Michel Auder – Heads of the Town

Michel Auder – Heads of the Town

Michel Auder has seldom neglected to record an event in his life and, over the course of these
40 years of filmmaking, he has slipped into a variety of roles: silent participant, obsessive
voyeur, discreet accomplice, or simple observer. Auder’s singular approach has earned him
worldwide recognition. His films are found in the Anthology Film Archives in New York and have
been exhibited in major international museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2008 his
works were shown at the European Kunsthalle in Cologne, at the Statens Museum for Kunst in
Copenhagen and at the Berlin Biennale.
In November 2008 he won the New Vision Award at the CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen
for The Feature, an artistic collaboration with director Andrew Neel. In his role as the fictional
protagonist, Auder reflects on the stations of his real life as a filmmaker, junkie, and partner of
Warhol’s muse Viva and, later, the artist Cindy Sherman. The French experimental filmmaker,
who lives in New York, was present for The Feature’s world premiere at the 58th Berlinale and is
now returning to Berlin one year later in time for this year’s film festival.
Heads of the Town, Auder’s first solo show in Berlin, employs installation to realize a unified
vision of sound and video. Although these recent works have little in common with the
seemingly “authentic” documentary style of his video diaries, Auder’s current approach – at
times reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion – remains self-referential in its treatment of
the work of art and the medium of film. All the same, Michel Auder has never viewed himself as
a documentarist. The artist Jonas Mekas wrote about Auder: “And yes, Auder is a poet; he isn’t
a realist. A poet of moods, faces, situations, brief encounters, tragic moments of our miserable
civilization, the suffering. And yes, also human vanity, ridiculousness.”

Aurel Scheibler

Ulrik Heltoft


PRESS RELEASE
Ulrik Heltoft: Elements from a Nightmare
Opening: January 23rd, from 5-8 pm.

It is a great pleasure to announce Ulrik Heltoft’s third solo exhibition at the gallery: Elements from a Nightmare. The exhibition consists of a new video work, photography, and an object, and continues Ulrik Heltoft’s familiar, original yet subtle universe.
Apparently fatally injured and trapped in a mysterious room, a man, played by Ulrik Heltoft himself, investigates his surroundings with a paradoxical, trance-like attention. He staggers around the room, looks out the tower window, observes the furniture and the objects in the room, and finally collapses on the sofa. The actual room dissolves itself and converge with a hallucinating internal experience of the room, which extends into a kaleidoscopic sense of an abyss. The video Voyage autour de ma chambre (Voyage around my Room) is Ulrik Heltoft’s interpretation of the French author Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 novel of the same title. de Maistre wrote the novel during 42 days of house arrest, to which he was sentenced after participation in a duel. In the novel de Maistre describes his stay in the cramped keep as an adventurous, imaginary journey to an exotic and foreign world. Furthermore de Maistre praised this inner journey: it didn’t cost anything and could therefore strongly be recommended to the poor, the infirm, not to forget the lazy.

A mental extension of a physical space may take on unreal, unrecognizable or even nightmarish dimensions. Such places: at once concrete and imaginary, are the subject matter for also the remaining works in the exhibition.

The photo series White-Out, shot in the Arctic ice landscape captures the weather phenomenon
“white-out” – the polar landscape and the sky converge into an almost monochrome
white surface. The result is a strange, vague, and disturbing dream-like space. In this hyper-arctic landscape mental conceptions of dizziness and vertigo replace the normal physical points of reference.

The large photography Old Mine shows the entrance to an abandoned gold mine in California. While pebbles and the mountains’ rock structure appear in almost palpable clarity, the gaze is lost in the impenetrable darkness of the deep, dark shaft, where both light and the recognizable world disappears. The mine is a one-man work, and a picture of the paradoxical relationship between a very concrete and physical project (as digging a hole in the ground) and all the hopes, fantasies and dreams associated with this activity.

The sculpture Deception Island is a large architectural object made from super-light and ultra-reflecting planes. By a very simple design principle Ulrik Heltoft achieves a highly refined effect: at once logical and yet completely incomprehensible, the mirror image reflects the room – and oneself – upside down!

Ulrik Heltoft (b. 1973) is educated from the school of visual arts at the Royal Danish Art Academy 1995-1999 and from Yale University 1999-2001. He has recently had solo shows at Raucci e Santamaria in Naples and at Wilfried Lenz in Rotterdam, and moreover
he recently had a screening at the New Museum in New York.

Kirkhoff

Anna Lena Grau I Frank Hesse I Eske Schlüters


Anna Lena Grau I Frank Hesse I Eske Schlüters
Der Satz “Es steht geschrieben.” (The phrase “It is written.“)

A quotation from the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein “about certainty“ applies to a central concern of the three artists and is used as the title of the exhibition. The phrase “It is written.“ vouches in a biblical context for the truth of the following narration. Disassociated from this context, however, it loses this certainty and discloses other, new viewpoints such as, an auto-reference of the phrase on a visual level. Anna Lena Grau, Frank Hesse and Eske Schlüters search archives looking for forgotten or unknown stories. In their artistic work, they investigate philosphical and scientific methods looking for the extraordinary viewpoint in what is already known.

Frank Hesse´s (1970) work walks a fine line between scientifically precise examination and art. With his great appreciation for nuances he tells stories whose dramaturgy mirrors the highly topical discourse on the visual language in art and science.

In his two-part work ”De Ou Par Marcel Duchamp (2008)” Frank Hesse refers to the legendary father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp. His research led him to Duchamp’s childhood. In order to mark his favourite place in the garden of the house where he was born, Duchamp, at the age of 12, carved his name and the year on a beech tree: Duchamp Marcel 1901. The present owner of the property had to fell the tree in 1993 because it would otherwise have toppled. He did, however, keep the piece with the inscription and it is still in his garage. The treetrunk object was documented by Hesse in accordance with the artistic and contextual allegations in the first edition of the ”The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp“ by Arturo Schwarz. Frank Hesse supplements the catalogue raisonné; the two pages – a painting and an index section- are inserted by means of a thin silver chain.

Eske Schlüters’ (1970) videofilms are a game of words, sounds and individual images redolent of their metaphorical character and the greater context which has been lost. By using film material from films made by other directors, Schlüters is writing a personal history of film in which complex atmoshpheres unfold in brief flashes. By using single and multiple projections, she researches the ”comprehension“ of moving pictures which are not governed by a strict narrative structure. Her open narrative method plays with conceptual thinking, agitating it and discovering new meanings.

Eske Schlüters latest film ”After the Rehearsal (2007)“ is based on a documentation of the shooting of Chatal Akerman’s film ”Jeanne Dielmann“ and focuses on the rehearsal of what are essentially everyday activities. The defamiliarisation effect inherent in cinematic dramaturgy is spotlighted by the isolation of the scenes where the actress rehearses her role for the camera. Eske Schlüters reflects the actor’s task of genuinely embodying the role, also on the level of sound when she translates from various languages texts on theatre theory and assembles them into an autonomous composition.

Anna Lena Grau’s (1980) interests are dominated by natural scientific areas as well as history of art. Her small-sized glass objects, the „Quallengläser 2008“ formally follow the inner moulding of a jellyfish, transfer its specific method of locomotion to the technical possibilities of glass blowing. The inversions and protuberances of the jellyfish glass objects are created by heating selective points of the viscous blow glass. For very large inversions, additional glass is partially melted which, with the aid of flow strength and additional suction in the blow tube, is then stretched. In her examination of scientific phenomena she educes formal structures from existing image associations, makes them independent, connects, layers, superimposes them freely associated with similar formations to then return them to the object.

“I am not interested in unambiguousness,“ writes Anne Lena Grau, “I examine moments in which the logical comprehension of familiar situations becomes confused, moments when the ambiguousness of the world becomes apparent. My work therefore consists of finding exemplary surrogates whose perception is able to split kaleidoscope-like, who experiences his own perception echo-like and floating.

Art Agents