141 | 2018

TOMÁŠ POSPISZYL

Eva Koťátková: Über Verdauungsmechanismen

The spectator enters a giant digestive tract, passes through its twists, and in a red twilight at its end watches a film. In it, children gathered in the school gym do various exercises: they draw, recite, learn about the inside of the human body, take part in a theater play. They are filling and stretching a symbolic stomach at the scene of a puppet show until there is no food left. Together, they are preparing the textile body of a giant snake so that it can swallow a symbolic mouse: the children themselves. Then they examine the bowels of the snake from the perspective of consumed food. For more exercise, the children take a trip to the countryside dominated by a giant landfill. The purpose of this metaphorical school play seems to be a common exploration of subjective anatomy, learning about the mechanism of digestion but also understanding the relationships between individual metabolism and Earth’s overall ecosystem, the cycle of its energy, and the environmental impact on the functioning of industrial civilization.
At first glance, Eva Koťátková’s exhibition “Stomach of the World” (2017) at Belvedere 21¹ did not go beyond her previous work: it was based on a sophisticated, even scenographic combination of objects, photo collages, and film which posed questions about the relationship between an individual and wider social rules. However, the comparison of “Stomach of the World” with her earlier works reveals continuity, but also shifts that allow a glimpse into the dynamics of her oeuvre.

¹ The exhibition running from 15.11.2017 – 18.2.2018 was dominated by a forty-six-minute-long film of the same title which premiered in the spring of 2017 at the Benaki Museum in Athens; thematically related works were also included in the exhibition “Diary of a Stomach” held in parallel at Meyer Riegger in Berlin.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 141/2018, pp. 9–20.

AVEEK SEN

Moyra Davey: Far from Hot Baths

“Life is a movie. Death is a photograph.”
Susan Sontag, introduction to Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death (1976, filmed by Moyra Davey in “Hujar/Palermo,” 2010)

Even when Moyra Davey’s films begin from a specific situation or event in her personal or familial life, as both “Hemlock Forest” (2016) and “Wedding Loop” (2017) do, I get the greatest pleasure from them when I think of myself not as a passive viewer, but as a “fellow-labourer,” as the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge liked to describe the ideal reader. I sit down with notebook and pen, and make a list of the quotations, references, and allusions that make up the layered texture of Davey’s films—the trail of books, essays, articles, and films that opens up from her work. I read and watch as many of these as I can, and then return to Davey’s films again and again. This sounds like—and is indeed—hard work. But it never feels like a pedantic or purely intellectual exercise. It keeps bringing me back to the core of what must remain difficult, unspoken, or unspeakable in the films. It also introduces me to, or makes me re-experience, these other writers, artists, and filmmakers—Mary Wollstonecraft, Chantal Akerman, Julia Margaret Cameron, Hervé Guibert, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Natalia Ginzburg, and Louise Bourgeois, to name a few—as integral to my gradually complicated understanding of Davey’s films. What deepens and widens in the process is not, or not just, the sum of my learning, but something more inscrutable: a restive intensity of living, thinking, and working that leads to a sharpening of my own perception of life and art.

The text was written on the occasion of the exhibiton “Moyra Davey: Portrait / Landscape“, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, 2017.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 141/2018, pp. 21–32.

AYŞE GÜLEÇ

Cana Bilir-Meier Movements Between Archives— Decolonizing Disciplines

“It is like when you write a dissertation: there are certain rules you have to apply; otherwise they won’t pass you. My whole struggle is to change the disciplines, to change the genres, to change how people look at a poem, at theory, or at children’s books … So I have to struggle between how many of these rules I can break and how I can still have readers read the book without getting frustrated.”¹

The passage by Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa that is quoted here indicates the efforts connected with “breaking rules” and transcending boundaries between disciplines. She notes that this process of decolonizing disciplines and genres changes one’s perspective, that it facilitates another way of seeing and reading and consequently allows for different ways of representing other people.
The passage, however, also makes it clear that such shifts go hand in hand with a change in one’s own cultural, cognitive, and emotional practices and politics. This reorientation postulates empathy as an active, complex, and interpretative practice, meaning that cognition and emotions are therefore linked² and that we see and perceive the person opposite. According to Sara Ahmed, it is “cultural policies” that align us with and in collectives.³ What happens, however, if we are confronted with recurring representations that lack empathy? In this context, might we speak of structures that distance us from an emotional-cognitive perspective and hence impede connections and solidarities and make them impossible?⁴

¹ Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera. The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012).
² Paul Hamburg, “Interpretation and Empathy: Reading Lacan with Kohut,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72 (1991), pp. 347–61.
³ Sara Ahmed, “Collective Feelings: Or, The Impressions Left by Others,” Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2) (2004), pp. 25–42, esp. p. 25.
⁴ Ayşe Güleç and Johanna Schaffer, “Empathie, Ignoranz und migrantisch situiertes Wissen,” in Juliane Karakayalı, Çağrı Kahvecı, Doris Liebscher, and Carl Melchers, eds., Den NSU-Komplex analysieren: Aktuelle Perspektiven aus der Wissenschaft (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017 (= Edition Politik 38)).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 141/2018, pp. 33–44.

KATHRIN SCHÖNEGG

Peter Miller: Postboxes are darkrooms too

Researchers search. They search for something that eludes them. A seductive and mysterious thing they can neither grasp nor formulate. Sometimes, when they’re working, they hit upon something unexpected, something they weren’t looking for but which, once it’s there, they strongly sense they’ve found. Research begins where the object of investigation alters the question posed.
Georges Didi-Huberman described this paradoxical connection between goal and chance as the “dual existence of all research.”¹ When the term “research” is replaced by “art,” the result offers a fairly precise image of Peter Miller’s working method. Born in Burlington, Vermont (US), in 1978, the artist has been living and working for more than a decade in German-speaking countries. Although Miller’s media are film and photography, he also makes installations and sculptures, undertakes interventions in space, and is often involved with performance art. Despite his wide range in form and material, the area his works address is thematically circumscribed: they research the history of the technological media and explore their basic components, such as chemistry and light, audience and the flicker effect, optics, and perspective.
Miller inquires into the nature of film and photography, without defining them ontologically. He rarely films or takes photographs in a classic sense. His interests are far from the narratives of Hollywood cinema and the representational realism of applied photography. Instead, the artist reduces the technical dispositive by subtracting the “obscure box”² of the camera and the lens. His film “Stained Glass” (2015), which was installed at the 57th Biennale di Venezia (2017), explores the conditions of seeing beyond the electrical signals of the retina.³

¹ Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Erscheinungen, disparat,” in Phasmes: Essays über Erscheinungen von Photographien, Spielzeug, mystischen Texten, Bildaus-
schnitten, Insekten, Tintenflecken, Traumerzählungen, Alltäglichkeiten, Skulpturen, Filmbildern (Cologne: DuMont, 2001), pp. 9–12, here p. 10.
² Hubert Damisch, “Fünf Anmerkungen zu einer Phänomenologie des photographischen Bildes” (1963), in Fixe Dynamik: Dimensionen des Photographischen (Berlin: diaphanes, 2004), pp. 7–12, here p. 9.
³ In this context, the artist is referring to Marcel Duchamp: “Where do we go from here?” (1961), in https://msu.edu/course/ha/850/Where_do_we_go_from_here.pdf, accessed January 25, 2018.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 141/2018, pp. 45–56.