Witches of Tamsweg is a photographic series created in 2023 by Josef Ka and Mark Maher during an artist residency at FAART Tamsweg.

The series concerns the alpine region around Tamsweg and examines how the figure of “the witch” was constructed during the witch hunts of early modern Europe — not as belief or folklore, but through legal processes, local conflicts, and systems of control.

For the series, the witch figure is approached and engaged with as a mechanism of accusation and power, not practice.

The landscape is perceived as a site where this history leaves no visible trace, yet persists in cultural memory. The photographs work with absence, body, and space to register what is no longer physically present yet historically active.

During the process, the work acquired an unexpected physical dimension: both Mark Maher and Josef Ka were hospitalized.

We do not claim a direct connection, but this experience intensified the sense of entering a territory that is not neutral.

Witches of Tamsweg frames witches not as myth, but as a constructed figure that was used to define and enforce social order in ways still quietly present today.

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Published by Josef Ka

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International performance, visual and sound artist Josef Ka blends richly varied influences – everything from Butoh dance to cinematic theory – with her decades of nomadic world travel to create bold, highly personal site-specific art. Josef Ka’s themes range from investigating the place of the human body in contemporary reality to exploring the inner body as a representative system of our human and post human kind. Her artistic practice often actively invites the audience inside a sort of private reverie, making it is a deeply participatory one; she actively engages with both her audiences and with a wide diversity of other experimental artists. In addition to her own work, Josef Ka curates a regular series of events and exhibitions at her Helsinki underground space – Sauna Gallery – and teaches classes on the theory and practice of performance art. She is also the inventor of the WORST THEATRE and her yogic training system, KA-YOGA. https://eskargoeskargo.com/

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