"Fiona Rukschcio attacks the subject "popular media/ public" by using means of excess. She cannot get enough of the huge offer of consumable media and popstars or featured people in the entertainment press, of the constantly renewed ingredients from which trivial myths and poltical truths are being created. Her trick is that she participates in it by incorporating passport photographs of herself; furthermore she comments on this new situation through her won texts. She is asking herself "Am I a Spice Girl?", but equally enjoys putting herself in the position of a politican. it is not without why alterior motives that she glues these montages on boxes of chocolate, made known through TV publicity, in order to, so to speak, close the metaphorical loop of her subject."

Silvia Eiblmayr, 1998 | Translation: Birgit Ball

The prize of the Ministry of Education, Art and Culture went to Fiona Rukschcio for her collage "The Me Generation" (2006). Depersonalized, headless figures, cut out from women's and sports magazines, are set in spaces vaguely defined by simple drawings. With economy a scene is opened, in which stories about the role of self in society, its positionings, wishes, ideals and disappointments are unfolded.

Barbara Engelbach, Sabine Himmelsbach, Thomas Trummer, 2007

The most interesting works in the exhibition are the drawings by Fiona Rukschcio. They reveal the same figure/ground tension but succeed in creating a world where the different components start to interact. Rukschcio uses newspaper and magazine clippings (small pieces of text or human figures) together with rough outlines of some kind of setting. The (virtual) world that Rukschcio succeeds in creating is a very contemporary one. It is full of romantic dreams of change and rather grim statements on the current state of affairs without becoming pretentious or moralistic. The drawings have the look and feel of the authenticity of diary notes and aphorisms without having to rely on formal structures or references.

Bart Geerts, 2009

Who is looking for whom and what?

The raw material for Fiona Rukschcio's collages is footage found in magazines and advertisements, often combined with the artist's own paintings. In atmospheric settings amongst protagonists from celebrity and entertainment gossip, the artist performs herself, taking on different roles and postures: sketches of identities of others and of her own collide. Transformed text fragments are mixed up with snapshots and appetisers of everyday life of the media; their associations produce ambiguities. The commentary is at times derived from word play, which even lends quality to corny jokes. In disparate settings and teased by the artist's language, the actors play with the codes and implications of the raw material until they participate in the production of obvious absurdities. At times they rid themselves of the identities imposed by the media: they then run about headless in vacation settings, where not only they, but also the landscape, seem to pose. But the question of reality and illusion is completely futile here, because we all are posturing - even the landscape can only offer something within the framework of a staging. And also the question: who is looking for whom and what? is finally redundant: because it is we who are the environment.

Nicola Hirner, 2005 | Translation: Birgit and Steve Ball

A series of Fiona Rukschcio's collages that are similar seem to illustrate, like a journal, the life of the artist and the repeated necessity of the assurance that there is no discrepancy between the identity models created by the media and herself. She glues her own face into those of people who surround her - into pictures taken from the press or the flea market - thus confirming the identity constructions that are related to them. At the same time the constructive nature of such images becomes apparent, because each collage is clearly recognizable as a construct, and, in spite of all its passport-like similarity, has a life of its own, which makes it recognizable as a foreign body in its respective environment.

Reto Krüeger, 2003

malaucoccyx (in english: coccyx pain) is not a picture book about the popular disease number one, the mysterious title conveys rather something of the atmosphere that can be felt in Fiona Rukschcio´s collages. Collages such as diary notes, made from 1997-2005 in Rome, Paris, London and Vienna, cut and pasted from headlines and newspaper fotos, set in painted and scetched rooms and landscapes. In her collages Fiona Rukschcio puts to the test the various roles and poses which politics, the press and journalistically produced feminism provide and, with humour and melancholy, lets their wishes for identity and identity-change clash with public expectations and clichés.

Johannes Schlebrügge, 2005

RRRoma

Limoncello, home-made with cheap lemons and ethyl alcohol from the pharmacy, cut with a little water. We could have awwakened blind! But maybe we were saved by the Kefir that Fiona offered in the morning,, or better, after we got up, which she begun brweing with a living fungus growing rampant on sugary water,, becoming stronger and more slippery each day. It made us forget all the booze, the Limoncello, Campari and Chianti of the day before. I could clearly see the clutter of her room,, indefinable scraps,, cuttings from magazines, glue everywhere; photos for cut-and-paste to make photo stories that fold out in action pleats and fit easily in a pocket, love stories on standard A3 sheets; a hundred times Fionaßs face on minuscule squares, her head much too large on bodies of women and men, on animals so much densely posed on the format of a postcard; the video camera with the flower-decorated lens; that´s how she made her film: shots framed by painted flowers and always slightly out of focus. Rome saturated by heat: the grateful background. When Fiona had a headache she put on a knitted hat and rested in her tiny room,, which looked like one of her collages, although you could move about in it and you could get lost in it just like in her montages, and discover things you had never thought of before but suddelny seemed perfectly plausible. Down in the street Vespas rattled by and the steel blinds of storefronts clatteres up or down in the constant sing-song and garble from the flow of tourists. Here one could have made good use of Fiona´s "self-defending earflaps". While I practised Tetris on a borrowed laptop she was making phone calls in Italian: pronto, prontoooo. And flea markets, again and again flea markets. Without flea markets she was not quite herself,, new old stuff had to produced constantly, dresses,, lamps, cameras,, Chinese boxes,, out of which jumped artificial birds and chirped, eyeglasses and mysterious utensils. So passed the days and the weeks, and suddenly there was a picture book,, for which one had been waiting the longest time without knowing it.

Linda Stift, 2005 | Translation: Birgit Ball

The Fixation of the Haphazard To the chaos of the world, as daily life is viewed at present, artists oppose an attempt to systematize. The creation of ordering structures is, however, not identical with the construction of rigid parameters, but the attempt to work against the disappearance of permanent values and against the haphazard attribution of contents (...) Fiona Rukschcio starts with her image-text-collages at the following point of her discourse: fast pictures, slogans, cut-out photos, incorporated objects, fragments of texts reveal only in their combination a systematic order, into which man is woven like a particle amongst many. Haphazard incidents - intended or unintended - are made into a net-like structure; the disconnected quotations become only readable and understandable in their amalgamation. In this system of thoughts and pictures a particle supports the stability of the whole, and the train of thought and meaning conveys the impossibility of the unreflected.

Margit Zuckriegl, 2008