Kirstin Burckhardt
A body that only embodies, 2020

5:37 min

Kirstin Burckhardt's moving-image portrait A body that only embodies oscillates between the poles of aggression and sensuality. The focus lies on the mouth, lips, gums, and tongue, which become the site of a subtle and intricate drama in the artist's video installation. On this corporeal stage, the simultaneous monologue and dialogue revolve around opening and sealing the body, around vulnerability and self-assertion, attraction and repulsion, withdrawal and emersion, as well as around forms of embodiment and mediation fluctuating between internal and external spaces. The public display, exercise, and manipulation of sexualised power are juxtaposed here with the intimate, self-determined incorporation and appropriation of the individual body, which operates across the boundaries, functioning both as an interface and an agent.
(Belinda Grace Gardner)

Kirstin Burckhardt
How does it feel?, 2018

9:18 min

How does it feel? is a video piece. It is accompanied by the fictitious Body Map Institute’s website on the psychological term ‘body ownership’ – www.bodymapinstitute.com. As a whole, this project seeks to question the term body ownership and the interplay between ‘me’ and ‘mine’.

‘Do you have a body? Are you a body?’ – this is the question at the beginning of video, which starts out as an interview with a charismatic, middle-aged, Caucasian psychology professor. He compares ‘body ownership’ with a pearl sliding on a string – one end of the string representing total connectedness with the body (e.g. states of meditation) to partial disconnection (so-called out-of-body experiences) to body dis-ownership (states of severe trauma) at the other end.

But during the course of the video, the dynamics shift: the camera creeps closer, curiously scanning the skin, pores, and wrinkles of this speaking body that is talking about bodies beyond words. The visuals question how we identify with the body, from what point of view and from which position of power. The voice of the expert continues, the camera circles him like a tiger with locked eyes, and the question reverberates: Do you have a body? Are you a body?
(Kirstin Burckhardt)

Sevda Semer
How do I, 2021

7:49 min

Who is speaking in Kirstin Burckhardt's 'How does it feel'? The psychology professor who is an invention of the artist, and into whose mouth she ‘puts' her own text, or the actor, whose body the camera steadily approaches?

Who is speaking? can also be asked of Sevda Semer, even though it is she herself who is talking about her own diary and also about whether anyone should ever read it. Are there things in the diary that should not be revealed even to posterity? And who is speaking in the video, the private self or the public self? Is the artist not performing her self, standing outside herself here?

Sevda Semer
Visual diaries 2017, part 8, 2018

3:42 min

The second film is part of a series in which Sevda Semer gives us a glimpse into another, drawn and painted, diary, in which there are only individual sentences written, such as: 'You said you're a body with a mind / I said I'm a mind with a body'.

In this way, Sevda Semer highlights an ambivalence similar to Kirstin Buckhardt's investigation of 'body ownership'. Both artists subtly demonstrate the depths hidden behind the idea of being identical to oneself or 'with oneself'. 'I is another' could be fundamental to both of them, as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud already documented around 1880, or as the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan put it: 'The I is not the I'.

Although Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova and Teboho Edkins each produced a video in entirely different cultural contexts, they pose a similar question: how are biographies remembered through images?

Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova
A Made-up Story, 2014-2015

13:17 min

Nadezhda Oleg Lyahova's film A Made-up Story (see also Shooting Ghosts) takes us through an abandoned house in the countryside. The camera focuses first on the partially rotted furniture and equipment, including an old camera, of the previous owner. There are old photos and postcards covered in dust lying around in a drawer. After cleaning them in water, the bleached and dusty outlines of the subjects are visible. The photos show family members, travel pictures, a newly married couple or a man on his death bed. But there are also scenes that appear to follow the official propaganda of socialist Bulgaria. The artist, who does not know the people and their life journeys, ‘invents’ possible stories behind the images and brings them to life. The forgotten biographies behind the forgotten pictures could actually have happened. Preserving lived lives in a collection of photos in an album was a collective ritual in all European or Europe-influenced countries for a long time. Even individual photos found by chance always say something about society as a whole.

Teboho Edkins
Initiation, 2016

10:39 min

Teboho Edkins' film Initiation also begins with a photo that could come from a family album. It shows a white child in the traditional shepherd's dress of Lesotho, where Edkins grew up. It is in fact a photograph of the artist himself as a 6 year old.

The film is the documentation of an intuition ritual in the mountains of Lesotho. Traditionally every young man of the Basotho, the people who constitute most of the population, becomes an adult through this ritual. However, Edkins does not show the months-long ritual itself but at first the younger brother of the initiate who discusses his feelings while waiting, and then the group's return after successfully completing the ritual. The stages of the initiation are private and undocumented in images. Although photo albums are also common in Lesotho, they would only contain the performative staging of the ritual, which Edkins shows at the end of his video. The young men celebrating the successful initiation wear traditional robes but add sunglasses and imitation jewellery, external cultural influences that are penetrating this ritual practised over generations.

Stella Geppert and Boryana Petkova use the medium of video only in connection with other artistic means of expression, with drawing and performance.

Stella Geppert
InsideT (collective), 2020

For blinkvideo: 12 min / original version: 17 min

The investigation of the human body and the choreography of its movement, as well as the exploration of its somatic and psychic condition, play a central role in Stella Geppert's work. InsideT (collective) is a performance on a white ground in which three dancers follow the energetic and emotionally charged actions of the artist. Their patterns of movement are determined by costumes specially designed by the artist, which become a kind of drawing instrument. Tentacle-like strips hang from head to foot and have carbon rods attached to the ends. The dancers' bodies tumble, swing, turn, fall, touch each other and communicate with each other. Their actions result in traces of carbon on the white ground, which produce a – 'blind' and unconsciously created – complex linear drawing.

Boryana Petkova
31_41_07, 2020

Boryana Petkova also subjects the drawing process to strict experimental arrangements or guidelines. From the physical actions carried out mainly by the artist herself, only the drawing hand reaches into the fixed-position camera shot.

In 31.41.07 a sheet of drawing paper hangs from a wooden construction, which swings the paper back and forth so that the drawing hand reaches it only with difficulty. The traces the artist leaves on the paper and the wall are thus a manifestation of the unattainable and cannot be fully controlled.

Boryana Petkova
2hands drawing, 2017

In 2hands drawing, two hands from different people draw on two off-set walls simultaneously. From the camera's position, they are beside each other, drawing two halves of a circle, which eventually fit together optically.

In Stella Geppert's work, the drawings result from the loss of control that occurs, not least when the performers shift their bodies' centre of gravity. Boryana Petkova, on the other hand, concentrates on the reach of the body and what 'emerges' when it tends to lose control of the hand, which also deprives it of coordination with the eye. Both artists work with the conscious restriction of movement in drawing, which becomes an externally controlled and mostly blindly executed activity. They both thereby succeed in letting the body and movement qualities of a drawing process become an expression of drawing itself.

Evamaria Schaller
Contra Cadicum Morbum, 2020

11:21 min

Evamaria Schaller made her 2020 video Contra Cadicum Morbum in the historic cellars of the Kunsthaus NRW in Aachen-Kornelimünster. The art-house is a former monastic building whose history reaches back to the Middle Ages. For centuries, it was also a place of pilgrimage for visitors to the relics of St. Cornelius, the patron saint of people with epilepsy.

The title of the video is a late High German spell against epilepsy. The performances taking place in the cellars are a scenic sequence which projects the monastery’s history and the healing power attributed to it ghost-like into the present day.

Kamen Stoyanov
Up and Through, 2020

11:11 min

Kamen Stoyanov’s film Up and Through (2020) evokes the spirit of certain activities that never actually took place. Different actions occur around a planned new hotel whose remains testify to an investment failure in a nature reserve near Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. These actions recall typical activities carried out in a hotel, such as the cleaning of rooms. They simultaneously quote in part other artists’ earlier historic performances, for example, Tomislav Gotovac’s Cleaning of Public Spaces, an ironic criticism of the Yugoslavian government in Zagreb in 1981.

Using such references, Stoyanovac also questions how to react artistically to political and economic friction. In Up and Through he does this in an almost allegorical manner, while the film Havalamani – New Istanbul Dream, referenced in Shooting Ghosts, contains a direct criticism of the reactionary Erdogan government.

Evamaria Schaller
Seven Shades Red, 2020

9:35 min

Evamaria Schaller also draws on the history of performance in her work. In Seven Shades Red (2020), she begins to apply lipstick. By the end, her entire head is wrapped bondage-like in red thread. The uncut video in which only the artist’s face can be seen recalls the stark aesthetics of many early video performances. It is also an almost exemplary presentation of the spectrum of expression and meaning of the colour red through the A to Z of different emotional states shown.