45cbm: Jennifer Mattes : Program – Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

This image shows a dimly lit curtain with text that reads "The Pleasure Cage."

Repeated green claims projected against a dark background.

A person stands in a reddish-lit room with patterns on a curtain.

Reflections of intricate stone carvings create an abstract appearance.

A man in a suit appears on a grainy, old-fashioned television screen.

A painted depiction of a man in a suit with multiple distorted faces.

Artist

Jennifer Mattes

Curator

Marie Himmerich

The video works of Jennifer Mattes (* 1982 ) are located at the interface of various genres, including documentary and essay film, Hollywood cinema and YouTube clips. A hallmark of her artistic practice is her work with existing film material from the visual databases of the Internet - so-called found footage - which she combines to create new narratives. Together with self-shot film sequences, this results in precise analyses of contemporary visual culture as well as humorous commentaries on her favorite themes of search, failure, love and desire.

In the studio space 45cbm of the Kunsthalle, the artist will present her video work State of Stage (2013) in a new site-specific installation. In montaged scenes, State of Stage revolves around the performative production of individual self-images and images of others on the stage of life and in the virtual space of new media technologies.

At the heart of the video are the site visits to abandoned cinemas filmed by anonymous Internet users, which Mattes tracked down on the video platform YouTube. In combination with other film fragments and soundtracks from the Internet, the artist has condensed these into a meta-narrative about theatrical spaces and identitary role-playing. While the off-screen monologue of an actress keeps the viewer at a reflective distance from the visual events, the sound dramaturgy and calculated arcs of tension transfer the affective markings of theater and cinema to the reception situation of the exhibition. In her design for Baden-Baden - the installation of a backstage area that also incorporates the specific spatial situation of the Kunsthalle entrée - Mattes will deliberately stage this effect.

Jennifer Mattes, born in Stuttgart, lives and works in Vienna. Studied at the Merzakademie Stuttgart and the Kunstakademie Wien under Harun Farocki, Judith Barry and Constanze Ruhm, among others. In 2014, Mattes was awarded the Birgit Jürgenssen Prize for Media Art.