“I’m with you. And we’re being eaten by words.”
By Daniel Urban
A distorted voice, half human, half machine, guides through Pedro Barateiro’s film “The Opening Monologue” and ponders the meaning of language.
DOUBLE FEATURE
The monthly Double Feature sees itself as a platform for various trends and forms of expression in film and video art production. For more than six years, the SCHIRN has invited national and international film and video artists to present a work from their own oeuvre, followed by a film of their choice. In conversation with the curators Katharina Dohm and Matthias Ulrich as well as guest curators, they provide a comprehensive insight into their creative work, and in particular into their interest in film. Films and video works by over 60 artists have already been shown at the SCHIRN. In 2019 the public can look forward to contributions from artists including Liv Schuman, Pedro Barateiro and Mario Pfeifer. The videos and conversations with artists who have participated so far, including Monira Al Qadiri, Bianca Baldi, Eli Cortiñas, Gery Georgieva, Beatrice Gibson, Andrew Norman Wilson, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ani Schulze, Timur Si-Qin, Paul Spengemann, Pilvi Takala, and Holly Zausner, can be accessed via the SCHIRN’s YouTube channel under the title “Double Feature Conversations.” The SCHIRN MAGAZINE also regularly provides discursive contributions with an editorial focus on video art to accompany the Double Feature series.
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.
UPCOMING: ALEKSANDAR RADAN
Aleksandar Radan’s film pieces are based on modifications of existing computer games, a practice dubbed “modding”. Radan’s focus lies on the avatars he comes across in computer games: He modifies these and combines them with additional, found footage. The Offenbach-born artist is screening his film “This water gives back no image,” which won the prize for the best experimental film at the international Lago Film Fest in 2018.
ROSA AIELLO
Literature and engaging with the possibilities of narration play a decisive role in Rosa Aiello’s works, which are a cross between photography, film and performance. Drawing on Patricia Highsmith’s “Little Tales of Misogyny,” Aiello has produced a series of photographs and the film “The Coquette”. In the latter, she presents stereotypical female figures and the power relationships between the sexes, in the process concentrating on the meaning of language.
GERARD BYRNE
Gerard Byrne analyzes the construction of images, how they are conveyed, and how collective moments are created. His pieces are often based on photographic material gleaned from magazines from the 1960s through to the 1980s, which assert a new presence of their own in his filmic and photographic realizations. Byrne’s film “In Our Time” (2017), which was on view at Skulptur Projekte in Munster, evidently does not take place in the current world despite being created using cutting edge film technology.
PEDRO BARATEIRO
Language, technology, information, distribution – with his films, sculptures, performances and installations, Pedro Barateiro examines the mechanisms of post-capitalist societies that are inscribed in preconceptions, ideas and everyday life. Starting with the motifs of pop culture, historical facts, literary and theoretical texts and other materials, the artist investigates how constructed narratives influence and manipulate our reality.
SCHIRN MAG
SCHIRN MAG
Invulnerable bodies
By Daniel Urban
Embedded in a poetic imagery, three spiritual healers from Brazil talk about their beliefs and practices in Mario Pfeifer's video work “Corpo Fechado”.
MARIO PFEIFFER
Adopting a cultural-anthropological perspective, Mario Pfeifer’s video works explore the correlations identity and culture have with the socio-economic and socio-political structures of a huge variety of societies, frequently starting with a collaboration with local protagonists. At the same time, Pfeifer’s works, which hover somewhere between documentary approach and aesthetic staging, question the conventions of visual, cinematographic representation that underpin them.
LIV SCHULMAN
Tirades about art, about the liberal market economy, about criticism of Marxism, or about psychotherapy gush from the monologizing protagonists in the films, performances and novels by Argentinian artist Liv Schulman (1985). The significance of what is said gets lost in phrases, becomes alienated, and ultimately culminates in the hopeless search for meaning.
SCHIRN MAG
What is the meaning of life?
By Daniel Urban
Liv Schulman’s video work L’Obstruction tells of unfulfilled desires and the search for the meaning of life. And asks why we are alone after all.
