Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, one of the directors of Arsenal, a key venue for artists' film and video in Europe, presents a selection of work by Matthias Müller, to be shown alongside pieces by Wilhelm and Birgit Hein and Francisca Cordes, as well as collaboration between Müller and Christoph Gira... Read more
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, one of the directors of Arsenal, a key venue for artists’ film and video in Europe, presents a selection of work by Matthias Müller, to be shown alongside pieces by Wilhelm and Birgit Hein and Francisca Cordes, as well as collaboration between Müller and Christoph Girardet. An evening of imploded melodrama and oneiric interludes, where languorous sailors are hand-processed into oblivion and Lana Turner becomes the stuff of serial composition.
“Müller’s works can be read as an unwritten history of experimental cinema in Germany, from the Super-8 scene in the eighties to genre-crossing work with found footage, from the mutual interweaving of analog and digital image technologies to the proliferation of media installation. In Müller’s biography as an artist and in his film aesthetics, Hollywood, avant-garde film and queer cinema coalesce.
His determined interest in questions of memory, traces of the past and the historical body makes his oeuvre the central point for a vast array of interrelated approaches: He is stealing images, like his teachers Birgit and Wilhelm Hein did for their Kali film series, but from many more sources. In an installation piece by his student Franzisca Cordes they are all gone. What is left is an empty, breathing space." – SST
