 Markus Schinwald: Diarios (to you), 2003 still from DVD Matthew Buckingham, Markus Schinwald, Clemens von Wedemeyer Galerie Klosterfelde is pleased to announce an exhibition with films by Matthew Buckingham, Markus Schinwald and Clemens von Wedemeyer. The three belong to a young generation of artists whose work is concerned with a precise interrogation of filmic means of presentation and a critical distance to media-reality. This is the case for their films as well as for other media that they use such as installation, photography, sculpture or performance. The films chosen share a particular relationship between text/voiceover and images, and a resulting tension between the formal structure of the film and its narrative level. Matthew Buckingham's film "Amos Fortune Road" (1996) deals with a search for the identity of the slave Amos Fortune, who in 1769 bought his freedom and moved from Boston to resettle in New Hampshire. This is narrated by the fictive character Sharon, who, during a summer runs a children's theatre in New Hampshire, and becomes aware of Amos Fortune during her daily drives past a historical marker. The 16mm black and white film shows her long drives through the roads of New Hampshire, the isolated theatres and places of her investigation, while texts in between or superimposed on the images give information on Sharon and about her research. Formally the titles recall early silent films. Although they take on the tone of an authoritative narrator, they deliver a potpourri of important and trivial statements, that only supposedly could be put together into a complete image. As Sharon experiences at the end, most of the reports about Amos Fortune that were brought to her attention are based on two fictive biographies. The network of references and cross-references is eventually held together by the frequent car journeys that Sharon takes over the old country streets, which as becomes apparent are the only original artefacts from the time of Amos Fortune. Clemens von Wedemeyer's work from the year 2002 consists of two parts: "Big Business" is a remake of the likewise named Laurel & Hardy film in a prison in Waldheim, Saxony. On a self-made stage within the prison precinct, three inmates perform the story in which an argument flares up over the unfortunate sale of a Christmas tree in summer, resulting in a house as well as a front garden and piano being ripped to pieces. The Making of "Big Business" comments on the framing conditions: a female voice with a French accent and a male voice report on the original film from 1929, on the filming, and the prison conditions, where the inmates actually build model houses only to tear them down again afterwards. Initially the "Making Of" complements the fiction film as documentation, though with time this polarity disappears: the scenery is destroyed by the acted aggression of the prison inmates, which is formally reflected in the increasing depth of focus in the image. The inter-titles in the "Making Of", which initially appear as ordering chapter dividers become more and more "un-documentary", contain personal remarks by the filmmaker about the prison wardens, or quotes from Foucault on the prison institution as a system of control. At the end, the "Making Of" becomes aware of the impossibility of its own objectivity: extracts from Pasolini's "Accantone" are read by an inmate, and the film maker recognises his inability to make a "true" film about prisons. In this way the conceptions of prison and reality overlap, as do those of cinema and reality. The "Making Of" is a central element in von Wedemeyer's work: it stands in relation to the fictive as supposedly other, while the actual film plays in the zone in between. Markus Schinwald's projection "Diarios (to you)", 2003, consists of 160 black and white slides and a sound track. The individual images are overlapping each other and provided with a voice-over and music, give the impression of a film, in a hommage to Chris Marker's "La Jetée". The motifs follow each other fragmentarily and in a loose sequence. Images from landscapes, architecture, scenes with a man and a woman, create a dense atmospheric network that appears equally foreign and familiar. The wide-screen format of the black and white images seems to quote classical cinema while the gestures and gazes of the figures recall filmic codes without however calling up concrete scenes. The associative charge of the images is increased by the narrative voices, which however remain just as fragmentary: a female voice delivers scene descriptions which evoke the filmic, but which only partly correspond to the images. A male voice recites a love poem which is whispered and so appears more like an inner-monologue directed to himself. Through the complex relation of images and voices, Schinwald plays with the observer's potential of imagination. The suggested narrative leveltakes place in the black images in between, or in the eye of the observer. So from very different perspectives the films shown interrogate the preconceptions of cinema and its narrative structures. While Schinwald in his work questions gestures and expressions of bodies and their formalised conditioning, for Buckingham it's a question of the construction of history and the mechanisms of memory. Von Wedemeyer analyses social phenomena, which he places in parallel to a conceptual questioning of film. All three share the interest in weaving the formal structure and the narrative level into a complex and fragile mesh, and so to create a formal instability, which questions narrative codes without giving them up entirely. Exhibition: February 4 - March 19, 2005 Gallery hours: Tue-Sat 11 am - 6 pm Galerie Klosterfelde Zimmerstrasse 90/91 D-10117 Berlin-Mitte Telephone +49 30 283 53 05 Fax +49 30 283 53 06 Email office@klosterfelde.de www.klosterfelde.de |
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