Margot Pilz

Margot Pilz (born 1936, Haarlem, Netherlands) is an Austrian visual artist and a pioneer of conceptual and digital art in Austria.

She and her mother spent two years among 8,000 prisoners in Lampersari concentration camp, Semarang, Central Java.

[9] In 1954 Pilz went to Vienna to study photography at the Höheren Graphischen Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt, the Federal Training and Research Institute of Graphic Arts.

[11] Pilz was strongly affected by her arrest by plainclothes police officers at the Third Women's Festival in Vienna on 14 April 1978.

She addressed these events through the creation of a body-centered series of self-portraits, communicating emotion to the audience both through expressive gestures and through the state of the linen jacket that she wore at the time of the arrest.

[13] Her photo sequence, The White Cell Project (1983–1985), placed her subjects within a small cardboard room, 165 centimeters wide, that concretized the weight and constraint of societal expectations and norms.

[19][20][21][22][23] In 2018, Margot Pilz was one of five women featured in Sie ist der andere Blick (She is the other gaze), a documentary film created by Christiana Perschon and artist Iris Dostal.

The film examines the ways in which their artistic practice and their feminism interact, as they recall challenges and obstacles that they faced and how they overcame them in both personal and political spaces.