Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller
16 Jun - 29 Jul 2011
© Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller
Contre-jour, 2009
Box that includes and HD master for exhibition (no titles, color, sound, looped) and a 35mm film (with titles, color, Dolby SR)
1:1,85 10'40''
Contre-jour, 2009
Box that includes and HD master for exhibition (no titles, color, sound, looped) and a 35mm film (with titles, color, Dolby SR)
1:1,85 10'40''
CHRISTOPH GIRARDET & MATTHIAS MÜLLER
Contre-jour
16 June - 29 July, 2011
In their show Contre-jour at Distrito 4, German artists Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller focus on aspects of visual perception – and it’s opposite: blindness.
Girardet and Müller have been successfully collaborating since their found footage work Phoenix Tapes, a high-profile contribution to Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Their work has been screened at the festivals of Cannes, Venice and Berlin and exhibited at major art institutions worldwide, such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.
The centerpiece of their Madrid show is a video installation entitled Contre-jour (2009).
This work, already awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival, is an audiovisual composition consequently defying convention and expectation.
This is how art critic Kristina Tieke describes this work: "The look with which we comprehend the world and which it casts back at us in response breaks up in Contre-jour into disquieting fragments. Blurs, flashes and stroboscope montages disintegrate reality into shadowy images that inflict pain on the eye. A spot light precisely cuts the individual out of the darkness. ‘I wish you could see what I see‘ remains futile hope. Blind spots gap between self-perception and the perception of others."
The central character of Contre-jour is the eye, "as a physiological perception of shape, space, colour, light, dark. As the source and reflection of what sight doesn’t see. As a fragment of a body condemned to remain in the shade. As a substitute for a tactile relationship with the world. As a glance, a sexual impulse, the fixing of desire. Turning the eye on itself means fragmenting the world, dislocating its forms, extinguishing consciousness." (Yann Lardeau, Cinéma du Réel / Centre Pompidou, 2010)
Contre-jour corresponds with Girardet and Müller's more recent video collage Maybe Siam. Spinning a dense net of references, this work is as image-rich as it is an exercise in denial: like an eye that cannot see, black separates the images of film clips that show blind people taking on the limits of their condition, bumping into walls and furniture as though imprisoned in hostile and unnatural environments. "Let me be the lamp that glows before you in the night!"
In his work Talking to Delilah (1998) Girardet transforms a dialogue from a Cecile B. deMille movie into a glaring LED installation.
The artists' interest in degrees of blindness can also be witnessed in their recent photo works.
If I Don't See, for example, is the translation of a philosophical aphorism into braille by means of film stills of reading hands of blind people. Eye is a five-part-series of spotlights in different states of luminosity that strangely resemble the pupil of the human eye.
These works are accompanied by photographic representations of ephemeral phenomena such as fume (Smoke, M. Müller, 2004) and lightning (Seven Strokes, C. Girardet, 2008).
Contre-jour
16 June - 29 July, 2011
In their show Contre-jour at Distrito 4, German artists Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller focus on aspects of visual perception – and it’s opposite: blindness.
Girardet and Müller have been successfully collaborating since their found footage work Phoenix Tapes, a high-profile contribution to Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Their work has been screened at the festivals of Cannes, Venice and Berlin and exhibited at major art institutions worldwide, such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.
The centerpiece of their Madrid show is a video installation entitled Contre-jour (2009).
This work, already awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival, is an audiovisual composition consequently defying convention and expectation.
This is how art critic Kristina Tieke describes this work: "The look with which we comprehend the world and which it casts back at us in response breaks up in Contre-jour into disquieting fragments. Blurs, flashes and stroboscope montages disintegrate reality into shadowy images that inflict pain on the eye. A spot light precisely cuts the individual out of the darkness. ‘I wish you could see what I see‘ remains futile hope. Blind spots gap between self-perception and the perception of others."
The central character of Contre-jour is the eye, "as a physiological perception of shape, space, colour, light, dark. As the source and reflection of what sight doesn’t see. As a fragment of a body condemned to remain in the shade. As a substitute for a tactile relationship with the world. As a glance, a sexual impulse, the fixing of desire. Turning the eye on itself means fragmenting the world, dislocating its forms, extinguishing consciousness." (Yann Lardeau, Cinéma du Réel / Centre Pompidou, 2010)
Contre-jour corresponds with Girardet and Müller's more recent video collage Maybe Siam. Spinning a dense net of references, this work is as image-rich as it is an exercise in denial: like an eye that cannot see, black separates the images of film clips that show blind people taking on the limits of their condition, bumping into walls and furniture as though imprisoned in hostile and unnatural environments. "Let me be the lamp that glows before you in the night!"
In his work Talking to Delilah (1998) Girardet transforms a dialogue from a Cecile B. deMille movie into a glaring LED installation.
The artists' interest in degrees of blindness can also be witnessed in their recent photo works.
If I Don't See, for example, is the translation of a philosophical aphorism into braille by means of film stills of reading hands of blind people. Eye is a five-part-series of spotlights in different states of luminosity that strangely resemble the pupil of the human eye.
These works are accompanied by photographic representations of ephemeral phenomena such as fume (Smoke, M. Müller, 2004) and lightning (Seven Strokes, C. Girardet, 2008).