Ortsbezogene Kunst: Statement

Based on archival documents from the photo-collection of Austrian Film Museum I will challenge the question in how far FILM as an event, hence as an experience can be traced/documented/re-animated outside the darkness of the cinema. Through pairwise comparison of singular artifacts in various medias, correspondences and oppositions might shed light of what - and in which fashion - can be reflected and illuminate the state of mind from the past. And equally important, which questions they might still conceal.
Since the founding of the Austrian Film Museum in 1964 the exhibitions of this institution take place on the screen. Which make it two regular exhibitions an evening. Never the less not only film reels and technical devices, which both determine the cornerstones of the dispositive have been collected and preserved, but also the original framework of these fleeting pictures. They tell us through which perspective a film has been conceived, produced, exploited, and received thus presenting a wide array of context and subtext of what was to be communicated. Understandably every part of it is a translation of the filmic event, we’ll have a closer look on how these transpositions can work out in the visual field. Various articulations of archival elements will speak not only if they associate to the high or low in culture at a specific time, but how the look on them constantly transforms. The art of the film-still and their reproduction techniques will not only determine their ingenuity, but also towards which public they try to address.
The proposed items will stretch through more than a century, spanning a cross section from the pre-cinematic to the cinema d’auteur.
It might be that the core value of an artefact lies in the questions it will intrigue in the future.

One can talk about movies that others made or decide to talk what looking at them induces in oneself. (Robert Bresson)