Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Elske Rosenfeld

Ein bisschen eine komplexe Situation

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 14:44 | Allemagne, Autriche | 2014

Content Summary/ Accompanying Info: This video is an intervention into footage from the first meeting of the Central Round Table of the GDR. The meeting took place on December 7th 1989 in East Berlin, two months after the beginning of mass demonstrations across the country. The Round Table was set up to bring together members of the established political parties and the newly formed oppositional groups on equal terms. A few hours into the meeting, proceedings are interrupted as a noisy demonstration approaches outside. In the ensuing 10-minute scene, participants try to decide on a collective response. Sounds from the demonstration can be heard ebbing and swelling outside the window, while the participants inside debate. The demonstrators are never seen, only heard. The 2-channel video shows the scene in its entirety. It unfolds as a series of interventions into the material that are themselves based on motions and gestures taken from the footage: pans, zooms, the shaking of the camera, the gestures and movements of the participants, the different qualities and sources of sound. These are amplified, repeated, looped, in order to confront and confound notions of inside and outside, language and body, representation and embodiment.

Biography: Elske Rosenfeld (b. 1974 in Halle/S., GDR) uses a variety of media to rework archival materials from the history of state socialism in Eastern Europe and to relate them to contemporary political forms. Recent works in the formats video, performance, and writing have focussed on the physical, gestural content of archival documents from situations of revolution or protest (Paris 1968, East Berlin 1989, Cairo 2011) – to address the body as a site and archive of political events. Various abstracted interventions into and around these materials reactivate political energies that were set loose in these instances and continue to reverberate into the present day. Rosenfeld lives and works in Berlin and Vienna. She holds a PhD-in-Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including Forum Stadtpark/Steirischer Herbst 2015, Graz; Berlin Art Week 2014; Sarai Reader 09/Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; Vienna Art Week 2011; BAK, Utrecht; Shedhalle, Zürich; mumok kino, Vienna; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; GfzK, Leipzig; tranzit, Cluj, Romania; the Education Programme of documenta13. She has taken part in international residencies, including the Visual Arts Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Her texts have been published in/on eipcp.net, Reviews in Cultural Theory, Springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, and in a number of books and collections. She has been awarded a DOC-Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and project funding from the Programme for Arts-based Research/FWF, Austria. www.elskerosenfeld.net