2-channel video installation

Twenty-five minutes exposed to one single director’s instruction: to stay in the frame, neutral facial expression – and you must not blink. Caused by the camera’s static presence, this mere technical assignment enforced a physical reaction: the participants started to cry. In a 25-minute long single shot each, actress Anna-Maria Hadorn and director Miriam Schmidtke are captured on videos that almost resemble photographs. The presentation of these tableau vivants may only happen with the two channels vis-à-vis. Solely the spatial set-up enables a narration and suggest an emotion that never happened. It thus challenges our relationship with filmic images. The situation of Anna-Maria Hadorn and Miriam Schmidtke looking into each other‘s eyes only „happens“ in the gallery. By projecting the images of two women looking at each other crying in one shared space, the work also attempts to question how fiction can be built.

Concept and Directing: Miriam Schmidtke
Performers: Anna-Maria Hadorn, Miriam Schmidtke
Camera and Lighting: Alexander L. Schank