Montreal-based artist Moïa Jobin-Paré approaches the world by scratching her way into the deeper spheres of her photographic material like an archaeologist. The figures of Gudrun Krebitz, born in Graz and living in Berlin, are struggling for a place in the smog of other people’s voices and views, but prefer to confide their thoughts to the moon.
Pantomime movements of a woman’s silhouette: Her hands and fingers move across the surfaces of a geometrical urban architecture, almost as if they wanted to remeasure the buildings. She weaves an irregular network of lines into the rectangular, rigid structure and the documentary image, animating the wasteland with a glowing spray of sparks produced by drawing scratches on photographs.
The truth is hidden behind blurs, but the allure of secrecy fades as the clarity increases. A woman in love ventures out of her cocoon to go out into the mundane world of “dead language.” Accompanied by a restless musical motif by Marian Mentrup, “Achill” boldly balances on the thin line between two universes – with raw, intimate drawings, shimmering stones and overpainted video sequences.
The longing for something to finally happen is fulfilled by a kiss. Not the romantic kind, however, but a monstrous one, a kiss the world will talk about. Thus Dodi plods vigilantly through everyday life and parties, in a cloud of other people’s voices. “EXOMOON” follows her confident path: like a kaleidoscope with creative fractures.
Found private photo albums: The connections between the pictures remain as abstract as that which the photographs show is concrete. In this film, grandparents, aunts and children do not look out of the past at the viewer in the now but into the mysterious depths of a corridor or the vastness of a bay. Poetic spaces of interpretation open up.
“I know you” is easier said than “I know myself.” Here, someone probes their own fear in a childlike voice and sketchy images. There are certain pieces of evidence, like the shovel used by a young woman to dig a deep hole. And there is that black thing that grabs her soul like a spider. A cautious and curious mutual approach in sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract ink drawings.
She opens her arms wide: “I want to go home, do my dreaming.” Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups. Gudrun Krebitz’s poetic combination of video and animation recommends pushing the gravestone aside and descending into one’s subconscious: with overpaintings and superimpositions.
Hands grasp emptiness. Sometimes they get hold of bundles of lines. Their everyday movements are turned into a ghostlike play of gestures, because the objects they handle and the devices they operate are erased from the frames. The sense of touch takes centre stage – in the actions themselves, but no less in the scratches on the material which dance to creaky, grating sounds.
Abstract organic drawings, wandering flocks of clouds and the surging sea give the “Impromptu opus 70” piano piece a visual body which refuses to take on a fixed form or pause. “Remous” embraces the undulations of Jacques Hétu’s erratic composition, twists perspectives and makes individual notes shimmer as brief reflections of light on the surfaces of deep darkness.
A film projection shows a woman sitting by the water. In “her back” is the shadow of a female figure who conjures radiant golden clouds of dots and balls of lines into the frame with her hands and is even able to blot it out. The magical trailer for the “Tricky Women” festival was made by manually editing the image and sound sequences recorded by Moïa Jobin-Paré when she was artist-in-residence in Vienna.
