James N. Kienitz Wilkins

DOUBLE FEATURE

September 22 – November 17 2019

In his Kunsthalle exhibition titled Double Feature, Wilkins introduces a total of five hours of sophisticated “entertainment” in two expansive, time-based installations. The Republic (2017), is based on a script by the same name by American writer/director Robin Schavoir in which a group of libertarian men living on the fringes of rural America struggle with the mundane constraints they've imposed on themselves as a community while being shaken by a murder within it. Wilkins' actors play their roles and recite the script over a single, 205 minute fade-in. Gobo Cave (2019) is a 90-minute light show using two Gobo projectors. The projectors move to a sampling of licence-free music used for film scoring, while projecting the logos of predominant manufacturers of 4K video cameras onto the walls of the exhibition space. Both works are the length of a commercial feature film, and both sample, use or distort the conventions of feature film making, leaving an impression that is elusive and fragmentary. Gobo Cave plays with the sequencing of diverse musical genres; The Republic with a seemingly endless succession of individual dialogues. This deconstruction of a traditional cinematic structure has a side effect: the individual characters emancipate from the framing narrative; instead of being subordinated agents, they become the main motives.

Oliver Kielmayer