An Expanded Take on Film: Cinematic Scope at Georg Kargl, Vienna

P1080061

The exhibition “Cinematic Scope” at Georg Kargl brings together the work of 6 artists who take a broad view of film, its aesthetics and presentation, in their artistic practice. In the work on view, projectors themselves become part of the medium or hanging flat screens adopt sculptural status. Above and below are installation shots of Wolfgang Ploger’s Texas Loud Texas Proud, where 16 mm film features text of the last words of executed Texas prisoners, illegible as it is projected on the wall but readable on the silkscreened film.

P1080063

It highlights the mediation of information and the technology used with subject matter that is distinctly different. Rather than as medium, the projectors become important as sculptural objects with the film strips exaggerating this effect by stretching from floor to ceiling.

P1080069

Tobias Putih’s Pre-projection takes film to its most distinctly sculptural iteration in the show, as it uses an enormous black pyramid to funnel an image onto the curve of a spoon on the gallery floor.

Manuel Knapp uses computer animation to create geometric planes of space which move and overlap to create spaces that seem almost three-dimensional. In this video projected onto the wall of a dark room, “film” as such seems irrelevant. The graphics form a moving sculptural element.

P1080070

Construction/Dismantling by Andreas Fogarasi centers around a never-realized architectural project, the three films surveying a desolate construction site, a temporary carnival, and the sweeping of a street. The most contemporary and quiet presentation, doing away with calls of attention to the means of presentation, never the less floats the three staggered screens and their content, demanding a consideration of them as objects.

Leave a Reply