I’ve got a machine for seeing, called eyes
To hear, I’ve got ears
To talk, a mouth
But they feel like separate machines
there’s no unity
A person ought to feel unified
I feel like I’m divided
Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot Le Fou, 1965
Vilma Gold is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Felix Gmelin.
In “I Feel so Divided” Felix Gmelin uses painting, photography, film, and sound to create a spatial montage that explores the abilities of cinema and the visual arts to organize and disorganize the senses. The different found, copied, interpreted and quoted elements – excerpts from a 1926 German documentary about a school for blind children, fragments from Vsevolod Pudovkin’s “Asynchronism as a principle for sound film” and Diderot’s “Letter on the Blind”, and more – are combined with a new series of paintings which depict children judged “good” or “bad” by the Nazi regime. Together the parts of the exhibition form an open constellation of historical and iconographic associations, continuities and ruptures. If the traditions of cinema and the visual arts have today entered into a state of profound uncertainty, then perhaps, Gmelin seems to suggest, their pieces can be disassembled and reassembled to create forms that think.
Felix Gmelin was born in Heidelberg in 1962 but lives and works in Stockholm. Gmelin has participated twice in the Venice Biennale, 2007 and 2003; in the October Salon 2006, Belgrade, and also in the Berlin Biennial 2006. He has had solo shows at institutions including Portikus, Frankfurt, Gasworks, London and Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö. Currently his work can be seen in a group show at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.