Jahresgaben 2016
Videos by Elke Dreier, Nichts Geschossen, An Laphan, M+M, Jovana Reisinger, Yves-
Michele Saß, Susanne Steinmassl & Julia Fuhr Mann, and Angela Stiegler.
3 – 11 Dezember 2016, 11am – 6pm
This selection of videos by artists and collectives based in Munich and the surrounding area has been compiled into a program as part of the 2016 Jahresgaben exhibition. It will be viewable in the Kino as a 75 minute program, looping daily, from 11–18 Uhr, for the entirety of the exhibition. Many of the works are for sale, so please inquire with Kunstverein team for more information if you are interested.
M+M
Cuckoo On Sunset (2007)
video, color, sound, 4:46 minutes
Collaborating since 1994, the duo M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia) primarily work at the interface between cinema and visual art, and are perhaps best known for large-scale synchronized installations that concern narrative and generic conventions, episodic chronologies, and how stories transform when subject positions are exchanged. They regularly develop their projects in relationship to specific sites or in collaboration with professionals from other fields, with humor and critical insight. Produced during a residency in Los Angeles, Cuckoo On Sunset is a performance, sculpture, and video, in which a Mexican landscape worker climbs a towering palm tree to install a modernistic cuckoo clock specially designed by an architect. German and Californian clichés are fused, while the hidden labor behind the City of Flowers and Sunshine is foregrounded.
Susanne Steinmassl and Julia Fuhr Mann
THE SHOW SHOW (2016)
video, color, sound, 26:12 minutes
Susanne Steinmassl is a filmmaker and visual artist. Julia Fuhr Mann is a director and film festival programmer. Each confronts narratives in politics and pop culture, questions conventions of gender and sexuality, and investigates the social consequences of a digital world. THE SHOW SHOW is an experimental hybrid of fiction and documentary that features an exaggerated television host and a whispering narrator commenting on both the simultaneous saturation and erosion of meaning online and the status of subjectivity and political engagement today. Intermittently flipping between the host in an abstract yellow room, documentary sequences from Odessa, and found footage from the conflict in Ukraine, the video creates a powerful juxtaposition between the apathy and superficiality of social media and the lived realities of political power and pain – elaborating the confusion of the internet age and the failure of the European ideal.
An Laphan
Flaw (2013 / 2016)
video, color, sound, 2:15 minutes
Fetishism and abjection and their haptic encounter and mediation through digital technology are the primary concerns in An Laphan’s moving images. In Flaw, Laphan explores the cartography of the body through extreme close-up shots of his own physical ‘imperfections’, juxtaposed with a soundtrack of glitches and sonic textures by Sebastian Schönfeld (Owl Yeah). A clinical examination of body parts and an honest and intimate self-portrait, the shots emphasize specific details – hair follicles, freckles, blemishes, pores, orifices, cuts. Identifying which parts are being depicted is nearly impossible, verging on abstraction.
Yves-Michele Saß
Haemorheology (2016)
video, color, sound, 2:15 minutes
Yves-Michele Saß’s practice blends critical research into media cultures, enthusiastic collaborations, and quasi-curatorial activities (including the artist-run-space Spreez, the collective We Are Hercules, and his apartment gallery Run To Babylon). Culling from the flood of Internet phenomena, he produces hybrids of videos and objects to analyze, exaggerate, and conflate fan subcultures, science fiction, esoteric traditions, self-help, and corporate marketing. Through Haemorheology, he offers a form of critical poetry that correlates various found sources, and focuses on mass-media, mythological, pop, and social depictions of vampires – exposing the figures as monstrous channels of energy, vessels of liquid, travellers across barriers, and conduits of philosophical potential.
Angela Stiegler
Shooting Liz (2016)
HD-video, color, sound, 4 minutes
Angela Stiegler produces videos, performances, installations and hybrid collaborations that are populated with skins, screens, and alter egos. The first part in a tetralogy of videos, Stiegler’s Shooting Liz analyzes a shooting scene. By splitting the scene into sections – before, during, and after the shooting – the artist dissects the event and adds a layer of dubbing to it. The incident is recreated from a multiple spectator's view that abandons cinematic linear perspective. Deploying cutting-edge motion tracking and body scanning technologies on a special stage, the artist registers not only the movements of her performer, but also her own documentation of the actions, connecting the registration of bodily data with the apprehension and mediation of an event. The manipulation of the footage correlates the act of shooting an invisible enemy with the act of being shot and killed. Concerning recent police shootings that have been documented in video by embedded witnesses and subsequently disseminated through the Internet, Stiegler also correlates the logic of ‘shooting’ shared in both cinema and the violent world of guns.
Nichts Geschossen
Gare d’Andelot (2014)
video, black and white, sound, 8:17 minutes
Since 2009, the duo Nichts Geschossen (Alexander Wagner and Samuel Langer) have developed an interdisciplinary practice that gleans historical fragments, poetic structures, and site specific contexts. Their video Gare d’Andelot centers on the alleged romantic affair of Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, the wife of Dadaist Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp, who was living in Munich at the time. Black and white, with reduced sound, their video takes a view on the nature of this secret rendezvous in Andelot-en-Montagne in eastern France, fusing the conventions of melodrama with the qualities of early film.
Jovana Reisinger
PRETTY BOYZ DON'T DIE (2016)
video, color, sound, 20 minutes
Jovana Reisinger is a filmmaker, writer, and artist who moves regularly between the worlds of journalism, fashion, literature, music, performance, theatre, and cinema. Reisinger’s narrative video PRETTY BOYZ DON'T DIE is set in the midst of a serial killer epidemic where good-looking boys are rapidly being murdered. The story follows a scantily-clad male model (the model Maximilian Bungarten) while he roams the streets of Munich – at once posing and enjoying the attention he receives from other streetwalkers, yet in a constant state of unease, fear, and anxiety of the possible danger awaiting him.
Elke Dreier
Motion Fixes Motion Pattern (2014)
video, color, no sound, 3:05 minutes
Elke Dreier’s video and mixed-media installations concern everyday gestures, nonverbal communications, and learned or involuntary movements. Through them, she explores the relationships between codes, actions, and body language. In Motion Fixes Motion Pattern a nude performer generates a sequence of repeated motions with her body that forms a square and charts the physical limits of a specific body part. Progressively layering the framed views on top of one another, the result is a fragmented body made up of autonomous quadrilateral parts.
Kunstverein München would like to thank the artists and Hasan Veseli.