Silke Grabinger’s works and concepts combine urban and contemporary dance with performative art and robotics. Special attention is paid to the critical examination of social phenomena, artistic paradigms, and the function and positioning of the audience.
She first came into contact with the dance form Breaking in her youth and achieved international success in a variety of competitions, both solo as “b-girl SILK” and in varying teams. Her project B-Girl Circle was dedicated to hip-hop culture.
After dancing in the Cirque du Soleil production LOVE from 2006 to 2008 and working with the choreographers Dave St-Pierre, Margie Gillis, and Daniel Ezralow, she created her first solo dance piece [SLIK] with Pilottanzt in 2008.
She completed a Bachelor’s degree in the programme space&designstrategies at the University of Arts Linz and was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Design at a group exhibition. She completed her studies in time-based media with a Master of Arts. In her contemporary works, she made herself available as a test subject to various choreographers such as Anne Juren, Benoît Lachambre, Astrid Endruweit & Michael Laub, Oleg Soulimenko, Hubert Lepka from lawine torren, the cabaret artist Dirk Stermann, and the filmmaker Arash T. Riahi, each for ten minutes.
She developed a dance notation for musicians and worked with the composer Bernhard Lang on the performance piece Moving Architecture, which is based on the architecture of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York and was premiered there. She is currently further developing this transfer of composition models into moving art forms with the series Compositional transfer inbodied.
Later, she founded her second dance company SILK Fluegge parallel to SILK Cie., with the intention of developing dance and performance productions as an experimental field for different disciplines. In 2021, she opened KLISCOPE, a former chapel that was turned into a creative space for new experiments and visions.
She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Art and Design Linz in exchange with Deakin University of Melbourne, Coventry University, and Johannes Kepler University on the topic of robotics and performance in the context of media art and AI; her focus is on the transfer of meaning to moving bodies. Since 2018, she has been working with robotics in cooperation with ARS Electronica and Creative Robotics.
2024
