Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller
CUT
1 May–14 June 2014
Opening: 1 May, 6–9pm
Galerie Campagne Première Berlin
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–6pm
During GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN, 2 – 4 May,
the gallery remains open from 11 am to 7pm.
T +49 30 400 54 300
mail [at] campagne-premiere.com
www.campagne-premiere.com
Facebook
Christoph Girardet (b. 1966) and Matthias Müller (b. 1961) both work autonomously across film, video art and photography. Whereas Christoph Girardet mostly uses visually reduced materials in his work, which acquire new levels of meaning through intensive processing, Matthias Müller frequently traces new and autobiographical themes, using both his own and foreign materials. Since 1999, the two artists have been building up a joint body of work, whose focus revolves around found footage. For the first time at Campagne Première, their recent cinematographic and photographic work will be presented in a joint exhibition.
Their video loop Cut (2013) ties the phantasmagorical idea of the fully transparent, controllable and infinitely malleable body to the notion of corporeality as a wound that can never heal. The work uses images from movies that idealise the human body as practically indestructible and highly mutable as well as being the cause of pain, anxiety, hysteria and delusion.
The concept of the body that can be formed and disciplined is juxtaposed with a physique that is fragile and vulnerable to danger, one that terrifies, ages and dies.
The dual slide-projection Everything Not Said (2014) also traces the boundaries between the body’s interior and exterior. A large collection of single frames showing bandaged heads was compiled from movies, newly arranged and paired with extracts from psychiatric health questionnaires. Caught between transparency and opacity; vulnerability and one’s armour against it; individuality and anonymity, the faces condense into a panopticon of voyeurs under observation.
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s work has been widely exhibited at international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam, New York and Oberhausen, and at major institutions such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Bozar – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Tate Modern, London; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Girardet and Müller have been honoured with major awards, amongst which are the German Film Critics Association’s Prize (1999), the Marler Video Art Award (2004), the Prix Canal+ du Meilleur court métrage at the Cannes Film Festival as well as the Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis (2006), and the Arte Short Film Prize (2012). The central piece of the artists’ exhibition at Campagne Première, Cut, was nominated for the European Film Award 2013. After their retrospective solo show, Tell Me What You See at Kunstverein Hannover (2014), the artists’ work is currently on exhibition at the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow and at the Videokunstzentrum Nordstern, Gelsenkirchen. A comprehensive publication on Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s work has recently been published by the Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg.
For more information, please contact the gallery at gallery [at] campagne-premiere.com.
