Christin Bolewski
LandE scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
slow decay of a still life over a period of three weeks with several cameras using different shot sizes and perspectives. Then the real-time video and sound footage was processed to speed up the rotting process to a visible level. Time is heavily manipulated in this process and emerges therefore as the main element of the work: Different parts of the image are arranged running simultaneously forward and backward, in fast motion, at different speed, or being looped – the still life starts to“ breathe”. Growth gets confronted with destruction, aesthetic beauty with rotten ugliness.
In particular, how do you view the concepts of the real, the authentic and the imagined playing out within your works? traditional film codes, revealing techniques of cubistic painting tradition which deals with time, space and perspective.
Time is explored as an aesthetic variable and is treated and performed differently in Still life in motion: First I filmed the
The world how we perceive it is only an interpretation of our minds, of what our senses receive and this interpretation is based on our individual previous learnt and cultural experience. Documentary film theory has always acknowledged the fact that it is not possible to represent reality in a film and that it shows the viewpoint of the filmmaker: the camera itself disturbs the authentic moment. The same applies to ethnography and field research which acknowledge that capturing reality or the authentic is pretty difficult if not impossible. Hence my film and photographic practice has always been based on the principle that it is manipulation and interpretation of reality and never authentic. This is the reason why I started working heavily with digital manipulation technology, collage and filtering and also why I like working with multi-voiced narratives and constructed imagery from different sources. Often I aim to create a subtle and poetic aesthetic within that: manipulating reality is always a central issue in my work.
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