Video works by An Kaler & Anne Quirynen, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Bjørn Melhus, Meg Stuart and Penelope Wehrli

An Kaler / Anne Quirynen On Orientations | Shifting the burden
Shifting the burden is a collaboration between the video artist Anne Quirynen and the choreographer An Kaler. The piece is the result of research on the perception of movement in the transition between different artistic speeches and works. The installation fluidly shifts between the media of painting, video art and choreography. A figure inscribes a second figure. The body, projected onto a black surface, is trapped in a frame. It seems robbed of its corporeality, accompanied by a sound that resembles the attempt of drawing and the movement sequence, in the knowledge that the attempt to hear and see movement can only fail.

Concept and realisation: An Kaler and Anne Quirynen. Choreography: An Kaler. Video, Video and
Installation: Anne Quirynen. Supported by PACT Zollverein Essen, Wien Kultur

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz CONTAGIOUS!
Installation with HD video, 12 min and 11 photographies, 2010
Contagious! exposes the subversive forms of protest within popular styles of dance around 1900 and traces the then widespread idea of epidemic infection through physical imitation. The filmed performance shows the origin of the “Epileptic Dance” and the “Cakewalk” on the stage of the legendary Café Concert in fin de siècle Paris. The dancers of the Belle Époque copied, distorted and subverted the poses of the ‘hysterics’, labelled ‘sick’ at the time, transforming their unique power and expressiveness into a spectacular dance. The fashionable dance the ‘cakewalk’ originated amongst the slaves of the plantations in the American South and mocked the stilted, stiff demeanor of the whites. Within a short period of time it became widespread and popular, abolishing and retaining the traumatic experiences of slavery and colonialism in a spectacular way.

Concept: Pauline Boudry und Renate Lorenz. Performers: Arantxa Martinez and Vaginal Davis. Director of Photography: Bernadette Paassen. Sound: Johanna Herr, Karin Michalski. Sound design: Rashad Becker. Set Photography: Andrea Thal. Make Up: Tan Nguyen. DP Assistant: Tim Ottenstein

Meg Stuart The Only Possible City
Video, 2008 (German premiere)
“The face is at once the irreparable being-exposed of humans and the very opening in which they hide and stay hidden. The face is the only location of community, the only possible city. (Giorgio Agamben)

In 2008, Meg Stuart was invited to Manifesta7. She came to Bolzano to work with a small crew on the second floor of the Allumix Building. The aim: to shoot a video. Time foreseen: six days of work. The face-to-face videos of Vito Acconci came to mind, time capsules of compressed presence revolving around simple actions and relational axes. “I think of images as excavation sites. To vacillate between the simplest of gestures, working the trace suspended in repetition, the face: the prime canvas. The close-up as a means to hone the optical unconscious and involuntary memories of everyday behavior, singular and collective, manufactured and fractured at the same time. What’s in the timing of things? Every work is made under the specifics of a time regime. To choreograph is to come to terms with that regime. To dance is to traverse it. Face it.”

Concept and Performance: Meg Stuart. Photography and Editing: Jorge Léon & Aliocha Van der Avoort. A Raqs Media Collective and Damaged Goods production commissioned by MANIFESTA 7

Penelope Wehrli House of Snow
Real time generated video and sound installation 2013/14
A video of a bee colony on a honeycomb. Three texts on natural history by Stanisław Lem, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Maurice Maeterlinck on the transformation and origin of different temporal processes. Sound material is from ‘my gait’, a long term study about the artist katrinem’s own pace of walking in the city. The sequence of sound and text is triggered by the movements of the bees.

A piece about perception and time and the process of reading and understanding.
A small homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller.

Concept, text and video: Penelope Wehrli. System architecture and implementation: Joa Glasstetter. Sonarisation and sound material: katrinem. Supported by TESLA Berlin e.V.

Bjørn Melhus MAESTRA
Video, 3’00 min., loop, (2009/2014)
A hooded rider heavily armed with high-tech weapons sits on a traditional Mexican saddle on a horse which seems to be dancing to folk sounds. The interplay between rider and horse seems at times choreographed, at times uncoordinated.

Maestra, the name of the Mexican horse, means ‘Mistress’ or ‘Teacher’ and one asks oneself who is holding the reins in this piece. The video MAESTRA is from yet to be released material from the production HECHO EN MEXICO (2009) which references Mexican narco-culture and militarisation of the country.

Concept and realisation: Bjørn Melhus