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19/2/2007

Special event

Goethe-Institut, Montreal

Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller Present their Works

To celebrate the recent awarding of the German Film Prize in Gold for Best Short Film (2006) for Kristall, the Goethe-Institut presents two evenings of films by Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller. This acclaimed duo belong to the most successful and important video/film artists working in Germany today. They have shown extensively at national and international exhibitions and film festivals for well over a decade and have won numerous awards for their individual and collective works. The Goethe-Institut, which welcomed Matthias Müller in 2000, is pleased to welcome both to Montréal to present their works and talk with the public.

Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller first met in the 1990s when they both studied at the Braunschweig School of Visual Arts under reknowned experimental filmmaker Birgit Hein. They have made a total of 7 collaborative works, the first of which was Phoenix Tapes in 1999, a commissioned work for the exhibition "Notorious - Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art" in Oxford. This work was invited to many international film festivals, among them Venice and Cannes, and was also awarded the German Film Critics’ Prize in 1999. Their second piece of collaborative work, Manual (2001-2002) went on to win the main prize of the German competition at the 49th International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, one of the most important short film festivals in the world. Their most recent collaboration, Kristall, won the Canal Plus Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 and the Best Short Film Prize in the section "Semaine de la critique", as well as the German Film Prize in Gold for Best Short Film.

By thematically reediting footage of classic Hollywood films, television series and commercials, the artists create short films which are serially structured catalogues of motifs and gestures, out of which emerges "a direct and hypnotic form" (Christoph Girardet). However, Müller and Girardet also create more autobiographical films like Beacon (2002) and Vacancy (1998), where found footage is used allegorically, and combined into collages with their own material and texts, to reflect on dreams and memory, space and time, architecture and human beings, and on the material of film itself.

Christoph Girardet’s artistic work consists mostly of video installations. In 2000 he received a grant from the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York and in 2004 a scholarship to the German Academy’s Villa Massimo in Rome. He lives and works in Hannover.

Matthias Müller has been presented at numerous international film festivals, such as Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam and Berlin. Important art exhibitions like documenta X and the Manifesta 3, and museums, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Louvre in Paris, have also shown Müller's work.

February 20 - 21, 2007

Goethe-Institut
418, rue Sherbrooke Est - Montreal
Admission : 7 $; 6 $ Étudiants, Gratuit pour Les Amis de Goethe
Hours: 7 pm

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