Boys or girls? Who cares?!

Said Atabekov: Battle for the Square. Courtesy of Centro Videoinsight®, Turin, Italy.

Said Atabekov: “Battle for the Square” 2009, One channel video. 4’15’’.

Said Atabekov’s Battle for the Square shows a black and white close-up view of a chaotic clash of horsemen. Riders and horses blend into each other, competing for the trophy in a circling warlike-dance. This scene documents the Kokpar, a traditional Kazakh game played on horseback in which two teams contend violently with each other to gain control over a headless goat or sheep. The picture seems to be in an ancestral setting, but it is really a contemporary market. The local, historical game becomes a metaphor, evoking symbols of globalization, for any kind of violent struggle between men and the cult of competition, leadership and success.

“The artist turns these images into an epic metaphor of the age-old human confrontation, which nevertheless has a highly pressing significance. What is represented here is a neoliberal market ideology that has encroached on this territory, with its apologia of competition and the cult of success, which Atabekov displays as a return to brutal archaics.” (Victor Misiano)

Said Atabekov (1965, Besterek village, Uzbekistan) is one of the most important artists in Central Asia. His work has been exhibited at the Laura Bulian Gallery, the Prague Biennial 2003, Istanbul Biennial 2005, Media Art Biennial Los Angeles 2006, Photoquai Biennial Paris 2009, Muhka Museum Antwerp 2009, New Museum in New York 2011 and the Venice Biennial in 2005, 2007 and 2011. He won the Prince Claus Fund, Netherlands in 2011. His works are part of important private and public collections in the world, including Vehbi Koc Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey and the Mart Museum, Rovereto, Italy.

Creator of the Videoinsight® Collection, Rebecca Luciana Russo is a clinical psychologist and contemporary art collector. The Collection comprises contemporary art works with high psychological meaning and evaluative or psychotherapeutic potential. In 2010 she founded the Videoinsight® Center in Turin, Italy as an open space with the aim of bringing out insights from the psychological interaction with contemporary art. In other words, they want to raise a transformative and evolutionary awareness stemming from the vision of the artwork itself. The Center functions in various capacities: a space for intellectual and emotional exchange in the here and now, a think-tank generating ideas and creating shared meanings, a creative laboratory that stimulates a conscious and evolved process of psychological innovation, and an experimental observatory of artistic experiences.The Videoinsight® Method developed by Rebecca Russo is innovative and unique. The Method presents a theoretical and clinical model of psychological evaluation and therapy performed using selected artistic images. In 2011 she published “Videoinsight®. Healing with Contemporary Art” (Silvana Editoriale, Milan) and in 2012 “The Videoinsight® Method” (ePub, postmedia books, Milan).

Janet Biggs: Brightness All Around. Courtesy of Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa (FL), USA.

Janet Biggs: “Brightness All Around” 2011, Single-channel, HD video with sound, 8’36’’.

Brightness All Around is the last part of Janet Bigg’s Arctic Trilogy, a body of work that came out of two expeditions to the Arctic Circle in which the artist participated. Biggs is known for her videos documenting challenging acts of endurance or risky working or leisure practices and for transforming these experiences into unique works of art. It has been said that filming these subjects requires almost as much courage and endurance as doing them.

The main protagonist of this video is Linda Norberg, a petite blond who spends her lonesome work days in the darkness of a coal mine deep beneath the eternal ice. Biggs portrays her from dusk until dawn, from her morning preparation with make-up and accessories to her drilling and bolting of a new underground cave. All throughout she is accompanied only by the deafening noise of her machinery and the solitary light of her headlamp. The harsh working conditions in this rough part of the world are juxtaposed by interventions of New York singer Bill Coleman with his seductive, but slightly threatening performance: “Biggs’ particularized genius in Part Three is to play Norberg’s femi-sensual machismo off of Coleman’s macho gayness, in which he rolls his eyes and body to pinwheel proportions.” (Charly Finch, Artnet)

Focusing primarily on video, New York-based Janet Biggs has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Tampa Museum of Art; Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; and Mint Museum of Art. Her work is in museum collections including the Tampa Museum of Art; The High Museum; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Mint Museum of Art; and the Gibbes Museum of Art. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, the New Yorker, ArtForum, ARTNews, Art in America, and Flash Art. Biggs is represented by CONNERSMITH., Washington, DC.

The Tampa Museum of Art opened its new award-winning home in 2010 with a commitment to providing innovative public programs with a strong focus on modern and contemporary art. The Museum balances a growing collection with a dynamic annual schedule of special exhibitions. It is the region’s largest museum devoted to art of our time and has built a reputation for embracing contemporary photography and new media. Since 2010, the Museum has featured solo exhibitions of Jesper Just, Janet Biggs and Leo Villareal and has showcased important holdings from such international renowned collections as the Hadley Martin Fisher and Martin Z. Margulies Collections. Additionally, the Museum has presented such modern masters as internally curated exhibitions of Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas. The Museum commissioned Leo Villareal to create a signature light installation on the its facade. Titled “Sky (Tampa)”, the work is a 14,000-square-foot LED installation and has become an iconic image for Tampa.

Gerard Byrne: Hommes Homme à Femmes

(Michel Debrane). Courtesy of Collection MUDAM Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg.

Gerard Byrne: “Homme à Femmes (Michel Debrane)” 2004, Video projection. 38’.
© Gerard Byrne

Homme à Femmes (Michel Debrane) is part of a broader research by Gerard Byrne focused on a collective amnesia in cultural history. In his previous projects, Byrne staged re-enactments of conversations drawn from popular magazines from the 1970s and 1980s. We get to see what was once part of everyday culture, but has since changed or disappeared entirely. In Homme à Femmes (Michel Debrane) French actor Michel Debrane performs as Jean-Paul Sartre in an interview conducted by a young post ’68 feminist journalist called Catherine Chaîne and originally published in Nouvel Observateur in 1977. Thoroughly scrutinized by the camera’s eye and surrounded by the noise of the camera team, we watch Michel Debrane thirty years later interrogated by a distant female voice. The actor obviously struggles to put himself in the place of the aging French philosopher as he looks back at the different relationships he had cultivated with the “women of his life”.

Gerard Byrne was born in 1969 in Dublin and lives there. His solo exhibitions have included the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2011), the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2011), the ICA, Boston (2008), the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2008), the Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2007), and the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003). Byrne has participated in the Biennale di Venezia (2011, 2007), the Biennale of Sydney (2008), and Manifesta 4 (2002).

Mudam - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg is the foremost museum dedicated to contemporary art in Luxembourg. Its collection and program reflect current artistic trends and appreciate the emergence of new artistic practices on a national and international scale. The cultural project of Mudam is based on a conception of art seen at a poetical distance from the world. It aims to capture not only a way of contemporary thinking, but also the aesthetic language of an era to come. The Mudam Collection bears witness to contemporary creation in all its technical and aesthetic forms, while remaining open to every other artistic discipline. The building, by Sino-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, is a marvelous dialogue between the natural and historical environment. Standing against the vestiges of Fort Thüngen, it is rooted in the Park Dräi Eechelen (planned by landscapist Michel Desvigne) which offers magnificent views onto the old town just a short walk from the European district of Kirchberg.

Carlson/Strom: Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore. Courtesy of Contemporary Collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.

Carlson/Strom: “Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore” 2007, Video (color, sound). Edition 3/7. 4’27’’

A collaborative work by choreographer and performer Ann Carlson and video installation artist Mary Ellen Strom, Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg & Moore blends gesture, rhythm, voice, and text in a humorous performance playing on urban masculinity through the lens of a lawyer’s day. The compelling video shows the four lawyers, John Sloss, Chet Kerr, Scott Rosenberg, and Thomas Moore, dressed in black suits and ties in a corporate setting and performing choreographed movements and vocal sequences, which oscillate between fighting, Tai Chi, dance and theater. In the beginning their stiff demeanor goes between aggressive movements and submissive bows, calling to mind scenes from Hollywood action movies, but soon they unwind into a relaxed dreamlike floating. The lawyer’s performance displays the tension between the rigorous behavior they apply in order to gain authority in court and the roles they have to play in their daily life as fathers or dog owners or simply private individuals: moments in which leadership behavior, emotional devotedness and vulnerability are more visibly intertwined. The phrases the four men recite in a choir refer to the legal practice they have to rehearse for like actors. They unveil an uncanny link between jurisdiction and deportments that are typical for a consumer society: “At first I ask for more. I always ask for more.”

Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom began working collaboratively in the early 1990s to create video and performance art together as Carlson/Strom. The collective has been recognized for the community-engaged activism of their work, which often addresses social and political themes. Carlson is a director, choreographer, performer and conceptual artist whose work explores the boundaries between dance and choreography. Strom is a video and installation artist whose work draws on performance studies, cultural geography, and feminist and queer studies, and who directs video and media installation studies as faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

MFA contemporary collection: Founded in 1870, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has since expanded its encyclopedic holdings to nearly half a million objects. Today its programming attracts over one million visitors a year. In September of 2011 the MFA unveiled seven galleries dedicated to the contemporary collections in the newly designated Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art, housed in the fully renovated 1981 building designed by I. M. Pei. The wing’s transformation resulted in approximately 21,250 square feet of space dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art in all forms. A rich diversity of over 200 works is presented throughout the wing at any one time. Installations rotate regularly, and feature internationally recognized artists from the collection, including: El Anatsui, Lynda Benglis, Mark Bradford, Carlson/Strom, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ori Gersht, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Sheila Hicks, Eva Hild, Wendy Jacob, Matthew Day Jackson, Jun Kaneko, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Christian Marclay, Josiah McElheny, Ana Mendieta, Sigmar Polke, Ken Price, Doris Salcedo, Timorous Beasties, Anne Truitt, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Fred Wilson, and Betty Woodman, among others. The Museum purchased Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg, & Moore by Carlson/Strom with funds provided by Robert and Jane Burke, Davis and Carol Noble, Steven Rogowski and the New England Artist Fund 2008.119.

Eli Cortiñas: Dial M for Mother. Courtesy of Collection Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf at Museum Kunstpalast, Germany.

Eli Cortiñas: “Dial M for Mother” 2008, Two channel video. 11’ loop.

Dial M for Mother presents a collage of found footage from three films by John Cassavetes, featuring Gena Rowlands as the lead, and recorded phone conversations between the artist and her mother. The piece revolves around the search for autonomy in an unresolved conflict between mother and daughter. The combination of scenes from different films with the material of the artist’s own archive create a new narrative. Through her voice the artist’s real mother appears as the mother of the protagonist played by Gena Rowlands. Private documentation and movie-fiction intertwine: the off-screen sound adds a new layer to the on-screen elements and creates a complex interplay that reflects the intricacy of the mother-daughter relationship. The two-channel projection forces the viewer to constantly switch from one scene to the other, mixing sound and image to create perpetually new stories.

Eli Cortiñas, born 1976 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, studied at the European Film College in Denmark and the Academy of Media Art in Cologne. She was nominated for the German Short-film Prize for Experimental Film (2008) and received the Supporting Award of the State of NRW for Media Arts (2009) as well as recently the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Grant (2012). In 2012 Cortińas participated at III Moscow Biennale for Young Art in Moscow, Les Rencontres Internationales in Beirut, Madrid and Paris, at the 58th International Short-film Festival Oberhausen as well as at the Experimental Competition of 20th Durtas Vila Do Conde International Film Festival in Portugal. Her works have been exhibited in institutions such as Castrum Peregrin in Amsterdam (2012), Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen (2011) and Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2010).

Collection Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf at Museum Kunstpalast
In 2008, the Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf - the major private bank of the City - and Museum Kunstpalast agreed to establish a collection of contemporary art that reflects the significant network of the art scene in Düsseldorf and the Rhineland. With funds by the Stadtsparkasse, more than 50 paintings, works on paper, photographs, sculptures, installations and new media works have been acquired and placed as extended loans in the collection of the museum. The artists represented belong to the most prestigious creative people active in the region. Works by Wolfgang Tillmanns, Thomas Schütte, Bernd Ribbeck, Alexandra Bircken, Erik van Lieshout, Juergen Staack, Rosilene Luduvico, Mañuel Graf or Tal R exemplify the high quality and diversity of this exciting collection.

Wilson Diaz: Los Rebeldes del Sur

(The Rebels of the South). Courtesy of a private collection in Bogotà, Colombia.

Wilson Diaz: “Los Rebeldes del Sur. (The Rebels of the South)” 2002, VHSC transferred on dvd. 12’.

The Rebels of the South documents an organized meeting between representatives of the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) accompanied by Colombian press and cultural operators in a so-called “distension zone.” Created by then president Andrés Pastrana, these de-militarized zones near San Vicente del Caguán of about 42 thousand square feet form a neutral no-man’s land, where Colombian law was temporarily suspended to provide an area for peace treaties and mediation. Diaz captures a moment of publicity, a concert on a stage, performed by guerillas in their combat-outfits for the press, an audience supposedly capable of spreading the word on their issues. The video shows two performances that both use traditional melodies and rhythms of the popular “vallenato” tunes from the Northern coastal regions of Colombia. In the first song the guerillas sing, dance, embrace and rock their guns to a love song, while the second song addresses their armed struggle, the poverty of their surroundings, the social issues that in their eyes justify their battle and government and paramilitary conducted massacres.

Although this concert was obviously performed for the press (the logo of then National Institute of Radio and Television INRAVISION is clearly to be seen in the video), Diaz’s work seems to be the only recording that has passed the threshold to a wider audience. The press recordings have never been published and in 2007 Diaz video was removed from a show in London by the then Colombian Ambassador to the UK. The world was not supposed to see these fighting men as tender, loving and suffering personalities, which expose their camouflage uniforms, outfits that serve to not be seen, in a public event. This vulnerability they decided to present was suppressed because a feminine, sensitive, weak man is not a good target for the government.

Although Wilson Diaz started as a draftsman and a painter, photography has always had a great influence on the iconography of his paintings and drawings. His relatively long carrier has always oscillated between painting and his relationship with diverse media, such as performance, installation, collage, photography and video. He has been a key figure in forming a group of artists that has opened the intrinsic problems of painting to a more complex and profound relationship to the cultural issues that structure the human condition. Thus his work is permeated by various situations and circumstances that are not associated with the “usual” facts issues that art assumes as its prime matter in traditional terms. His work explores matters, situations and media that are clearly associated with cultural aspects that have been maintained outside from any attempt to be legitimized by the hegemonic gaze.

Laura Glusman: Nado y Nada. Courtesy of Fondazione Fotografia - Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, Italy.

Laura Glusman: “Nado y Nada” 2004, Single channel video, with sound. 2’18’’, loop.

In Nado y nada (Swim and nothing) by Laura Glusman a young woman swims with difficulty against the river current and almost disappears in the mighty movement of the rapids. The surface of the water is muddy even though it is glittering. Despite these constant and remarkable efforts, her body doesn’t move forward due to the opposing force of the current and it seems symbiotically fused with the elements. In the repetition of the looped video the figure remains a prisoner and never reaches her (unknown) destination. She is swimming against the current, an action that seems to be totally futile, but also a kind of enduring resistance.

The relationship and the clash between man and nature is one of the central themes addressed by Laura Glusman: “I’m drawn towards experiencing the forces of nature and the pointless persistence of humanity to ignore them. I understand the concept of landscape not as an isolated portion of the earth to be looked at, but as a type of being that holds the traces of culture, the traces of storms, of commerce, of changes of climate. I’m fascinated by these landscapes, whether they are influenced by men or just the result of time embracing space”.

Laura Glusman was born in Rosario in northern Argentina in 1971. She took up photography at an early age and learned her craft at numerous workshops in her own country and elsewhere, including a one-year course at the New York International Center of Photography in 2000. Her work has been presented in numerous art galleries and institutions, both in Argentina and abroad, among them the Centro Cultural España Juan de Salazar in Asunción (Paraguay), the OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, 2011, the Centro Cultural in São Paulo, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Boston Center for the Arts, 2010, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, in Argentina, 2009, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, 2009, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago de Chile, 2007.

The Fondazione Fotografia is an organization promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, set up in 2007 with the aim of creating permanent collections of contemporary photography and artists’ videos. The collections – Italian and international – have been put together through a series of works by both established and emerging artists, paying particular attention to those artists who are currently consolidating their position in the art world. The collection currently includes about 900 works by over 160 artists, among them Nobuyoshi Araki, Olivo Barbieri, Yael Bartana, Gabriele Basilico, David Goldblatt, Daido Moriyama, Walter Niedermayr, Roman Ondák, Adrian Paci, Raghubir Singh, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yang Fudong, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Alongside the photography collection, a video library is also being put together, currently featuring more than 90 interviews with some of the artists present in the collection. As well as its exhibition activities, ample space is also given over to teaching and training: in particular, in 2011 Fondazione Fotografia started a Master of Fine Arts in Imaging Arts – Photography, an innovative teaching course held on an international level, aimed at those who have chosen photography and video as their main media.

Oded Hirsch: 50 Blue. Courtesy of the collection of Robert D. Bielecki, New York, USA.

Oded Hirsch: “50 Blue” 2009, One channel video. 13’ 08”.

In 50 Blue a young man (the artist’s brother Eli) pushes an elderly disabled man (the artist’s father Yoel) in a wheel chair through a muddy landscape. It is a long and exhausting trip to an unknown destination that the viewer only discovers at the end. After an arduous struggle the two arrive at the edge of a grey lake where a 10-meter high guard tower stands. The young man ties the wheel chair to a rope and hoists the old man up on the tower platform with the help of eight men, all dressed in yellow plastic raincoats. We see the father watching the grey horizon of the lake, the view obstructed by a tower beam. Is this outlook really worth the long trip? 50 Blue is a video with multi-layered meanings. On the one hand, we see the value of masculine labor, even if the result does not fulfill its expectations. On the other hand, we also see an attempt to correct a distorted father-son relationship, in which a son tries (literally and figuratively) to uplift his handicapped father that he has looked down upon for his entire life.

Oded Hirsch was born in 1976 in Kibbutz Afikim, Israel, and currently lives and works in New York. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. His work was recently exhibited at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, and is currently on view in the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, UK. Past exhibitions include group shows at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Queens Museum of Art, NY; The Ramat-Gan Museum of Art, Israel; The Jewish Museum, Munich, Germany; HVCCA, Peekskill, NY; Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX; EDS Galeria, Mexico City; and Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, NY. Hirsch is a recipient of the 2011 Jerome Foundation Film Grant; the 2011 Laurie Tisch Illumination Fund Production Grant; the 2010 Six Points Fellowship; the 2009 Artis Exhibition Grant; and the 2009 Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Exhibition Grant. His work was featured and reviewed in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, ARTFORUM, and ARTnews Magazine. Robert D. Bielecki is a New York based art collector with a concentration in video and new media. He serves on the Board of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center Buffalo, is a Benefactor of Electronic Arts Intermix, and donated Kate Gilmore’s Blood From A Stone to the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. His collection includes works by Chul-Hyun Ahn, Jim Campbell, Peter Campus, Kate Gilmore, Ken Jacobs, Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, Marck, Julian Opie, Laurel Nakadate, James Nares, Daniel Rozin, Lincoln Schatz, Oleg Tcherny, Siebren Versteeg, among many others. He actively supports a variety of art and music related projects and can be followed at FastOrbit.com.

Yasumasa Morimura: Requiem: Laugh at the dictator. Courtesy of Fondazione Fotografia - Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, Italy.

Yasumasa Morimura: “Requiem: Laugh at the Dictator” 2007, Video on dvd, color, with sound. 10’ 27’’.

In Laugh at the Dictator, a re-enactment of Charlie Chaplin’s parody on Adolf Hitler, we see Yasumasa Morimura dancing with a balloon globe in an office and delivering a speech similar to Chaplin’s discourse at the end of The Great Dictator. But instead of Chaplin’s onomatopoetic German torrent of hatred, Morimura talks about a utopian world without exploitation. He concludes: “I myself am a dictator. You yourselves are dictators. The dictator of the twenty-first century does not have the face of a bad guy. The dictator of the twenty-first century is a ghost that nobody can see. I don’t want to be a dictator.”

Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1951, Osaka) graduated in 1978 from Kyoto City University of Art. In his work, he appropriates universally well-known images derived from art history, mass media and pop culture to create unconventional and bold self-portrait renderings in photography, performance and video. Morimura’s work has been collected by numerous prominent public and private collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh. His major recent exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern Art Salzburg, 2011; the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2010; the International Center for Photography in New York, 2009; the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, 2007.

Fondazione Fotografia is an organization promoted by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, set up in 2007 with the aim of creating permanent collections of contemporary photography and artists’ videos.The collections – Italian and international – have been put together through a series of works by both established and emerging artists, paying particular attention to those artists who are currently consolidating their position in the art world. The collection currently includes about 900 works by over 160 artists, among them Nobuyoshi Araki, Olivo Barbieri, Yael Bartana, Gabriele Basilico, David Goldblatt, Daido Moriyama, Walter Niedermayr, Roman Ondák, Adrian Paci, Raghubir Singh, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Yang Fudong, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Alongside the photography collection, a video library is also being put together, currently featuring more than 90 interviews with some of the artists present in the collection. As well as its exhibition activities, ample space is also given over to teaching and training: in particular, in 2011 Fondazione Fotografia started a Master of Fine Arts in Imaging Arts – Photography, an innovative teaching course held on an international level, aimed at those who have chosen photography and video as their main media.

Markus Schinwald: 1st part Conditional. Courtesy of Collection Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland.

Markus Schinwald: “1st Part Conditional” 2004, Single-channel video projection
35 mm film shown on DVD, color, sound). Edition 5/7.

1st part Conditional, a 35mm film by Markus Schinwald, raises questions about the body and its interaction with architecture and space while challenging conventions and identity. In a dark and classic apartment furnished in Biedermeier-style we can see an androgynous female figure dressed in a gray suit moving spastically through the rooms while an off-screen voice reads fragments of scientific and literary texts. A man sitting in an armchair in a shadowy corner of the apartment watches the woman’s disquieting body movements, while the heavy furniture inexplicably self-destructs. They appear like two strange figures twisted by an intense psychological conflict. The puppet-like young woman trembles, turns and drops, seemingly forced by the male observer’s unknown power, and in the end she collapses.

The film is based on the idea that any emotional condition or repression can turn into a movement or cause physical contortions and the human mind and its discomfort can force the body to communicate the physical equivalent.

Markus Schinwald was born in 1973 in Salzburg, Austria and currently lives and works in Vienna and Los Angeles. He represented the Austrian pavilion at the last Venice Biennale and participated in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including: La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporàneo, Murcia; ICA, Boston; Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; Kunstverein, Hannover; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Aspen Art Museum; Kunsthaus, Zurich; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Tate Modern, London; MAMbo, Bologna; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Center for Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki.

The collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst is made possible by the Migros Cultural Percentage, a unique cultural engagement by the largest Swiss retailer. The collections was started by Migros founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler, and his advisors in the 1950s and professionalized in the mid-1970s with a focus on international contemporary art. While acquisition in the 1970s concentrated on Minimal Art, German painting and important Swiss art, the focus in the last two decades has been on contemporary art (e.g. Maurizio Cattelan, Christoph Büchel, Urs Fischer, Douglas Gordon, Rachel Harrison, Cathy Wilkes, amongst others) and their important predecessors (e.g. Stephen Willats, Katharina Sieverding, Paul Thek etc.). Installation art as well as works that involve performance and socio-political questions take a particularly significant role here. Recent acquisitions have for the most part arisen from commissions for exhibitions. In this way the exhibition activities are linked to the collection activities. In the course of time the responsibility for collection activities was incumbent on various protagonists: Urs Raussmüller (1978-1985), Jacqueline Burckhardt (1986-1990) and Rein Wolfs (1991-2001), who was able to found the museum in 1996. Since 2002 Heike Munder has been the director of the museum and thus also responsible for its acquisitions.