CONSTANZE RUHM


Opening: 16. March 2010, 7 pm
Exhibition: 17/03 – 25/04/2010

Installation views

 

Press release

Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot is the sixth part of the serial-based project X Characters. Like the previous productions (A Memory of the Players, 2001; Coming Attraction, 2002; X Characters / RE(hers)AL, 2003; X NaNa / Subroutine, 2004; X Love Scenes, 2006/7), the new film by Constanze Ruhm attempts to re-script the identities of iconic female film characters derived from cinema modernism as contemporary new versions. In Crash Site / My_Never_Ending_Burial_Plot, the artist now tries to end the circle of X Characters by symbolically put paid to the lives, or more to the afterlive, of the characters. Whether this is successful remains unknown for now.

The movie is devided into three in their courses similar scenes, in which the three figures Hari (Judith van der Werff) Nana (Irina Kastrinidis) and Julian (Dominic Oley) collectively and in changing constellations try to find closure with their past by literally “burying” their story or by killing themselves or each other. However, these attempts remain unsuccessful and after a short blackout the scene starts afresh in a new constellation of the three roles Digger, Driver, Patrol respectively Ego, It and Super-Ego: nobody is dead. Simultaniously, the plot never changes its environment: the figures are captured in their stories as well as on a clearing. The film resembles a “never-ending-burial-loop” which revolves around a grave that is in the act of either being digged out or being filled up. Each scene could be interpreted as a form of a flashback respectively flashforward of that very Hari version, in whose psyche the figures and also the audience are located. In the context of a psychoanalytic session, this amnesic Hari tries to reconstruct her story in order to advance to the traumatic quintessence of her existence.

By their independent interference into their own stories, the characters attempt to gain autonomy so as to escape the endless circle of death and reincarnation. However, the story may not correspond to the death wishes of the characters, since figures of that ilk cannot die. They are undead, mere symptomps of differing forms of desire: they neither have a past nor a future – only by the act of suicide they seem to be able to empower themselves. Hari, around whom the plot is centered, desires an integrity that manifests itself in her longing to die as well as in her whish to reconstruct her memory. Her love is devoted to a sardine tin, which has expired 360 years ago. This tin seems to be either a representation of death or maybe it preserves Haris past – or it may also be possible that the whole film is contained in this sardine tin.

The artist skilfully combines several levels: psychoanalytical elements step into contact with the debatable relation between and characters as well as with the ascendancies of the preceding films Constanze Ruhm has been inspired by (like Andrej Tarkovsky’s Solaris (Hari), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Guiliana) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (Nana)). This evoques that also the viewer feels captured in this never-ending-burial plot.

Constanze Ruhm’s exhibition concept for the galery mirrors the moment of the always recurring also in formal and content levels either by the threepart constellation of the installationversion of the film whose acts are shown parallel on three different monitors on a stage. Or by the three in the film recurring props, which in form of ready-mades collectively with the five setphotographies open up a new level between cinematic and non-cinematic reality.

The movie will be presented in a cinema-version on march, the 18th at 2 pm and on march, 19th at 11.00 pm at Diagonale Graz.

For further information concerning the exibition please contact Kerstin Engholm at +43 1 585 7337.