Currently she is leading the artistic research project: At the Margins. The Art of Equal Participation at the HGB Leipzig. Her recent exhibition projects for HGB Gallery include Flashback:forward (2022) a reflection on the connection between (post)conceptual art and teaching, Décalage: Marion Baruch (2021/22), Broken Relations: Infrastructure and Disruption (2021 with Beatrice von Bismarck) on the topos of infrastructure and aesthetics, Radical Passivity. Politics of the Flesh (2020/21 with Kathrin Busch), or the exhibition series “1937 – 2017: From Degenerate Art to Distorted Art” (2019/20), realized with Adam Szymczyk and students of HGB Leipzig.
Her recent publications include Deculturalize (Mousse, 2020), a reader on historical feminism in Italy and its influence on art production. Lafer is also (co-)editor of, among others Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics (Sternberg Press, 2016); A Book on Collecting and Exhibiting Conceptual Art After Conceptual Art (Buchhandlung Walther König, 2013); the print-on-demand publication Counterproduction I-III (2012); unExhibit, (Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2011) and Behind the Fourth Wall: Fictive Lives – Lived Fictions, (Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2010). Co-edited with Martin Beck, Beatrice von Bismarck, and Sabeth Buchmann, Broken Relation: Infrastructure, Aesthetics, and Critique will be published by Spector Books Leipzig in winter 2022.
Between 2006–2008 she worked for Kunsthalle Wien, and from 2008–2016 she served as curator of the Generali Foundation, Vienna with a focus on (post)conceptual and feminist art practices. In addition to her institutional work, Lafer has served as (co-)curator for other, international art institutions, including ASF, New York (2008); INDEX, Stockholm (2012); Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2015); Galerie Leonard et Bina Ellen, Concordia University, VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, and SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Montreal (2016); Museion, Bolzano (2019); nGbK, Berlin (2020). In addition, Ilse Lafer worked as lecturer for Art and Knowledge Transfer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2014 -2018), for Art History at the Art University Linz (2017) for Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2018) and as guest docent at Maumaus Independent Study in Lisbon (2022).