Selected to : "International Jewish Artists of the
Year Award".
Award : "International Jewish Artist of
the Year 2012" in the category "New media and performance" for the work "Vanishing", London (U.K.), may 2012.
"Vanishing"
This artistic installation
encloses a 20 minutes video and a series of seven charcoal on paper
drawings illustrating peoples’ faces. They are the same faces,
gaining shape and then gradually disappearing that we find later on
the video.
"Vanishing"
The drawings sum up a
configuration of 150 cm x 150 cm.
This work in remembrance
of the Shoah.
1. The video
It opens on the verses of
Paul Celan - “Death Fugue”,
interpreted by the performing artist Aurelien Ringelheim. Then we step into the
world of the film : witnessing a slow movement of progressive
appearances and disappearances of seven faces, each one labelled with
a name. The faces acquire clarity, as dust is progressively blown
from sheets of charcoal blackened paper.
Each stage of
transformation was recorded on camera and subsequently creatively
altered by the Artist. She employed modern cinematographic processes
in order to achieve the magnetic back and forth movement of images.
Vanishing © Marianne Winkler (2010)
2. Charcoal
portraits, framed in antique painting frames
The photos that served as
models for these portraits are of family members of the artist,
victims of the Shoah.
In reality, we face one
consolidated art work, composed on one side of the framed drawings
exposed on the wall at the entrance of the video exhibition space,
while the video is projected continuously inside this space on a wall
or on a screen. In this way the spectator enter the intimacy of a
family.
The shattering poem of
Paul Celan (the poet spent two years in the Moldavian camps, and
having never recovered from the trauma committed suicide in 1970 in
Paris) evoking the blackened sky of Auschwitz appears as the best
introduction for the artist’s present work.
The video symbolises,
through the inescapable decomposition of faces, the reduction into
tombless ashes, of the humans they belonged to. This scenery wants to
place the viewer under the heavy look of death of a family decimated
by the Shoah.
Vanishing © Marianne Winkler (2010)
The drawings show the
faces frozen forever by bereavement, while the black and white video
reminds us of their lives that are gone, their transformation from
being into the hollowness of death. Firstly, the viewer sees through
delicate strokes of charcoal how faces take shape, firstly a mouth,
eyes, cheekbones, a forehead – an expressive and lively face coming
to life from Earth.
After a few moments of immobility, the faces crumble, deform, dissolve, and return into the all encompassing earth. And with each disappearing face declines as well a part of Humanity.
After a few moments of immobility, the faces crumble, deform, dissolve, and return into the all encompassing earth. And with each disappearing face declines as well a part of Humanity.