PLAY pt 1

The Rehearsal /
of William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream

2018 / Single channel video / 16:9 / colour / 2:08 min

PLAY pt 2

L’absence est présente (prototype version)

2018 / Single channel video / 16:9 / b+w / 2:03 min

The 2 video works PLAY pt 1. The Rehearsal and PLAY pt 2. L’absence est présente negotiate the philosophical aspect of absence and how it comes into presence by artistic interpretation, particularly by staging a play or a film. Both works question how absence can be glimpsed or displayed.
A play has specific structures and rules. Inbetween those structures — in the interplay of repetition — we can glimpse absence. In this flickering between presence and absence a space unfolds which enables the emergence of poiesis in a hermeneutic sense.
In my artistic practice I examine structures, mechanics and mechanisms of art and image production itself, mainly the frame conditions and production processes. In this context for me the central aspect is the rehearsal as basic element of the realisation of (mostly) text interpretations with their relevant issues and decision-making processes regarding possible forms of staging.
The artistic rehearsal is repeatable. This repeatability is enabled by the repeatability of once present experience in and by remembering — in the play the absent is always revealed and negotiated: the absence of death, of endlessness in the repeated or repeatable imagination (idea/eidos) or in our memory.
The video PLAY pt 1. The Rehearsal shows the staging of a text source and refers to one of the great narrations in the history of theatre in its subtitle. Here the organic-mechanic principle of repetition is replaced by the technical loop.
In PLAY pt 2. L’absence est présente a puzzle, after being put together, displays the text “L’absence est presente”. It’s the playful attempt to make the absent, the still invisible, the non-perceptible present by the generation of text.

PLAY pt 1. The Rehearsal / of William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream + PLAY pt 2. L’absence est présente were realised in the frame of ORTung Hintersee 2018.

Chorprobe / Choir Practice

2017 / Single channel video / 16:9 / colour / sound / 2:41 min

In the frame of the residency project Was Anderes? I conceived a small piece for a choir. The reenactment of this choir practice was both choreography and social interaction as well as performance
and rehearsal. This scenic fragment was the attempt to connect and combine our various approaches responding to the introducing question in a playful performative way, addressing communality, community and the collective itself. We performed and filmed the reenactment on site in Vairano. The result is the film fragment Chorprobe.

Facing the current populist developments in Western politics and society, it seemed to be useful and relevant to examine and revise popular and established terms in relation to their social and philosophical meaning. In order to grasp the notions of our time, we wanted to dispute these developments from an artistic perspective.
In an experimental setting, by collecting and developing methods of re-appropriating, re-connecting, re-understanding and embodying terms we investigated the experience of meaning of (socio)political terms.
Despite our diverse, individual ways of investigating and questioning
we were collectively and continuously collaborating on instructions for an appropriate choreography within our social frame and on the depictions of personal strategies of social (inter)action. We were consistently searching, creating and collecting notions, vocabulary and ideas for our adaptive alphabet using new possibilities of perception, connotation, contextualisation and interpretation. An essential experimental stage of our reflections and investigations was learning and understanding by doing or acting: by taking action technical or social processes can be reconstructed, tracked or reenacted.

Zusammen (:) was anderes (!)
After 4 weeks of searching, collecting, comprehending and developing a new vocabulary, (self) investigations and developments of action strategies, we would be able to start the filling our abédédaire – C for Choir, Z for Zusammen, …

The Sasso residency collective in July/August 2017 consisted of performer Nicolas Galeazzi, artist Maia Gusberti, graphic designer Miriam Hempel, typographer and graphic designer Nik Thoenen and Michaela Schwentner.

Personne

2016 / Single or multi-channel video installation / 1,85:1 or 16:9 / colour / sound / 9:40 min

This short film is a miniature about gazes and perception,
about the experience of observing and being observed.
The film consists of just one long, tableau-like shot including
a quarter circle pan shot. The narrative structure's vagueness suspends and questions the boundaries of reality and illusion.
What do we see, when we look? What do we see, when we watch? What do we learn, what do we know then?
Can we rely on our perception, since it is just a partial aspect, one perspective of reality?
The vague and intimate staging creates a surreal, oneiric atmosphere accompanied by a mysterious effect which generates a confusing feeling – we are exposed to the act of observing and thus forced to be voyeurs.

The film is a kind of a "gestell" – a framework for reflections
on the essentials and mechanics of film as well as on film production itself. In this sense, the make up scene reveals the actress's transformation into the film figure. Thus, it also refers to Eleanor Antin's video performance Representational Painting from 1971 in which the act of putting on make-up as a traditional mode of self-expression was explored and staged, amplifying the observational aspect.
Also, connections to Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock are at hand when it comes to the concept of the figure(s): both figure and idea refer to Bergman’s Persona on the level of the internal conception, on the level of external conception to Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

In the multi-channel installation Personne permanente 4-8 selected takes, depending on the spatial situation, are arranged in a parallel and synchronised way — with their subtle variations and congruent moments — and held together with the soundtrack of two of these takes. Thus, the film making itself as well as the performative act becomes the narrative: we can understand the chronologic process of the creation of this cinematic action image. By this, the work is questioned concerning the role and the claim of truth of the images: Is each take a real take or possibly just a rehearsing part? Is the rehearsal staged or is it real? In this iterative process of repeating and rehearsing, will there be one particular take that is most convincing? Are all takes equal? Which criteria are therefore crucial?

Standbild / Immeuble

2016 / Installation / 16:9 / colour / multi-channel sound / 5:00 min, loop

Standbild / Immeuble is a time-wise condensend and spatialised version of the cinematic miniature Personne. A partial scene is transformed into an image, condensed to a kind of film still and at the same time temporally expanded.
The image shows nothing but two women standing at opposite windows watching each other through their binoculars.
These women are kind of lookalikes — one we can see from inside (an apartment), the other one is visible only from the outside, we can only see her upper body parts. Beyond that, her face is covered by the binoculars.
Is this a mirrored image? Is it one woman confronted with an image of an earlier herself, is it a kind of flashback? Are they two different women? Why are they looking at each other so persistently?
There is a kind of desire pervading the situation, the image — still it‘s not clear what kind of desire it is. This uncertain feeling of some hidden desire or emotion is even more emphasised by an architectonic eversion of the projection which suspends the solidity and the original statement of the image: it seems to diverge by the specific spatial setup of the projection (the image is projected onto two panels leaning in the corner of a space leaving a gap where they overlap).

Reorient.manifest

2016 / Multi-channel video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 4:00 min

A model for a film. The set design is an assemblage
of several small scenes.
The scenery includes some rather iconic images which refer to a sophisticated Europe and its highly developed state of civilisation with its democratic, political and critical consciousness.
Since it is to be feared that Europe is going to
abandon its cultural standards, we as European citizens have to question this so-called system of values and even a lot more of our ideas.
This model film is supposed to be transformed into
a musical performance with 2 chorus ensembles interpreting the dialogues.

Figures
(Women Under Influence)

2016 / Photographic series / Pigmented inkjet prints / variable sizes

The cinematic (action) image as a spatial object, providing a new perception and interpretation.
Cinematic images of iconic films featuring modern women under a certain kind of influence, though,
are transferred into sculptures created of working and household tools.
By this transference and the shifting of frames reflections on aspects of work and conditions of artistic working processes may be initiated.
The sculptures are named after the main female characters of these particular films:
Camille (Le mépris, J.-L. Godard, 1963), Myrtle (Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1977), Martha (Martha, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974), Catherine (Jules et Jim, François Truffaut, 1962) and Giuliana
(Il deserto rosso, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964).

Fra(g)me(nt)s Of Camille

2016 / Single channel video / 16:9 / colour / 30 sec

The fragmentation of the digital reproduction of Camille from the series Figures resulted in the Fine Art Print Fragments of Camille and in the video work Frames of Camille.

Speed Of Life

2016 / Single channel video / 16:9 / colour / sound / 4 min

Contribution to the artistic research project Dizziness -
A Resource, a cooperation of the Institute for Differential Psychology of Karl-Franzens-University Graz, FWF PEEK, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Kunsthaus Graz.

The work won the 3rd place of the competition

The Shooting (in progress)

2015-2016 / Multi-channel video installation

Two sprinklers are "shooting" at each other with
black-coloured liquid.
The installation refers to a film dialogue.

Playing Martha (Augarten version)

Performance + multichannel video installation / colour / appr. 10 min

Fragmentary reenactment of the 720º scene from
Martha by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
The renowned camera shot is transformed into
an installative performance with 4-6 performers and
their particular interpretation and enactment of
Martha, actually their individual mode of slipping
into a role by putting on the figure's costume.

IMAfiction portrait #08 Electric Indigo

2015 / Single channel video / 16:9 / colour / sound / 22:00 min

Video portrait of electronic music dj and composer
Electric Indigo.
Camera: Andreas Gockel, Michaela Schwentner.
Commissioned by IMA Institute of Media Archeology.

Descending A Staircase / In Shifts

2015 / Performance + video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 33:36 minutes

A woman in a yellow bathrobe is descending a staircase - over and over again.
This image of action refers to the film scene from Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963).
The main "character" is in fact the significant prop of the scene, the yellow bathrobe.
The scene is performed by 3 different performers over the course of a day.
The piece is at the same time the reenactment of a film shooting, and hence the
reenactment of Camille's role, a reenactment of an actress' work, a reenactment of
Brigitte Bardot's performance and furthermore a demonstration of variations of acting.
It is the reenactment of the work of an actress, a spatial intervention, a performance,
the actual work of the performers and the video installation in public space.

Descending A Staircase / In Shifts was commissioned for Festival der Regionen 2015,
Ebensee (A).

Installation: Festival der Regionen 2015

Penelope /
In The Scenery /
Reflecting /
Relations
A Theoretical Comedy.

2013-2015 / Single channel video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 18:45 min

The film shows two women sitting in the scenery of a theatre or in the backdrop of a film set. It is not clear whether these two figures are already acting or whether they are waiting for their scene, trying to kill time by telling stories and reflecting on film-immanent matters.
Are they outside their role, outside the film set or are they acting in a film which is about two women playing in a play or a film, waiting for their scene and telling stories which (seemingly) have nothing to do with th situation they are in? Are they rehearsing?
Repeatedly text inserts are displayed which show stage directions but also questions addressing the lead figure Penelope, asked by an invisible audience or other film figures as well as her reactions on them.
Some scenes are repeated several times, but still it is not a rehearsal, but instead a film that uses montage of image and sound to transfer figures from one context into another or a new one and by that question the previous one and furthermore question the production per se and its aesthetic realisation.

This short film is about the story of Penelope, though a contem-
porary and emancipated model of this fictive figure. To create
her story Penelope is on one hand knotting and interweaving fragments of her story, of stories, on the other hand she is reflecting on film-immanent matters also by reenacting several (iconic) film scenes.
Fragments of stories are interlinked and interwoven to assem-
blages. These fragmented and re-arranged narrative threads which refer to different contexts create a new narration-image. The level of narrative partly follows the principle of the mise en abîme. The formal level also follows this principle and consists
of fragmented images and reflections. The reflection on narration itself and on projection has its equivalent on the formal level in the sense of mirroring.

Screenings: Diagonale Graz 2014, Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz 2014, Cairo Video Festival 2014;
Part of the Les Rencontres Internationales vidéothèque Paris

The Content (in progress)

2015 / Single channel sound installation / 10 min

In this work the technical content of a film is described by voice-over. There are no images, only black frames.

A Contest

2013-2016 / Single channel video / 16:9 / colour / sound / 4:45 min

This short film essay is both cinematic reconstruction and staging
and refers to a pop-cultural moment of 20th century history.
I was interested in the intersection of historic moments and aesthetical practices and in the examination of our relationship to collective historic and visual experience.
In a sequence of about five minutes A Contest shows two young female performers in a gymnastic performance situation.
The minimalistic setting of the scene filmed in a real but still staged studio unfolds in static shots and shows the performers primarily in long shots by considering the symmetry of the image.
The performers movements equal real practising movements of figures skaters, still the reduced image composition lets the choreography appear somehow artificial.
The formal aesthetic approach to the historic event which is grounded in the collective memory and visual archive on one hand and to the presentation of subjective experience on the other hand result in a stylised image which is supposed to merge into a timeless form. It was not my intention though, to dissolve the historic event in the aesthetic, but to objectify it by reducing all narrative moments.
The negotiated historic event was a spectacular case in the history of US-American figure skating: during a decider preparation for a championship one of two rivals was attacked and incapacitated; the other athlete got linked with the attack and was subsequently suspended from all further championships.

Screening: Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz 2015

A STONE,
A WORD
ACTIVATED
BY

ABDUL SHARIF BARUWA // EVA BODNAR // HERBERT DE COLLE // PLAMEN DEJANOFF // HEINRICH DUNST // MARINA FAUST // VERONIKA HAUER // GERHARD HIMMER // SIGGI HOFER // NICOLAS JASMIN // DANIEL KNORR // ELKE SILVIA KRYSTUFEK // SONIA LEIMER // JOHANN LURF // CHRISTIAN MAYER // ALBERT MAYR //JOSH MÜLLER // MICHAEL PART // ELISABETH PENKER // ROMAN PFEFFER // JOSEF RAMASEDER // BERNHARD RAPPOLD // FRANZ SCHUBERT // CONSTANZE SCHWEIGER // MICHAELA SCHWENTNER // AXEL STOCKBURGER // CHRISTIAN STOCK

2014 / Frottage
3x live frottage Blickle Raum Vienna 2014

re-PARADISE /
reconstruction of botanical archives
by reenacting representative complexities
in history

2014-2016 / Pigmented inkjet prints + Baryt prints / Series of 7 images / different sizes

What is paradise?
A state.
A place.
A garden.
A greenhouse.
A gift.
A souvenir.
Loot.
Colonised and
Uprooted.


This photographic work is a derivative of one of my previous film projects Prospects: Images of plants in botanical gardens and parks in the Mediterranean. While for that film I was mainly interested in the garden as a manifestation of paradise, for this work it was the plants themselves — in their appearance as mute witnesses of political conquest.

The prefix re- in the work title refers to the reconstruction of an image, to the technical reproduction of the photographic material and on the other hand it’s associated with reparation which refers to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.

All depicted plants (monstera deliciosa, ficus elastica, dypsis lutescens, livistona rotundifolia, banana) originate from regions which have been colonised and exploited. Thus, among others these plants found their ways to botanical gardens for educational reasons and to our living spaces for decorative purposes.
Conflicts from the past can’t be rectified ex post facto, but our approach to history can be changed by awareness-raising. Since the plants are part of the barbaric European history of colonisation, the photographs are black and white.

The pictures of the assembled plants in botanical gardens and parks, mostly from the Mediterranen were printed, copied, rearranged with indoor plants from my studio and photographed again. The result are highly condensed and at the same time spatialised photographs in which the substantial relation between the historical and the contemporary is intensified by technical re-production.

re-PARADISE /
reconstructinig archives
by rendering representative complexities
into moments of desire

2018 / B/W prints / 17 images / different sizes / transmission oil

In this installation photographed content of botanical archives is transferred into actual context. In addition to digital b/w prints "archived" techniques, technologies and materials are used, like transmission oil, a petroleum distillate, as well as developing trays.
Oil seals material and timeliness like film. Film, the coat, transparent and impermeable like varnish, fixates and secures a painting, carries and transports (moving) images - film.
The pictures which were made in botanical gardens refer - like a botanical garden itself - to something absent or past: plants as witnesses of colonial conquest, diplomatic, political, representative strategies.
The aspiration to fill a gap, to turn the significate into the sign itself, to manifest the referential; to fulfil the desire for transferring the absent or the past into something representative shifted, is the idea of this poetic-technical arrangement.
Representative complexities create projection spaces and consist of superpositions, layerings, fragmentations and ambiguities in a social, historic, theoretic or interpretative sense. The assembled images in the exhibition are layered shots, originally taken in various botanical archives, which want to create a space of longing in this specific display.

This version of re-PARADISE / was installed at Vienna based offspace ANNA in September 2018.

In The Remaking
— After Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (in progress)

In The Remaking is a film essay reflecting the process of film making and its mechanisms.
Reenacting the making of the film, this work demonstrates my ongoing examination of personal and historic (collective) memory and the transformation of the mechanics of film into a work with poetic potential.

Un divertissement d'amour

2012 / Video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 11 min

This film is a kind of rearrangement of Plato's Symposion based on philosophic essays
on love and it is also inspired by the Surrealists' Recherches sur la sexualité.
The film structure refers specifically to Sergej
M. Eisenstein's definition of the mise en cadre and concentrates precisely on the possibilities
of revealing or hiding substantial film-immanent information.

Screenings: Diagonale Graz 2013, Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz 2013, school, Vienna 2013, Cairo Video Festival 2014

Watch excerpt on vimeo.

26 Days

2012 / Multi-channel video installation / 16:9 / colour / 1 min

This work was created during my residency at a remote place near Rome. It emerged from the situation I was in there for the period of one month. The work was a general examination of time and transience.

Installation: imPORT, Studio PORT, Vienna 2012

Überraschungsei
(In Theory And Practice)

2012 / Installation + performance / Tank tops, zips, fabrics, belts, cords

Bag or dress?
Bag or raincoat ... ?
Content as surprise!
Wearing or carrying!
Brand carrier, a status symbol
Instrument of social positioning.
Multifunctional object
Transporter of social messages.
A kind of Blödmaschine*
*© Markus Metz and Georg Seeßlen

Presentation performance at Reheat Festival, Nickelsdorf 2012

BILLBOARD / prospects modifiés

2012 / Multi-channel video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 8 min

Modified version of the experimental documentary
Prospects (2011). The term prospect is used in a more
condensed way, in the way of a promise, in the way
travel agencies use it for their holiday offers.
For this work interviews from the documentary have
been reduced to simple but catchy slogans.

Installation: RHIZ SCREENS, rhiz, Vienna 2012

Prospects / split

2011 / Single or multi-channel video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 32 min

A film essay about women in the Mediterranean who
talk about their ideas of paradise / Utopia.
It consists of interviews with women from this area and images of "paradisiac" places like public parks, private gardens, botanic gardens.
The video is an assemblage of these images and the interviews and it is accompanied by field recordings and subtle sound pieces which have been composed particularly for this work.

Installation: GRENZWELTEN / LEERE LINIEN, Kulturbrücke Fratres 2013

La route du paradis

2011 / Fixing pins on cardboard, framed. 34 cm x 22 cm

Side project of Prospects.
The map of fixing pins shows the cities
in the Mediterranean area I visited for my research and interview work.

SAUNA, brut Konzerthaus, Vienna 2010

It Will All Be Differerent

2011 / Text on memo-cube 11 cm x 11 cm and less

Error correction by repetition?
Or realisation by repetition?
Can a wish become true if you repeatedly write it down some hundred times?

AFFENARBEIT, Area53, Vienna 2011

Des souvenirs vagues

2009 / Multi-channel video installation / 16:9 / colour / sound / 8 min
Sound: Michaela Schwentner

Des souvenirs vagues is a short film essay about visual memories and their repetitions, shifts and refractions and about desire.
Even the choice of the film material and aesthetics is an utterance of desire: the seemingly analog film aesthetics has been created digitally. In this way it corresponds to desire as a longing for past times with the only existence of analog film.
It’s also a poetic reference, a blank which senses desire, which refers to an unknown, an unpronounceable desire.
The film's main elements are vaguely remembered, kind of stereotyped scenes en miniature - they could be from a film, but also someone's personal memories or desires.
Like in many of my works this film negotiates (re)construc-
tions of female role models, depictions and images of women which are formed by the absence of the body and by almost pure reflection. In this way, only traces or fragments of actions or the body are perceptible.

Screenings (selection): Triennale 1.0 Linz 2010, Diagonale Graz 2009, Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz 2009,
B3 Biennial of the Moving Image Frankfurt/Main 2017

Watch excerpt on vimeo

Alpine Passage

2008 / Multi-channel video installation / 4:3 / colour / sound / 6 min
Sound: Michaela Schwentner

Alpine Passage is a film comprising individual images about a journey across the Swiss and Austrian Alps.
The mountains, impressive as a painting, and in front
of them a sort of architecture that enables either a panoramic or a close view.

Screenings (selection): Diagonale Graz 2009, Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz 2009,
BREAKING GROUND tour programme

Watch excerpt on vimeo

Grossglockner

2008 / C-print 40 x 50 cm

Ridin'

2008 / video / 4:3 / colour / sound / 5 min
Sound: Irradiation

Tribute to female:pressure DVD.
Presentation at MAK Vienna 2008

Bellevue

2007 / Single channel video installation / 4:3 / colour / sound / 9 min
Sound: Michaela Schwentner

Snow, fog, clouds and in the midst of it all, a barely per-
ceptible massif. Or, better yet, a white noise from which contours gradually emerge and just as steadily dissolve back into: As though ghost lights in the digital image-fog that dominates the expanse of this composition.
A mountain peak, only vaguely discernible for the longest time, that halfway disappears again the moment it appears.
The starting material for Bellevue are webcam recordings from Grossglockner that she collected for months and condensed into a nine-minute time image.
Schwentner's method benefits from the rigid takes, mainly because within them, the interplay of appearing and eluding, of revealing and concealing, can develop the greatest possible effect. Thus, the figure of the mountain uncovers and covers itself in a constant, modulating movement: ridges and slopes peel from the whiteness of the surroundings, to then immediately vanish again within it.
Accompanied by a subtle ambient-like rustle, which Schwentner gathered from the direct transformation of the image into sound data, the vision continually clears up and becomes disarranged. As though the mountain, seen and photographed millions of times, does not want to disclose its identity so simply; yes, as though the apparently banal weather panorama recordings harbor a key of sorts to the disappearance of the supposedly most unchangeable natural things.
The beautiful view is fundamentally blurred as a result of Bellevue. Not by things incidentally blocking it, such as snow, fog, or clouds, but by a basic instability in the process of (electronic) seeing itself. The more persistently it pursues the phenomena, the more they keep themselves covered from time to time. (Christian Höller)

Exhibitions (selection): ALPINE DESIRE, ACF New York 2011; LANDS END, Shedhalle Zurich 2010; LANDSCAPE 2.0, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg 2009; SCREENING TERRITORIES / Field Textures, Transmediale Berlin 2009