SCHIRN MAG
Expectations and experiences
By Daniel Urban
DOUBLE FEATURE in January presents the artist Eli Cortiñas and her film “Quella che cammina.” Afterwards the film “La Noire de…” by Ousmane Sembène...
Double Feature
For four years now the SCHIRN has acted as a forum for national and international film and video artists. In dialogue with the SCHIRN curators, international artists offer in-depth insights into their work and, more especially, into their filmic interests. DOUBLE FEATURE was designed as a platform presenting the extremely varied trends and forms of creative expression in the production of art films and for the juxtaposition of familiar and not so familiar positions. In 2017 visitors can expect to see works by, among others, Eli Cortiñas, Beatrice Gibson and Mélanie Matranga. Moreover, interviews with the artists will be available on the SCHIRN YouTube channel.
Rather than presenting the works as objects in an exhibition room, “Double Feature” creates a cinema-like viewing situation that focuses solely on the screen.
PAST ARTISTS 2017
ELI CORTIÑAS
The basis of Eli Cortiña’s video works often form scenes from well-known art-house classics. She reconfigures them in cinematic terms, creating in combination with her own film and sound recordings highly allusive pictorial collages which focus intensely and critically on family conflicts and attribution in line with gender politics.
BEATRICE GIBSON
Inspired by the Fluxus movement and the greats of the musical avant-garde such as John Cage, artist Beatrice Gibson explores voice, language, collective production and questions of representation. Together Gibson’s individual film narratives form a coherent, never-ending artistic process and work
PILVI TAKALA
In her films Pilvi Takala interweaves the various film genres and at the same time goes beyond their limits. The director, documentary filmmaker and performance artist also generally plays the lead, putting herself in very tricky and embarrassing situations, in the course of which social norms and expectations are revealed.
MÉLANIE MATRANGA
Love, freedom, success, desire, sex, jealousy – these are the key themes that Mélanie Matranga tackles in a series of films. In the various episodes she portrays the tensions and sentiments between people who are in relationships with one another. The most dramatic moments are mired in cliché and the protagonists remain soulless.
MONIRA AL QADIRI
The works by Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri revolve in particular around questions of gender and identity, around ecological thinking and society’s power discourse within the Middle East. The aesthetic of sadness, influenced by poetry, music and religion, forms a kind of core here.
HENNING FEHR & PHILIPP FÜHR
Henning Fehr & Philipp Rühr describe themselves as filmmakers operating between active participation and passive observation. In their works they represent and explore commercial and cultural behavior, for example, with their juxtaposition of global cultural phenomena such as television, music, tourism and architecture
BIANCA BALDI
The works of South African artist Bianca Baldi raise questions about supposed facts and granted truths. Baldi touches on spaces, places, objects and biographies, which she transforms leaving the observer wondering whether they are being confronted with true or fictional stories.
SCHIRN MAG
Language comes from the left
By Daniel Urban
Historical events play an important role in Bianca Baldi’s films. The South African artist is July’s DOUBLE FEATURE guest.
BEN RIVERS
Inspired by formal ideas from experimental documentaries, the themes of the atmospherically charged films by British artist Ben Rivers range from research into unusual living spaces to puzzling and intimate portrait shots
SCHIRN MAG
What the camera says about life
By Daniel Urban
A cinematic contemplation: In his portrait of the painter Rose Wylie, British artist and director Ben Rivers puts his faith entirely in his camera.
TRIS VONNA-MICHELL
Tris Vonna-Michell tells stories in which real and fictional strands are interwoven. Fragments and irrelevancies simply dictate the mood and the image, and follow more of a rapid, musical rhythm than a comprehensible story. Vonna-Michell’s films represent an expansion of his original live performances
ANI SCHULZE
SCHIRN MAG
Imagination machine
By Daniel Urban
In October’s DOUBLE FEATURE the artist Ani Schulze presents her latest film “Merchants Freely Enter”.
Ani Schulze’s film works develop a visual language founded on her exploration of literary history, film and architecture. They focus on abandoned architecture and places, failed utopias and interrupted stories without conclusions. Schulze recontextualizes and collages images and visual information structures, thereby sounding out the potentialities of moving image and the filmic medium
JOHN SKOOG
John Skoog’s film works combine documentary research and observations of reality with subtle poetry. They make the backgrounds and perils of the everyday tangible and reference social as well as historical milieus. Born in Sweden in 1985, Skoog is currently a Visiting Professor at Kunsthochschule Mainz. He works in the filmic and literary tradition of Scandinavian Modernism
SCHIRN MAG
JOHN SKOOG
PAUL SPENGEMANN
The hidden signifiers of an image, brought out through the movement of a camera or the sound of a voice or instrument, define his final project at HFBK Hamburg titled “About Falling in Love and Even Little Rubber Ducks” created in 2016. Paul Spengemann, born 1987 in Hamburg, has infused the extremely recalcitrant interior life of his studio with a filmic breath that downright brings it alive. In order to do so, he employed spectacular camera movements and soundtracks reminiscent of classical film genres and professional advertising films, making the studio itself the subject matter of his artistic work
