Catalogue > At random

Lynne Marsh

Plänterwald

Art vidéo | dv | couleur | 18:15 | Canada, Allemagne | 2010

Plänterwald is filmed on the site of a former GDR amusement park built in 1969 and abandoned after unification. Its rollercoaster and ferris wheel sit motionless at the edge of the city of Berlin. After being closed to the public for almost a decade the rides and fairground structures ? once providing a distraction from everyday realities ? are left to a gradual process of decay and overgrowth. Paradoxically this derelict site is patrolled and protected by security guards who on the one hand attempt to maintain its separation from the public sphere and contemporary life yet at the same time position it in the present social and economic conditions. The video stages a journey in, over and through this bordered off park evoking the exceptional conditions of its persistent existence. Positioning the security guards as the guardians of a ?dead? space, the work plays on the absurdity of the use of force and notion of property in relation to the decay and obsolescence of the site. Plänterwald pursues an exploration of a world held together by an internal logic, and quietly, yet relentlessly - like the defunct rollercoaster - echoes the rumbles of deep social and political fault lines and their explosive potential.

Lynne Marsh is a Canadian artist who divides her time between Montréal, Berlin and London where she teaches at the University of Hertfordshire. Working predominately with video, installation and sound her practice explores the cultural and social concerns that operate at the convergence of performance, choreography, speculative fiction and staged events. Her most recent works, shot respectively in a sports stadium, a TV studio and an abandoned amusement park investigate the inscription of individual bodies in architectural environments built for mass consumption. Her works present conceptual and visual experimentations that create a space for us to speculate on the present concept of the individual and its contemporary exertion of pressure as a political subject. Marsh?s video installations have been exhibited in solo exhibitions including Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, the Musée d`art contemporain de Montréal and Danielle Arnaud contemporary art, London and group exhibitions including Catastrophe, the Québec City Biennial and There is no audience, at Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. A monograph on her works entitled Lynne Marsh, was produced by the Musée d`art contemporain de Montreal and the Musée régional de Rimouski.