Authors such as Virginia Woolf, Marlen Haushofer, Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek as well as artists such as Birgit Jürgenssen, Francesca Woodman, Monica Bonvicini, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Orshi Drozdik and Gabriele Stötzer have a noticeably frequent presence in their texts, photographs and (video) installations dealt with the ambiguous motif of the wall by staging their own disappearance, working on walls or declaring them to be projection or writing surfaces. They skillfully combine gender-critical with aesthetic issues.

On the one hand, the wall stands for limitations that restrict the subject, on the other hand for a protective space that shields against disturbances from the outside world and expands into a creative place. In the artistic and literary works, the wall sometimes functions as a canvas, blank sheet or ‘fourth (theater) wall’, then again as an invisible barrier, prison, dungeon or coffin lid. Above all, it is the scene of a legacy that allows the female figures to emerge all the more clearly by absorbing them. It is precisely in its cracks that the wall becomes a speaking entity that reveals more than it hides. It is less a real than an imaginary object, which paradoxically closes access to the outside world, but at the same time allows insights and outlooks.

Taking up a space, positioning yourself in it, finding a place for yourself is by no means self-evident for the artists and authors presented in the volume. The subversive strategy of walling up in order to gain a free space and an unobstructed view was pursued by a surprising number of them, without knowing one another. The volume brings together contributions from scholars from literary, cultural, art and performance sciences who deal with different forms of creative counter-the-wall approach.