“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.
UPCOMING: SHEN XIN
Shen Xin’s film “Warm Spell” takes a sensitive, sensual approach to the economic, ecological and cultural changes currently being experienced in the Thai island of Ko Yao Yai. Periods of drought and flooding, investors and migrant workers, tourists from Europe and Asia are currently changing the life there. Taking documentary material as her starting point, Shen Xin weaves a dreamy, surrealist tale about a ghostly presence on the island which combines the experiences of local protagonists with intimate, personal impressions of a journey.
HANNAH PERRY
“Could I have said one small thing to make you happy?” In her work “Gush”, Hannah Perry comes to terms with the sudden loss of her boyfriend. She investigates the question of just how to reflect on feelings, memories and traumas in a post-humane society. To do so, using her own personal experiences as her starting point, she develops a loose network of references which she uses to illustrate sociocultural parameters.
MIKHAIL KARIKIS
Can noise influence sociopolitical and physical changes? Anglo-Greek artist Mikhail Karikis investigates the role played by sound and the human voice in shaping a sense of community. Karikis’ cross-media installations are based on long-term collaborations with children and young people. His work focuses on forging community and on the dreams of the coming generation.
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.
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 PFEIFER
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.
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.
SCHIRN MAG
When computer games become reality
By Daniel Urban
A tropical landscape turns out to be the distorted world of a human avatar. In Aleksandar Radan’s film “This water gives back no images” nothing is as it seems and yet incredibly real.
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.
SCHIRN MAG
PS I really don’t like you
By Daniel Urban
A woman, her suitors and a murder. In her film “The Coquette” artist Rosa Aiello plays with stereotypical gender roles and power relations.
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.
SCHIRN MAG
Travelling back to the past - or is it the future?
By Daniel Urban
In his video work “In Our Time” artist Gerard Byrne shows that time is just a cultural construct. And the present an idea that is not as reliable as it seems.
CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER
In his video piece “Transformation Scenario” (2018) Clemens von Wedemeyer explores to what extent simulated life generated by computer algorithms affects how we perceive crowds, as well as how it might influence society. Simultaneous sequences of real and fictitious images combined with virtual scenes from a crowd-control software program produce a narrative in which simulated life becomes the ideal.
SCHIRN MAG
When the crowd determines the individual
By Daniel Urban
Crowd movements can easily be simulated by algorithms. How this influences our real life, is shown in the film “Transformation Scenario” at the coming Double Feature.
DAMIR OČKO
Damir Očko’s works “Dicta I” and “Dicta II” revolve around the complexity of language. “Dicta I” is based on Bertolt Brecht’s autobiographical work “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit” (Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth), which he wrote in exile having fled the Nazi regime. “Dicta II” is constructed around a number of “safe words” – code words intended to ensure sexual practices are immediately discontinued.
SCHIRN MAG
What is for real, what fake news?
By Daniel Urban
In times of alternative facts, Damir Očko’s films seem more relevant than ever: reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s call for truth and exposing the lack of content of political slogans.
SANDRA SCHÄFER
Based on on-site research, “Constructed Futures: Haret Hreik” is a video installation in which Sandra Schäfer addresses the relationship between memory and reconstruction in the Haret Hreik district of Beirut. The latter was destroyed by Israeli air strikes in 2006 and subsequently swiftly rebuilt by Hezbollah. This reconstruction project is part of an armed conflict and geopolitical constellation in which architecture is involved in creating space, landscape and memory.
SCHIRN MAG
How do wars and geopolitics influence architecture?
By Elisabeth Pallentin
Video artist Sandra Schäfer provides insights into a reconstruction project of Hezbollah after the Lebanon War. And examines how architecture influences memory and identity.
