Galerie Campagne Premiere
Berlin
Chausseestrasse 116
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Christoph Girardet & Matthias Muller
dal 30/4/2014 al 13/6/2014

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Galerie Campagne Premiere



 
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30/4/2014

Christoph Girardet & Matthias Muller

Galerie Campagne Premiere, Berlin

Cut. The artists both work autonomously across film, video art and photography. Now their recent cinematographic and photographic work - whose focus revolves around Found Footage - are presented in a joint exhibition.


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Christoph Girardet (1966) and Matthias Müller (1961) both work autonomously across film, video art and photography. Whereas Christoph Girardet mostly uses visually reduced materials in his work, which acquire new levels of meaning through intensive processing, Matthias Müller frequently traces new and autobiographical themes, using both his own and foreign materials. Since 1999, the two artists have been building up a joint body of work, whose focus revolves around Found Footage. For the first time at Campagne Première, their recent cinematographic and photographic work will be presented in a joint exhibition.

Their video loop “Cut” (2013) ties the phantasmagorical idea of the fully transparent, controllable and infinitely malleable body to the notion of corporeality as a wound that can never heal. The work uses images from movies that idealise the human body as practically indestructible and highly mutable as well as being the cause of pain, anxiety, hysteria and delusion.
The concept of the body that can be formed and disciplined is juxtaposed with a physique that is fragile and vulnerable to danger, one that terrifies, ages and dies. “The bodies that spring from Girardet and Müller’s cutting board have lost their sharp outlines, instead becoming what Deleuze calles “anorganic bodies” – decentralised bodies that have been stripped from their organisation and have turned into “zones of indiscernibility” in which various persons blend into one another, and where technology seamlessly merges into body parts and vice-versa … a wholly new corporeal sense arises from the images and transfers itself onto the stunned viewer, who has no choice but to be overwhelmed by these unfamiliar sensations.” (Johannes Binotto)

The dual slide-projection “Everything Not Said” (2014) also traces the boundaries between the body’s interior and exterior. A large collection of single frames showing bandaged heads was compiled from movies, newly arranged and paired with extracts from psychiatric health questionnaires. Caught between transparency and opacity; vulnerability and one’s armour against it; individuality and anonymity, the faces condense into a panopticon of voyeurs under observation.

In the dual light box “Crime Scene” (2013), the artists change the sequence in four events of cinematic action. With their intervention, the artists obstruct what the movie seeks to represent through its re-enactment of forensic investigation, namely: evidence and factuality.
Similarly, looking at the photographic work “Eye” (2010), it is unclear whether we can trust our own eyes: do we see cause or effect; a spotlight’s five stages between being illuminated and extinguished or do we see a pupil opening and contracting?
„One is unaware of the process as it is happening,” these ten words – derived from a sentence on a theory of language acquisition – have been assigned to the fingers belonging to a patient’s both hands, in the video-loop Reflex (2013). Through a clinical trigger-response-test, a doctor presses onto the fingertips in various sequences, thus evoking the words. Whereas these words then appear correctly in the images, the person under examination speaks the binary opposite of the word they are typing out loud.

Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s work has been widely exhibited at international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, New York and Oberhausen and at major institutions such as, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Bozar – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Tate Modern, London, and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Girardet and Müller have been honoured with major awards, amongst which are the German Film Critics Association’s Prize (1999), the Marler Video Art Award (2004), the Prix Canal+ du Meilleur court métrage at the Cannes Film Festival as well as the Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis (2006), and the Arte Short Film Prize (2012). The central piece of the artists’ exhibition at Campagne Première, “Cut”, was nominated for the European Film Award 2013. After their retrospective solo show “Tell Me What You See” at Kunstverein Hannover (2014), the artists’ work is currently on exhibition at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow and at the Videokunstzentrum Nordstern, Gelsenkirchen. A comprehensive publication on Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s work has recently been published by the Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg.

Image: Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Everything Not Said (workprints), 2014. Courtesy Campagne Première Berlin.

For more information, please contact the gallery at gallery@campagne-premiere.com

OPENING PREVIEW ON THURSDAY 1 MAY, 6-9PM

Galerie Campagne Première Berlin
Chausseestrasse 116 D-10115 Berlin
Hours:
Tuesday–Saturday 11–6pm
During GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN, 2 – 4 May,
the gallery remains open from 11 am to 7pm.

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Karen Mirza & Brad Butler
dal 1/5/2015 al 26/6/2015

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