Film screening organised with Etienne Eisele
Imagine a reversible image. The strange drawing of a duck that turns into a rabbit depending on how you look at it. Try to concentrate on the moment when it flips, when the contours become blurry, and your perception is disturbed for a moment. In order for perception to remain adaptable, it is organised by so-called instability points. If there is indecision, a continuous change between these points, a dynamic type of perception arises – so-called multi-stability.
A distorted reflection of the New York skyline. Strolling people in time lapse, a view from a moving car. A laptop screen disintegrating into pixels. Observations through a microscope catching fire. In their video works, artists Milena Langer and Marie Menken repeatedly evoke multi-stable moments. They use the camera as an instrument to lure images out of their stability, causing them to flicker, and reassemble them into loose narratives. The lens enables a nuanced view that sharpens perspectives – for once not from this fleshy mass that we call a body. Nevertheless, the observations of the two artists are by no means lacking in physicality. Their handling makes the camera as apparatus intimately perceptible, as if they were operating a probe paving the way. Sensitive and gestural, they also reveal a certain brutality.
Langer and Menken examine perception as a constant process of becoming that cannot simply be resolved in a single perspective – a tilting image of overlays and relations, always in between.
Kunsthalle Winterthur will present a screening of selected video works by Milena Langer and Marie Menken – who is an important reference for Langer – on 11 April 2025.
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Milena Langer (*1997, lives in Berlin, DE) works with film and its displays. She has had solo exhibitions at ABC, Hamburg in 2022 and Plymouth Rock, Zurich in 2020 and participated in group exhibitions at FOR, Basel; Hamlet, Zurich; Centre d’Art Contemporaine, Geneva and Longtang, Zurich and in screenings at Studiologue X Binz 39, Zurich, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, among others.
Marie Menken (1909-1970) was an American experimental filmmaker and artist and is considered a pioneer of avant-garde cinema. She studied painting at the New York School of Fine and Industrial Arts and at the Art Students League. From the 1940s, she turned to film and developed a style that is often regarded as a forerunner of later underground cinema.
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Our current exhibition Vera Palme, Diversion will be open before, during and after the screening.