nach/sichten Video works from the Goetz Collection

The exhibition presents a selection of current video installations from the collection owned by Ingvild Goetz in Munich, one of the most distinguished private collections of contemporary art worldwide. In recent years the fields of film and video have become a focal point within the Goetz Collection, a development which reflects the collector’s awareness of and fascination for the thematic relevance of media works. The selection of works to be shown at the exhibition mounted by the Edith Russ Site for Media Art comprises productions of recent years and, therefore, centres on a new generation of artists working in this medium and their approaches to investigating the impact made by the moving picture on how the world is perceived.

The works to be shown are linked by a common element: calling into question what might seem unequivocal. The pictorial worlds revealed are constructed and staged as spaces with possibilities. Not until the viewer has taken a second glance at them do the conceptual trial arrangements become apparent.

The works selected for the exhibition play with the viewer’s powers of perception. They operate with fragments of filmic language which are familiar to viewers from the cinema and television. Evoking mnemonic images and memory pictures, they refer to what is already known. The content is explicitly political in nature, as in the work of Hans Op de Beeck and Juan Manuel Echavarria, for example, who deal with the issue of refugees from the Third World, or with the traffic in cocaine and its social and political implications.
Social and political subject matter is also the concern of artists Andrea Bowers and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, whose work provides a forum for discussing illegal abortion in the US or the political significance and use of places such as the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Other works to be shown give priority to the question of filmic structure, as is the case with Jeanne Faust’s study of time and space.
Another artist who works with the expectations raised by Hollywood cinema is David Claerbout, who builds up an ominous tension, only to dissolve it totally unexpectedly. Andro Wekua designs evocative worlds that awaken slumbering recollections of a lost homeland or the fates of private individuals.
Stan Douglas, on the other hand, deconstructs classic narrative patterns by generating a never-ending story online with new links and strands of narrative constantly being created. Finally, Mathilde ter Heijne searchingly examines the question of the self beset by an increasingly media-driven world to create memorable scenarios of a world of appearance and reality.

Curated by: Sabine Himmelsbach, Stephan Urbaschek