seen as centered on Hari this time, as
she comes to a clearing and meets female figures from other movies, some of them male after a sex change, all of them unstable characters who share her condition and attempt, loop-like, to kill themselves (or others in their place). Suicide seems to be the only way out of the vortex of the story, the only way to assume power over one's own identity, an Oedipus interruptus. But this fails precisely because those attempting to perform it lack their own lives.
The other characters therefore emulate Hari's behavior in Solaris where she attempts more than once to commit suicide but is unsuccessful, being a mere projection from the surface of the planet Solaris.
Film
Nana
Giuliana
Alma
Bree
Hari
Laura Mars
Rachel
A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
X Characters / RE(hers)AL
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
Y
X NaNa / Subroutine
Y
X Love Scenes / Pearls without a String
Y
Y
Y
Y
Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot
Y
Y—as "Julian"
Y
Partnerships with co-directors
Cold Rehearsal
Constanze Ruhm (2020)
The end of the period centered on the seven characters inaugurated a new one where Ruhm worked in collaboration with other directors. Again, a film bridges the divide between the two periods: in this case, it is Cold Rehearsal (Kalte Probe) (2011/12), co-directed by Christine Lang. The two main characters are Anna, clearly based on Anna Karina and as such a callback to Nana from the earlier films, and Hans, played by the same actor who played Julian in the previous film and evoking a name Godard used to pseudonymously sign several articles of film criticism.
The film begins, however, with three figures who Ruhm has identified as dead actresses formerly in Hans's films and marooned in a realm of detritus—a patch of land with folding chairs and a tent—that she calls "hell." But she has also said that the characters from the earlier series "find themselves together again," implying that the actresses are continuations or interpolations of the seven earlier characters. The actresses exact punishment on Hans by imagining him as a janitor on a talk show, made to appear on it as a guest with Anna (played by one of the dead actresses). Through a process of redoubling he is also forced to witness the events in the talk show studio with two other instances of Anna (played by the other two dead actresses) and himself (always himself, sometimes dirtier, sometimes stupider).
Other elements connect Cold Rehearsal to the earlier series: some of the actors (Judith van der Werff, Irina Kastrinidis, Dominic Oley); a sardine can; shovels for digging graves and knocking people unconscious; and the male character explaining that he is undergoing an identity crisis. "The film explores forms of female (self-)representation and the autonomy of female film characters as opposed to their male writers and directors." The dialogue in the film serves as "hidden instructions for the plot as well as its interpretation, thereby exposing the cinematic illusion -- in a very Brechtian sense -- by laying bare the modes of production." Ruhm has reiterated this lineage of her work: "By showing the contrived aspect of fiction, I am working in the Brechtian tradition, so to speak."
Panoramis Paramount Paranormal
Panoramis Paramount Paranormal (2014–16), co-directed by Emilien Awada, continues the connection with Godard and Karina. The film starts at Le Panoramis, an apartment complex in the Paris suburbs that was once the site of the Saint-Maurice studios[fr], the French division of Paramount. Godard had shot scenes from A Woman Is a Woman at these studios.
However, Ruhm saw this film as the beginning of a "new cycle" where "the form has become much more open and essayistic." Indeed, the film is less dominated by on-screen characters and features long passages of the surroundings of Le Panoramis with only ambient sound and the occasional passerby.
Alongside Laurent Lacotte[fr], actors from Ruhm's previous films rehearse passages from Marcel Carné's Juliette, or Key of Dreams, a film shot at the Saint-Maurice studios. They alternate between French and German, an allusion to the former practice of filming versions of films in multiple languages on the same sets with different directors and lead actors. Again, this was a practice associated with these studios.
The "paranormal" element of the film comes from two ghosts who prolong in a sense the role played in the earlier films by characters existing beyond their original films, or dead actresses imposing plotlines from their place in hell. For Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, the film "examines the role of cinema in the production of memory." She then quotes an unpublished text by Ruhm: "What form does the work against oblivion have to assume, and how can you live in peace with the specters, and should one even wish for it? Derrida responds that one cannot do anything but learn to live with the phantoms [...]."
The "Italian period"
In 2012
Schulte Strathaus invited Ruhm to participate in "Living Archive -- Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice," a long-term project of the Berlin Arsenal "in which artists are encouraged to appropriate and rework the films and footage
stored in [its] vaults."
Here, Ruhm encountered the film Anna (1975) by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli. Schulte Strathaus has suggested that "it may have caught her eye because of its title: Anna, like Anna Karina [...]." Jan Lumholdt describes it as a "three-hour-plus cinéma vérité piece [...] [s]hot on video in 1972" that "portrays a 16-year-old homeless drug addict who is eight months pregnant, discovered by the directors in central Rome and intimately explored, possibly also exploited, throughout the movie."
On the basis of the Grifi/Sarchielli film, Ruhm created Gli appunti di Anna Azzori / Uno specchio che viaggia nel tempo (The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror that Travels through Time) (2019). But here again, as with Ruhm's earlier works, we have the theme of the character rebelling against her representation. In her article on Ruhm's film, Marina Pavido imagines Anna's thoughts: "What do these men want from her? Why do they film her? Why do they laugh when they talk about her in her absence?"
We also have examples of Ruhm's predilection for revealing the "reverse shot" of what is shown, or what was "left on the cutting room floor." The "notes" of the title did not really exist, except in a slip of the tongue by one of the directors in a moment that was cut out of the original film;
Ruhm provides them through "Anna's" voiceover (the casting of "Anna" is characteristically a major component of her film). In another outtake of the original film, Ruhm discovered Anna's last name, which is never mentioned in the finished product whereas all the other members of the crew were duly credited with their full names.
Ruhm's discovery of Anna "prompted her to undertake studies in the history of the Italian feminism of the 1970s."
Around the same time, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, which had presented a solo exhibition of Ruhm's work featuring Apartment in their 20er Haus space in 1998, renewed their interest in her work by proposing another collaboration. "In this instance, she delved into the history of the women's movement in Italy and discovered the Italian writer and art critic Carla Lonzi, who passed away too early."
While doing research for Gli appunti di Anna Azzori Ruhm had come across the Casa Internazionale delle Donne (International Women's House) in Rome, and the herSTORY archive located there.
On the basis of its resources, she developed La strada (è ancora) più lunga (2021), first a series of photographs and then an installation. She later incorporated the photographs into the exhibition Come una pupilla al variare della luce (2023)
at the Belvedere, which also featured screenings of Gli appunti di Anna Azzori.
The research incorporated into La strada, Come une pupilla and another installation, A Shard is a Fragment of a Life, found filmic form in Ruhm's most recent feature, È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia (It Is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises) (2024). Here she combines her exploration of the work of Lonzi—and the Rivolta Femminile group that Lonzi co-founded—with a look back at the Précieuses, "a group of proto-feminist activists"
in 17th century France. Molière parodied this movement in his plays Les précieuses ridicules and Les femmes savantes.
The seventeenth-century phenomenon of the précieuses is of great interest to Lonzi, who identifies with the lives of those intellectual women, discredited and ridiculed for "publicly expressing the desire to refuse and defer physical love, and for presuming to judge authors’ works, thereby trespassing into the phallic domain." The précieuses were women who, for the first time on the scene of French belles lettres, "spoke out for their own eroticism and claimed a self-bestowed faculty of judgement," two elements that clearly resonate with the pillars of feminism as practised by Rivolta. [...] Historically deprived of the privilege of being able to narrate themselves from their own perspectives, women have often been turned into grotesque caricatures by the gaze and the pen of authors such as Molière. [...] The unfortunate protagonist of the Femmes savantes is Armande, with whom Lonzi identifies at a difficult time in her life.
At one point in her film, Ruhm imagines an encounter between Lonzi and Armande.
Many sections of È a questo punto are accompanied only by an ambient soundscape: this is in particular the case for reenactments of paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi. The film is thus a development of the "open and essayistic" direction that Ruhm has pursued since Panoramis. But Godard has not been forgotten: the restaged paintings recall similar tableaux in Passion, and there are several images of hands reaching out to each other, a motif seen in Nouvelle Vague and Goodbye to Language among others. Unlike Godard's films, however, no men participate in these tableaux, and the women involved are staging themselves, imagining their own representations. The film also features archival footage of feminist demonstrations in Italy in the 1970s. Sight and Sound listed it as one of the best video essays of 2024.
Works
Filmography
1998: Apartment (18 min., b/w, silent)
1999: Evidence (5:30 min., color, silent)
1999: ID Remix (4:55 min., color, silent) (co-director: Elisabeth Fiege)
2015: Comparing Local Spectres (18 min., b/w, sound)
2019: Gli appunti di Anna Azzori / Uno specchio che viaggia nel tempo (The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror that Travels through Time) (72 min., color, sound)
2020: Pearls Without a String -- Trailer (3 min., color, sound)
2020: Pearls Without a String (72 min., color, sound)
2023: Dark Mirrors Turning Brighter (2:36 min., b/w, silent)
2024: È a questo punto che nasce il bisogno di fare storia (It Is at This Point That the Need to Write History Arises) (96 min., color & b/w, sound)
Installations
2013: Replay: ANNA
2021: La strada (è ancora) più lunga (2 channel installation / 2 x 60 min., color, sound)
2023: A Shard is a Fragment of a Life (2 channel installation / 2 x 23 min., color, sound)
2024: A Woman's Work is Never Done (2 channel installation / 2 x 12 min., color, sound)
Photographic works
1993: Un Coup De Dés, series of photographs / 3D-objects based on Mallarmé's poem
1997-98: Day for Night, series of digital photographs (C-print on aluminum): "10:45" (105 × 230cm), "Cendrier" (105 × 230cm), "Surdité" (105 × 230cm), "Scaffold" (105 × 230cm)
1999: Off, series of six digital photographs (C-print on aluminum): "Suburbia," "Desert," "Dancing," "Swamp," "Two Suns," "Kiss"
1999: Evidence, series of digital photographs (C-print on aluminum): "Snack" (180 × 300cm), "Hut" (240 × 180cm), "Terror" (214 x 180cm), "Hangar" (214 x 180cm)
2001-02: A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight, series of four photographs
2008: Renewal of Perspective: La Difficulté d'Être, series of 24 photographs, 37 x 25cm, color (Photos: Jean-Luc Bertini)
2013: La Difficulté d'Une Perspective: A Life of Renewal, series of 22 photographs, variable dimensions, color (Photos: Emilien Awada)
2016: Panoramis Paramount Paranormal
2021: La strada (è ancora) più lunga, series of 59 analogue photographs, 41cm x 28,5cm
2024: A Woman's Work Is Never Done, series of 24 analogue photographs, 40 x 50cm, b/w baryta prints
Selected exhibitions
Constanze Ruhm (2023)
Solo exhibitions
1991: A House Has a Top and Four Walls, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna
2015: Constanze Ruhm Re: Rehearsals (No Such Thing as Repetition), Zeit Kunst Niederösterreich, Lower Austria Museum, St. Pölten
2021: La strada (è ancora) più lunga, Kulturni center Tobačna 001, Ljubljana (as part of the When Gesture Becomes Event exhibition, but in Ljubljana the works by other artists were presented at the Mestna Galerija)
1992: CVC -- Computer Video Camera, Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna
1992: Die Idee einer Sammlung -- 20 Jahre Galerie Grita Insam, Dorotheum, Vienna
1992: On Justifying the Hypothetical Character of Art and Its Non-Identicality in the Object World (in collaboration with Peter Weibel), Galerie Tanja Grunert, Cologne
1993: Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt, Institut für Neue Medien an der Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main
1998: Interactus V, Accademia d'Ungheria, Rome (in cooperation with mumok, Vienna)
1998: Bestandsaufnahme Sehen, transmediale, Berlin
1999: Richtung Museumsquartier -- Die neue Sammlung, mumok, Vienna
1999: Mars, Post Gallery, Los Angeles
1999: D.A.CH.com, Galerie Krinzinger at Benger Park, Bregenz
1999: Das Jahrhundert der Frauen, Kunstforum, Vienna
1999: Punkt Linie Fläche Raum: Abstrakte Fotografie aus den Beständen der Österreichischen Fotogalerie Rupertinum Salzburg, Projektraum im WUK[de], Vienna
1999: D.A.CH.com, Galerie Krinzinger im Semperdepot, Vienna
1999: Junge Kunst: Aus der Sammlung Morgenbesser, Kunstverein Horn, Horn, Austria
Group exhibitions -- 2000s
2000: Illicit Form of Meditation, haus.0 program, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart
2000: Skulptur als Möbel / Möbel als Skulptur: Objekte und Grafiken aus der Sammlung der Neuen Galerie Graz, Franziskanerkloster[de], Frohnleiten
2000: Ankauf: NÖ. Werke aus dem Bestand der Artothek des Bundes, Kunstraum Palais Porcia, Vienna / Karmeliterhof, St. Pölten / Artothek des Bundes, Belvedere Museum, Vienna
2000: cultural sidewalk, Gumpendorf 2000, Unit F - büro für mode / NIN.design / Informationsbüro Vektor K. / public and commercial spaces, Vienna
2001: Diesseits und jenseits des Traums: 100 Jahre Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna
2008: Under Pain of Death, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York
2009: Empfindung: In der Nähe der Fehler liegen die Wirkungen, Augarten Contemporary / Belvedere Museum, Vienna (curated by Eva Maria Stadler and Sabeth Buchmann)
2013: FOTOS -- Österreichische Fotografien von den 1930er Jahren bis heute, 21er Haus, Belvedere Museum, Vienna (curated by Severin Dünser and Axel Köhne)
2014: There Was Nothing To It: Sigmund Freud and the Play on the Burden of Representation, 21er Haus, Belvedere Museum, Vienna
2015: Self-timer Stories, MUSAC, León, Spain (curated by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein)
2015: To the Sound of the Closing Door: FORUM EXPANDED / Berlinale 2015, Academy of Arts, Berlin (curated by Bettina Steinbrügge, Anselm Franke, Nanna Heidenreich, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, and Uli Ziemons)
2015: Libidinal Economies: Art in the Age of Bull Markets, UCI Gallery, University of California Irvine (curated by Juli Carson)
2015: Vienna for Art's Sake! / Archive Austria, Winterpalais, Vienna
2015: Now, at the latest, Kunsthalle, Krems
2016: Sensuous Discontent: Critical Aesthetics The First 10 Years film series, UCI Gallery, University of California Irvine (curated by Kelly Donahey and Ian Meares)
2021: Wake Words (lecture performance by and with Golden Pixel Cooperative), Kunstraum Niederösterreich[de], Vienna (curated by Enar de Dios Rodriguez, Olena Newkryta and Marlies Poeschl)
2023: On Stage -- Kunst als Bühne, mumok, Vienna (curated by Rainer Fuchs)
2024: I love you and leave you, Charim Galerie, Vienna
2024: Auf den Schultern von Riesinnen (On the Shoulders of Giantesses), Künstlerhaus Vienna (curated by Nina Schedlmayer)
Curatorial projects
1999: Hotel Utopia (film program), Summerstage Festival, Vienna
2001: Inextinguishable Fire / Traces of a Staging: Harun Farocki, Olaf Metzel, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, haus.0 program, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart
2004: Fate of Alien Modes (film program), ZKM, Karlsruhe
2006: Cinema Is Not A Bad School (presentation series as part of a lecture series), Merz Akademie, Stuttgart (co-curated with Elfi Mikesch, Christa Blümlinger, Babette Mangolte, Thomas Tode)
2008: Mimétisme (film program), Hebbel am Ufer (HAU), Berlin (exhibition curated by Anselm Franke)
2012: Keine Zeit (film program), 21er Haus, Vienna (exhibition curated by Bettina Steinbrügge)
2013: Positions in Experimental Films & Video: Familienfilme, University of the Arts, Berlin (co-curated with Christine Lang)
2013: Proben aufs Exempel (film and lecture series), mumok, Vienna (co-curated with Sabeth Buchmann)
2014: For the Birds (film program), Kunsthalle, Vienna
2015: You’ve Seen Me Before: Between Appropriation and Déjà-vu (projections and performances by students of the Art and Media class), Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
2015: Blühendes Gift (collection exhibition), mumok, Vienna (co-curated with Diedrich Diederichsen and the students in the Master program in Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts)
2016: Laura Mulvey: Feminismus und/im Kino, 1. mumok Kino, Vienna
2017: Erkennen und Verfolgen (a series of events on the work and teaching of Harun Farocki), Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (co-curated with Michael Baute, Christa Blümlinger, Sezgin Boynik, Filipa César, Diedrich Diederichsen, Antje Ehmann, Thomas Elsaesser, Maren Grimm, Thomas Heise, Tom Holert, Jens Kastner, Christine Lang)
2017: Jene Tage (film and lecture series on Iran), topkino, Vienna (co-curated with the Golden Pixel Cooperative: Marlies Pöschl, Bernhard Staudinger, Lydia Nsiah)
2018: Casting a Shadow (film and lecture series), mumok and mumok Kino, Vienna (co-curated with Sabeth Buchmann)
2022: Raise and Unraise Your Voices! Choirs in Moving Images (three-part series), mumok Kino, Vienna (co-curated with Marietta Kesting)
2022: La Lotta Non È Ancora Finita (multi-part film program), Filmmuseum Vienna (co-curated with Annamaria Licciardello and Katharina Müller)
Ruhm, Constanze (1993). True, false, else: give the self a shelf (in German). Graz: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum. OCLC312981671.
Meierhofer, Christine; Redl, Erwin; Ruhm, Constanze; Sandbichler, Peter; Sandbichler, Thomas (1996). Out of the dark. New York: Elga Wimmer. OCLC49880056.
Ruhm, Constanze; Sandbichler, Peter (1996). Knot projects: 1995-1996. Vienna: Publisher not identified. OCLC49343110.
Ruhm, Constanze (2003). "Coming Attraction: X Characters (in search of an author)". In Shaw, Jeffrey; Weibel, Peter (eds.). Future cinema: the cinematic imaginary after film. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. p.244. ISBN978-0-262692861.
Ruhm, Constanze (2004). Video Works From 1999-2004 (DVD). Vienna: Index. ISBN978-1-350-91843-6.
Ruhm, Constanze (2006). "(My/Theme) in Parenthesen". In Baute, Michael; Pantenburg, Volker (eds.). 93 Minutentexte: The night of the hunter (in German). Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose. pp.185–190. ISBN978-3-922660941.
Ruhm, Constanze (1 October 2006). "X Characters: Shifting Identities". Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal. 6 (8). Retrieved 15 October 2025.
Ruhm, Constanze (2009). "La difficulté d'être (Renewal of Perspective)". In Buchmann, Sabeth; Husslein-Arco, Agnes (eds.). Empfindung: Oder in der Nähe der Fehler liegen die Wirkungen (in German). Vienna: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. p.69. ISBN978-3-901508-61-5.
Ruhm, Constanze; Ehlers, Ekkehard (2009). "blindstorey / Fitzwilliam Version, 2003–2009". In Rainer, Cosima; Rollig, Stella; Daniels, Dieter; Ammer, Manuela (eds.). See This Sound: Promises of Sound and Vision. Cologne: Walther König. p.99. ISBN978-3-86560-683-9.
Ruhm, Constanze (2013). "Une femme est une femme -- Jean-Luc GODARD". In Busch, Annett; Gunkel, Henriette (eds.). Frieda Grafe -- 30 Filme: Heft 3. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose. pp.208–217. ISBN978-3-940048189.
Ruhm, Constanze (2013). "Replay: ANNA"(PDF). In Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie; Ziemons, Ulrich (eds.). Living archive: archive work as a contemporary artistic and curatorial practice. Berlin: b-books. pp.150–159. ISBN978-3-942214148.
Ruhm, Constanze (November 2014). Aranda, Julieta; Wood, Brian Kuan; Vidokle, Anton (eds.). "Attachment". e-flux (59). Retrieved 19 July 2025.
Buchmann, Sabeth; Ruhm, Constanze (2014). "Subject Put to the Test". In Thun-Hohenstein, Felicitas (ed.). Performing the Sentence: Research and Teaching in Performative Fine Arts. Berlin: Sternberg Press. pp.200–207. ISBN978-3-956790539.
Ruhm, Constanze (2016). "Schlussel und Werke: The Key Works (Or It Doesn't)". In Diederichsen, Diedrich (ed.). Blühendes Gift: Zur feministischen Appropriation des österreichischen Unbewussten (in German). Cologne: Walther König. pp.134–141. ISBN978-3-902947-32-1.
Ruhm, Constanze (2017). "'Yes, but...': Morgan Fisher's Alien Modes". In Antoine, Jean-Philippe; Blümlinger, Christa (eds.). Morgan Fisher: Off-Screen Cinema. Dijon: Les presses du réel. ISBN978-2-84066-942-5.
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Ruhm, Constanze (2018). "Mala Sirena: DD Geburtstagslied". In Buchmann, Sabeth; Kastner, Jens; Sonderegger, Ruth; Spiegl, Andreas (eds.). Die Stimme als Voice & Vote: Festschrift für Diedrich Diederichsen (in German). Berlin: b_books. pp.6–27. ISBN978-3-942214278.
Armaly, Fareed; Ruhm, Constanze (2019). "On the haus.o program (1999-2002) im Künstlerhaus Stuttgart: Gespräch zwischen Fareed Armaly und Constanze Ruhm". In Paflik-Huber, Hannelore (ed.). Künstlerhaus Stuttgart: 40 Jahre 1978-2018 (in German). Stuttgart: avedition. pp.372–387. ISBN978-3-899862874.
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Buchmann, Sabeth; Ruhm, Constanze (2021). "Casting A Shadow". In Huber, Leonie; Ludwig, Valerie; Zabric, Andrea (eds.). Big Critical Energy. Vienna: Schlebrügge. pp.212–231. ISBN978-3-903172739.
Ruhm, Constanze; Diederichsen, Diedrich, eds. (2010). Immediacy and Non-Simultaneity: Utopia of Sound. Vienna: Schlebrügge. ISBN978-3-851601732.
Ruhm, Constanze; Buchmann, Sabeth; Lafer, Ilse, eds. (2016). Putting Rehearsals to the Test -- Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics. Berlin: Sternberg Press. ISBN978-3-95679-211-3.
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Carson, Juli (June 2010). "Liebe Arbeit Kino, Galaxie der Signifikanten: Über "Crash Site/My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot" von Constanze Ruhm". Texte zur Kunst (in German) (78): 166–169.
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↑This is an allusion to an appearance by Godard and Karina on a French talk show in the 1980s, years after their separation.
↑However, in the preface to the published version of Les précieuses ridicules, Molière did say that "the true Precieuses would be in the wrong to be angry, when the pretentious Ones are exposed, who imitate them awkwardly."
↑LaCan, Jacques (1981). Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed.). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan -- Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York / London: Norton. p.95. ISBN0-393-31775-7.
↑Licciardello, Annamaria (2023). "Shards of Memory: Notes on the Feminist Cinema in Italy". In Rollig, Stella; Slanar, Claudia (eds.). Constanze Ruhm: Come una pupilla al variare della luce. Cologne: Walther und Franz König. p.69. ISBN978-3-7533-0446-5.
↑
Watzenboeck, Susanne (2022). "L'unico movimento è il ritorno: Constanze Ruhms 'La strada (è ancora) più lunga'". In Laussegger, Armin; Sam, Sandra (eds.). Tätigkeitsbericht 2021 der Landessammlungen Niederösterreich und des Zentrums für Museale Sammlungswissenschaften (in German). St. Pölten: Landessammlungen Niederösterreich. p.114. ISBN978-3-903436-01-5.
↑
Molière (n.d.). "Preface to The Pretentious Young Ladies". In Van Laun, Henri (ed.). The Dramatic Works of Molière. Vol.2. Translated by Van Laun, Henri. Philadelphia: George Barrie. p.137.
↑
Mascat, Jamila M. H. (2023). "Leaving and Living". Feminism in Revolt. By Lonzi, Carla. Corna, Luisa Lorenza; Mascat, Jamila M. H. (eds.). London / New York / Calcutta: Seagull. p.117. ISBN978-1-803091563.
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Schantl, Alexandra (2015). "'My work is a process of continuous adaptation': Constanze Ruhm in conversation with Alexandra Schantl, June 2015". Constanze Ruhm: Re: Rehearsals (No Such Thing as Repetition).
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