video feature
Videoartist of the Month December 2020
Susanne Wiegner
Video Artist of the Month December 2020 –
Susanne Wiegner
Susanne Wiegner is the 3rd artist who started her collaboration with CologneOFF in 2010 and the 3rd of them who is honoured as the Videoartist of the Month December 2020. I am happy, how individual these three artists are in their expression and the use of the medium video. Susanne has a different approach by combining the 3D animations with poems by different poets working in German language, often her works are based and inspired by poems by Robert Lax, in each case the 3D animation is corresponding and communicating very intuitively with the poetic works and words which make her videos extraordinary fascinating. The combiniation of the fictive footage with poetry is generating a particular sensual perception.
The feature is including 13 videos created and submitted between 2010 and 2020, and like in the cases of the previously honoured fellow artists, the selection of these 13 works is giving a representative overview of 29 video projects in total.
It was a pleasure to have the chance to follow Susanne’s artistic development during more than 10 years, and I hope she will share her artistic poetic view on the world with the audience, the artists fellows and me as a curator also during the next following 10 years. Bravo Susanne – and all the best for a bright artistic future!
> see Susanne’s videos featured as a screening program @ Alphabet Cinema N
List of 13 featured videos
Old family photos and the ticking of a clock evoke a process of remembrance that deals with the spacial fading of remembered reality and visualised possibility.
The child enters the grandparent’s house, a very strict, religious and proper world, embedded into a chronologically controlled daily routine.
The constant dripping of the tap symbolizes our everyday, Careless waste of resources, the effects of which in this short film cannot be felt in distant countries or times, but instead end immediately in a domestic catastrophe from which there is no escape.
“just midnight” is a poem by Robert Lax, which conveys a temporal and spatial momentary mood with very minimal means.
In his texts, it was important to Robert Lax how the letters and words are set on the paper and so one of his typical, vertical typefaces was created here, which was adopted for the film. The letters become spaces, actors, which the camera paces through and circles around.
Gradually a three-dimensional word structure emerges in front of the beholder’s eye, which then disappears again into the two-dimensionality of a sheet of paper.
The film “mixed reflection” works both with the mixture of digital techniques, the video and the 3D animation as well as with the mixture of media that confront us (often suddenly) with our face; the mirror, the camera and the screen.
The video takes place in the privacy of the bathroom – but it is not clear whether I am looking at myself in the mirror or seemingly unobserved in front of a camera.
“at the museum” is a surprising game with the relationship between a work of art and the viewer’s imagination.
[meine heimat] is a poem by Ulrike Almut Sandig, that describes a space of memories or a landscape, that is not clearly defined.
“Heimat” is a very special German word, that can’t be translated into other languages, because it means as well a specific place,
as a certain landscape or an abstract feeling. During the Third Reich in Germany, the word “Heimat” was barbarously and fanatically
glorified and misused with the result that many people lost their “Heimat” and their lives.
In the video a picture of a concentration camp is projected on the letters of the words [meine heimat] blended with a train ride through my own homeland that reminds also of the terrible deportations to show the ambiguity, that you feel as a German when you think about your “Heimat”.
“inside this room all of my dreams become realities and some of my realities become dreams” (Willy Wonka and the Chocolat Factory)
Von diesem Zitat ausgehend, erkundet die Kamera die Szenerie eines Arbeitstisches, die geheimnisvolle, kreative Welt eines Künstlers und gibt Hinweise auf verschiedene
literarische, architektonische und künstlerische Einflüsse (Kafka, Jules Verne, Boullée, Caravaggio)
The film shows the immediate, destrucive impact to a home by usual , everyday disturbances, that we create, watch and suffer at the same time.
“the light – the shade” is a poem by Robert Lax that plays with the contrasts and opposites light and shade, with bright and dark, black and white, red and blue.
The film begins with a nighttime scenery in a city, moves into a room and starts watching the movement of the shadows on the wall. Finally the camera enters
the screen of a laptop and goes deeper and deeper into the poem. The film becomes a journey through the realm of imagination, through spaces and
pictures, through letters and words. In that way the minimal language of the poem is unfolded into unexpected pictures.
The poem “Kaspar Hauser Lied” by Georg Trakl was written in 1913. Kaspar Hauser (30 April 1812 (?) – 17 December 1833) was a German youth who claimed to have grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell. Hauser’s claims, and his subsequent death by stabbing, sparked much debate and controversy. (Wikipedia)
The visualization of the poem is based on the inscription of Hauser’s gravestone where you can read in Latin: “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious.” In the film, the typeface is three-dimensional and builds a sequence of spaces, that is passed by the camera. Images and videos are projected on the letters, that lights up in the dark like kaleidoscopic smithers of memory. By these means the epitaph becomes the abstracted path through Hauser’s life from the subtle, slightly colored experiences of nature to the gradually darken spaces of civilisation, to a confusing labyrinth.
Towards the end of the poem, the camera leaves the typeface, the script becomes flat again and one realizes Kaspar Hauser’s headstone.
susanne wiegner
A single camera movement explores a catastrophic scenario that cannot be classified
neither spatially nor temporally. Is the flat overlooking the street just an illusion or the
broken rooms in the inhospitable landscape. The title “melting fields” refers to climate
change, the melting ice surfaces and glaciers as well as to an incipient loss of memory and
orientation. How does our usual environment change when it is only fragmentarily
perceived and reminded. How can this feeling of complete loneliness and despair in a
fragmented and destroyed world be visualized?
The film is based on a haiku poem that painfully recalls a time that no longer seems to
exist. The flowering meadow is just a memory image on the retina of a dead bee in the
midst of a dystopian-looking environment. At the very end “the silence is broken”.
The film shows soul landscapes – inner images that convey in their vastness a sense of
loneliness and threat. Certain scenes are a reminiscent of German romanticism, like the
paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, whose ambiguity is enhanced by cinematic means.
The beauty of the sunrise marks the beginning and the end of a disaster scenario that
reminds of climate change and war ruins.
