In her work—spanning installations, videos, and performances , Carola Dertnig addresses artistic processes in relation to historiography, genre, and perspective.

She develops structural frameworks for absent or suppressed narratives and invents figures or entire settings that intervene in the past. Through these constructed scenarios, history becomes neither fixed nor linear, but open to reinterpretation and performative reactivation.

This catalogue documents the performances and objects presented in the exhibition Donauspuren at the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich (19 October 2019 – 24 May 2020). The exhibition engaged with archaeological excavations conducted in 2016/17 during the construction of the museum building. Medieval and Roman artefacts intersect with contemporary questions of generational change, forming a layered inquiry into the permeability of time.

Central to the project is the notion of the past seeping into the present. What does it mean for history to infiltrate current structures of thought and space? Is this infiltration sufficient to understand the present as a manifestation of the past? How do historical shifts become perceptible, and what consequences do constructed narratives have for lived and designed environments? How do they reshape routes, spatial relations, and the dynamics between urban and rural contexts?

By moving back and forth between generations and locations, memories and experiences, Dertnig establishes relational constellations in which fragmented histories are made visible. The publication reflects this methodological oscillation, presenting the works as interconnected investigations into the mechanisms through which history is produced, displaced, and reimagined.