3 May - 20 July 2008

ESKE SCHLÜTERS

The Similaar and the Possible - Levels of Enactment

Using individual and multiple filmic projections, Eske Schlüters (*1970) investigates the »understanding« of moving pictures and cinematic sequences, which are themselves not governed by a tight narrative structure. Her open narrative method plays upon conceptual thinking, disturbs it discovering new meaning. Schlüters' projections experiment with found material and as such constitute an interplay of words, sounds and images redolent of their metaphorical character and the »bigger picture« or context, which has been lost from view. By exclusively using cinematic material from other directors' films, Schlüters is writing a personal history of film in which fleeting instances of complex atmospheres come into being. No longer integral to a given narrative framework, the images speak for themselves. They are not quotations but memories of something that has been seen that can no longer be unequivocally recapitulated.
The exhibition presents the films »Vanished into Thin Air« from 2006, »Like a Shadow - No Reflection« (2007) and the film devised for the exhibition itself, »After the Rehearsal«. If the associative montage of essentially disparate images is at the heart of the earlier pieces, Schlüters new works are characterised by a more marked thematic focus on the structure of images and cinematographic dispositives.
»Like a shadow - No Reflection« revolves around the topic of vampirism and how the object of desire is subjugated to the power of the viewing (camera) eye. Schlüters juxtaposes excerpts from vampire films both associatively and disassociatively. Filmstrips reminiscent of test cards undermine the idea of continuity and divert the eye to the filmic image itself as the vehicle for film as a representational system.
»After the Rehearsal« on the other hand is based upon a film of the shoot of Chantal Akerman's feature »Jeanne Dielmann« and places the rehearsal of what are essentially everyday activities at the centre of attention. That defamiliarisation effect inherent in cinematic dramaturgy becomes particularly prominent in the isolation of those scenes where the actress rehearses her part for the camera. Eske Schlüters reflects the actor's task of genuinely embodying the part-on the level of sound as well-when she translates texts from the theory of the theatre from different languages and assembles them as autonomous compositions.
The filmic works of Eske Schlüters are supplemented by the poster work„Mismatch" (2007) in the foyer of the Kunstverein. It corresponds with the principle of montage and assembles found images by means of reflexive association, which itself circle around role models anew - filmstills, shots of filmsets and (historic) photographs of hysterics and women, who acted and lived as men. „Mismatch" gathers like „After the Rehearsal" images of learnt roles, that are undermined by means of gender change.
Following on from the exhibition »Sehen als Denken sehen« (»Seeing Thinking as Seeing«) in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen (2006), this presentation for the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen is Eske Schlüters' second comprehensive exhibition.