EN    DE

The collective

Matthias Moll­ner and Judith Schoss­böck († 2024) had been a cou­ple from 2019 to 2024 and planned joint projects start­ing in 2020, which gained a par­tic­u­lar focus through Judith’s illness.

Fol­low­ing Schoss­böck­’s death, Moll­ner con­tin­ues to run Black Ferk Studio.

Matthias Mollner

Founder, artis­tic stu­dio man­age­ment, art production

Matthias Moll­ner, born in 1984 in Gmünd (Low­er Aus­tria), lives and works in Vien­na and Low­er Aus­tria. From 2000 to 2004, he com­plet­ed a design train­ing pro­gramme at the School of Met­al Design in Steyr (Upper Aus­tria) and has been work­ing as a free­lance visu­al artist since 2005.

Moll­ner began explor­ing per­for­mance and the body at an ear­ly age, and his work exam­ines the ambiva­lent rela­tion­ship between humans and their envi­ron­ment and ‘nature,’ as well as the dark side of human existence.

With the ‘Black Ferk Stu­dio’ (found­ed in 2021 togeth­er with Judith Schoss­böck († 2024)), he explores the themes of chron­ic ill­ness, dis­abil­i­ty and death, and in par­tic­u­lar the phys­i­cal and socio-polit­i­cal dimen­sions of severe mul­ti­sys­temic and/or com­plex dis­eases such as ME/CFS.

Moll­ner realised numer­ous exhi­bi­tions, per­for­ma­tive and sculp­tur­al inter­ven­tions in pri­vate and pub­lic spaces. His works can be found in the state of Low­er Austria’s art col­lec­tion, at the Neue Galerie Graz/Museum Joan­neum, as well as on per­ma­nent loan to the out­door area of ​the Sym­po­sium Lindabrunn. He works as a cura­tor for var­i­ous group and solo exhibitions.

Art­works, projects and a detailed biography

Portrait photo of Judith Schossböck with a plush pig.

Judith Schossböck, PhD († 2024)

Founder, stu­dio man­age­ment, sci­en­tif­ic sup­port, art production

Judith Schoss­böck, born in Braunau/Inn (Upper Aus­tria) in 1981, died in Mat­tighofen (Upper Aus­tria) in 2024, lived in Vien­na, Lon­don, Budapest, Hong Kong and Amsterdam.

Schoss­böck stud­ied media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion sci­ence, Ger­man philol­o­gy and Ger­man as a for­eign lan­guage at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na. She wrote her dis­ser­ta­tion on health activism and social media at City Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong (fund­ed by the Research Grants Coun­cil, Hong Kong, S.A.R.).

From 2009 onwards, she worked as a research assis­tent at Danube Uni­ver­si­ty Krems. Oth­er activ­i­ties includ­ed sci­en­tif­ic co-direc­tion of paraflows.at and organ­i­sa­tion and co-found­ing of burners.at (art and cul­ture asso­ci­a­tion). Schoss­böck pub­lished in the fields of media tech­nol­o­gy and cul­tur­al stud­ies. She was man­ag­ing edi­tor of the open access e‑journal jeDEM.org. Her research spe­cial­i­sa­tions includ­ed dig­i­tal activism, elec­tron­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion, online com­mu­ni­ties, social media, health com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and the ethics of tech­nol­o­gy and com­mu­ni­ca­tion systems.

Fol­low­ing an unex­pect­ed and extreme dete­ri­o­ra­tion in her health after receiv­ing a COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion and sub­se­quent lum­bar punc­ture, Schoss­böck became bedrid­den and required full-time care in 2021. She lived with very severe ME/CFS and oth­er ill­ness­es such as cere­brospinal flu­id leak­age syn­drome, severe mast cell acti­va­tion syn­drome (MCAS), pan­cre­at­ic insuf­fi­cien­cy, hor­mon­al dis­or­ders, etc. until her death in Decem­ber 2024.

From her bed, she began to draw in order to com­mu­ni­cate with the world when oth­er options such as speak­ing were lim­it­ed. Togeth­er with her part­ner Matthias Moll­ner, she realised ‘CRASH!’, the first exhi­bi­tion on ME/CFS in Aus­tria, as well as oth­er projects that focus on using art to raise aware­ness and vis­i­bil­i­ty for chron­ic ill­ness­es and oth­er social taboo top­ics.
Lat­er, as her ill­ness­es pro­gressed, the con­tin­u­ous dete­ri­o­ra­tion fur­ther severe­ly lim­it­ed her abil­i­ty to speak and draw, so that her artis­tic work was also sub­ject to a con­stant forced minimalism.

Select­ed grants, work and publications