Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

The eighty-year-old actress Libgart Schwarz suddenly loses her language while rehearsing for a film version of the play KASPAR. The play is based on the historic enfant sauvage Kaspar Hauser who assumedly grew up locked in a dark room with no social contacts. Just as it’s protagonist, MY SENTENCE does not fit in. Although in German, it is about universal politics of language and (age) discrimination. Amina Handke’s first feature-length film translates her father’s famous play into cinematic language. The protagonist, originally a young man, is replaced/played by the director’s mother. The play itself questions the rules and violence of language and naturalistic narration. The movie transforms this disobedience into a world full of quotations and references. „What begins as a pure and playful family meta-fiction turns into a surreal, partly nonsensical Babylonian confusion, it’s just that it’s not different languages that are clashing but layers and fragments of the German language, the language of the father. Losing a language becomes an act of resistance against the expected channels of communication, the seriousness of conversation and also the model text. There couldn’t be a truer adaption of the original play than the one taking it apart.“ Patrick Holzapfel, VIENNALE

Amina Handke's work evolves around topics of originality, subjectivity, authorship / audienceship and reception: where does the actual work happen, who produces it, how many versions or realities of it exist and where – in the minds, as documents, as remains? And what is it worth? Her perception of artistic work emphasises the privilege of formulating questions rather than contributing to the universe of commodities. Her practice roots in a wide range of expertise and experience in the fields and intersections of arts, social practice, participative media and a multitude of disciplines: mainly time based (audiovisual, performing and conceptual) arts. It is fueled by the concern to exchange experiences and thoughts with others and to create dialogues about the perception of contradictory, complex constructions of reality. As a curator, she combines her artistic concerns with reflections on working processes and documentary / expanded artistic practices.