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Yours, KOW

Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008

video installation

GermanEnglish

"Yet Untitled [‘Pieces of Nature‘]“ describes both performance and studio film production. Situated in a loose, self-reflexive narrative poised between the traditions of structural film, dance and theater, the carefully choreographed film follows actors in what appears to be a casting process. Breathing, moving, and literally constructing the film before our eyes, crew members and the director himself are also revealed as actors, literally mirroring a photograph by Jeff Wall‘s famed photograph “Picture for a woman“ (1979). (Text by Amy Patton)

"Yet Untitled [‘Pieces of Nature‘]“ (2008) describes both performance and studio film production. Situated in a loose, self-reflexive narrative poised between the traditions of structural film, dance and theater, the carefully choreographed film follows actors in what appears to be a casting process. Breathing, moving, and literally constructing the film before our eyes, crew members and the director himself are also revealed as actors, literally mirroring a photograph by Jeff Wall‘s famed photograph “Picture for a woman“ (1979). (Text by Amy Patton)

GermanEnglish

S-16 mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, color
Stereo, 11:30 min
English and German with English subtitles

Cast: Evelyne Cannard, Simon Denny, Assaf Hochman, Andrew Kerton, Anca Rimnic Munteanu, Mira Partecke, Bastian Trost
Cinematography: Max Penzel
Sound Design: Thomas Wallmann
Montage: Mario Pfeifer/ Amy Patton
Sound Recording: Michael Klöfkorn
Light Design: Patrick Albring
Still Photographer: Eric Bell
Produced by Mario Pfeifer, Amy Patton [blackboardfilms]
Conceived by Mario Pfeifer

© 2008 Germany

S-16 mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, color
Stereo, 11’30 min
English and German with English subtitles

Cast: Evelyne Cannard, Simon Denny, Assaf Hochman, Andrew Kerton, Anca Rimnic Munteanu, Mira Partecke, Bastian Trost
Cinematography: Max Penzel
Sound Design: Thomas Wallmann
Montage: Mario Pfeifer/ Amy Patton
Sound Recording: Michael Klöfkorn
Light Design: Patrick Albring
Still Photographer: Eric Bell
Produced by Mario Pfeifer, Amy Patton [blackboardfilms]
Conceived by Mario Pfeifer

© 2008 Germany

Caption: Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo

Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo (film still)
Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo (film still)
Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo (film still)
Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo (film still)
Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo (film still)
Mario Peifer, Yet Untitled (Pieces of Nature), 2008, S-16mm film transferred to HD, 16:9, stereo (film still)
GermanEnglish

Pfeifer’s recourse to the canon of classical genre painting and postmodern dia-positives, his transformation of art historical material into moving images and his psychoanalytically loaded meditation on spectatorship merge into moments of growing distance towards the notion of essence. Niklas Luhmann discusses this tendency as metamedialization, the interlacing of different realities and their perception as symbolic systems. The actor’s speculations on their very roles, their relations among each other, their indirect communication with the director and last but of course not least the mirror wall–Pfeifer’s delicate web of representational strategies foregrounds exactly this inter-mediality, the symbolic power that jostles our imagination and fosters the wide range of associations immersing in the very process of meaning making. But what cultural consequence is to follow? The ambivalent relation of the as highly as hermetically loaded studio space and its factual surrounding is becoming clear when Pfeifer closes his film with the shot of an actor leaving through the back door of the studio onto a real road. The notion of “the streets“ and its oppositional model of agency contrasts intensely with the constructedness of an ‘art-icifical’ realm of image production. This provocative coda is the powerful critique of Pfeifer’s piece. (...) Pfeifer’s particular synthesis of the real and the symbolic, the representative and the sensuous ultimately manifest the philosophical depth of the piece without straightening out the paradoxical discomfort of his very medium. (Text by Julia Moritz)

Pfeifer’s recourse to the canon of classical genre painting and postmodern dia-positives, his transformation of art historical material into moving images and his psychoanalytically loaded meditation on spectatorship merge into moments of growing distance towards the notion of essence. Niklas Luhmann discusses this tendency as metamedialization, the interlacing of different realities and their perception as symbolic systems. The actor’s speculations on their very roles, their relations among each other, their indirect communication with the director and last but of course not least the mirror wall–Pfeifer’s delicate web of representational strategies foregrounds exactly this inter-mediality, the symbolic power that jostles our imagination and fosters the wide range of associations immersing in the very process of meaning making. But what cultural consequence is to follow? The ambivalent relation of the as highly as hermetically loaded studio space and its factual surrounding is becoming clear when Pfeifer closes his film with the shot of an actor leaving through the back door of the studio onto a real road. The notion of “the streets“ and its oppositional model of agency contrasts intensely with the constructedness of an ‘art-icifical’ realm of image production. This provocative coda is the powerful critique of Pfeifer’s piece. (...) Pfeifer’s particular synthesis of the real and the symbolic, the representative and the sensuous ultimately manifest the philosophical depth of the piece without straightening out the paradoxical discomfort of his very medium. (Text by Julia Moritz)

Mario Pfeifer, Pieces of Nature, like Flowers in Water (after Robert Bresson), 2011, C-Print, Passepartout 44.5 x 55 cm
GermanEnglish

CIRCA PROJECTS, SUNDERLAND, 2012
BUNDESKUNSTHALLE BONN, 2012
NASSAUISCHER KUNSTVEREIN, WIESBADEN, 2011
KOW (Group), 2009

GermanEnglish

MUSEUM OF ART AND DESIGN, NEW YORK, 2011
VIDEOART AT MIDNIGHT #16, KINO BABYLON, BERLIN, 2010
LICHTER FILMTAGE, FRANKFURT A.M., 2010
KUNSTFILMBIENNALE, COLOGNE, 2009

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Mario Pfeifer

Mario Pfeifer was born in 1981 in Dresden, Germany. His work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film, in locations ranging from Mumbai to California to the Western Sahara. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. Often, Pfeifer collaborates on publications that reconsider these projects, offering research materials and critical investigations by writers and thinkers of related fields, concerning issues suggested in his projects for a wider social-political discussion. After his studies in Leipzig (HGB) and Berlin (UDK), Pfeifer graduates from Willem de Rooij's class at Städelschule Frankfurt in 2008. He is a Fulbright fellow in Los Angeles (California Institute of the Arts) in 2008/09. Further grants and projects lead him to Bangkok, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Beirut, Tierra del Fuego, Santiago de Chile, and New York. Mario participated in the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), the 11th Bienal do Mercosul (2017), the 3° Montevideo Bienal (2016) as well as the 4th Marrakesh Biennal (2012). Survey exhibitions took place in 2016 at the GfZK Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig and in 2019 at The Power Plant Toronto. In 2019 IDFA commissioned the first performance work AGAIN – Live which premiered at Amsterdam's Pakhuis de Zwijger. Pfeifer lives in Berlin and Dresden. In 2023 Pfeifer was awarded the Hessian Film- and Cinema award in the categorie "Best Short Film" for "Zelle 5 - Eine Rekonstruktion".



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