CAC Artist Talk + Film Program: Empty Frames/Staging Mimicry

This event consists of a lecture by the artist Katharina Swoboda and a film program co-curated by Marlies Pöschl and Katharina Swoboda, part of Golden Pixel Cooperative, a nomadic platform, situated on the intersection between art and moving image.

1/ Empty Frames

Lecture by Katharina Swoboda

The zoological garden and the cinema are both invention of modernity, which work with “living images”. The talk focuses on architecture in zoos and its representation in film. Architecture in the zoological garden, in my opinion, structure the view on animals and therefore establish cultural ideas about them. Comparable to cinematic procedures like shot sizes and montage, which are used to construct an image and therefore a significant view about the animal, the architecture in zoological garden directs the gaze of the visitors and therefore creates certain ideas of species. Artworks to be discussed include contemporary video artist Anri Sala’s work about an empty zoo in his home town Tirana, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy ́s film about the modern architecture from the “Tecton Group” from 1934.

2/ Staging Mimicry

Film program + Q&A with Marlies Pöschl (Golden Pixel Cooperative).

Contrary to popular believe, Roger Caillois (1931-78) shows in his work on mimicry, that an insect’s ability to camouflage itself does not have any survival value. Moreover, it is “excessive” to survival; it is a surplus of life. Through mimicking itself, the insect also creates a second identity of itself.  “The mimicking insect lives its camouflaged existence as not quite itself, [but] as another,” writes cultural theorist Eliszabeth Grosz, “the capacity to imitate one’s habitat or surroundings, far from performing an adaptive function, witnesses the captivation of a creature by its representations of and as space, its displacement from the center, from a ‘consciousness’ of its place (in its body, located in space) to the perspective of another.” Following Caillois, there is a rupture in the identity of the subjectivity of the insect – the mimicking insect feels as if what is happening inside its body actually comes from outside.

Extending the term mimicry to the field of architecture and art, in this program we will explore the artistic surplus of mimicry. Which aesthetic realms do artists create through strategies of mimicry, camouflage and mimesis?

List of artworks included in the program:

#1

Bernd Oppl: Sick Building

2013, 7min

#2

Lukas Marxt/Marcel Odenbach: Fishing is not done on Tuesdays

2017, 15min

#3

Sena Basöz: Be the Doctor, Practise Nursing

2016, 7Min

#4

Marlies Pöschl: Untitled (Lost Horizon)

2014, 7min

#5

Bernhard Staudinger: Sichuan

2014, 9min

#6

Katharina Swoboda: Reconstructing Z

2014, 2min

#7

Dorit Margreiter: Broken Sequence

2013, 8min

#8

Katharina Swoboda: Penguin Pool

2015, 3:20min

#9

Simona Obholzer: -5°C 40%rF

2016, 7min

About Golden Pixel Cooperative

Golden Pixel Cooperative is a group-platform (initiated in 2013 by Nathalie Koger, Simona Obholzer and Marlies Poeschl) for video-film (and other matters) production and distribution, based in Vienna. The focus of its activities is the exchange and mutual support between young artists, the communication with other people in the public realm and the responsibility of mediation and infrastructure. The group-platform serves as means to support, debate, educate, publish in a micro and macro cosmos.