Kurdwin Ayub

Sarah, a former professional kickboxer from Vienna, accepts an offer to work as a personal trainer for a rich family in the Middle East. She finds herself in a foreign world, in a palace behind walls and cut off from the internet, where the sisters are under surveillance around the clock. They have no interest in learning to box. So why has Sarah been brought here?

Young women, Austrian style. Yesmin is Kurdish and wears a headscarf. She shoots a cheeky burqa video with Bella and Nati which makes the trio famous in the Muslim community. Controversy and alienation ensue. Immediate, exuberantly introverted cinema.

Adnan is obsessed with going to his ex-wife's housewarming party. Unfortunately, he isn't invited.

Kurdwin Ayub captures the intimacy of a trip she made with her father. Family visits alternate with real estate tours searching for an ideal apartment: her father's will, as he's planning to retire, is to find a place so he can finally return to that stateless territory he proudly calls "homeland".

Anton and Franz live together since the beginnings of 20th century. They talk about their difficulties of being vampires, since their first bite in 1938. Their inconsistent arguments recall those of normal human beings. And history repeat itself. As if that were not enough, they also doesn`t really like each other much.

Filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub dances through Vienna on her own to the sounds of Go! Go! Gorillo, exploring public spaces in her black chador. She encounters amused groups of men and apathetic passersby, letting nothing disturb her calm or throw her off-beat. Dancing on her own, so to speak. The final highlight is a wonderful quote from Andrzej Żuławski in a U2 station!

With provocative and performative energy, Kurdwin Ayub made herself the protagonist of her own video works during the 2010s' new internet culture of selfies and self-representation. In 'LOLOLOL' she turns the camera - a smartphone - away from herself and towards Anthea, an artist in her early 20s, as she during a long evening and night makes her entrance into Vienna's art world.

Sitting on her bed, Kurdwin Ayub wears a babydoll and hugs a blanket in her arms. She speaks to the camera as if addressing her ex-boyfriend. How to react to his eyes staring at us?

In pretty-pretty, Kurdwin Ayub’s reflective self-staging meets Viennese Actionism, body horror coalesces with beauty, and the pain that Ayub has so often staged becomes physical for the first time. As she applies a fine needle making viewers’ nerves twitch, a bloody, radiant smile spreads across her face. (Diagonale 2020, die Unvollendete, Catalogue, mk)

In this episode, the petite artist Ayub poses in front of an oriental curtain in a voluminous wedding dress, performing a playback of Lorraine Ellison's equally voluminous voice. "Remember you said you'd always gonna need me, remember you said you'd never ever leave me." Left alone in a room with relatives in Iraq, trapped in a cultural corset, locked in a "man's world," the brat becomes a heartbreakingly ironic soul singer.

Driving school instructor Florian has to endure a lot when his vivacious student takes her place behind the wheel. And brings along her two best friends to sit in the back seat; and the next time, her father. Will things work out by the time of the driving test at the end of 2 Hot 2 Drive?