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| Melanie Manchot |
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| Film Gallery |
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* 1966, Germany
lives and works in London
more information under: Melanie Manchot at Galerie m Bochum
Trilogie of Reconstructions, 2009 - 2010
The relationship between documentation and staged situations is central to Melanie Manchot’ practice. Rather than employing portraiture as a mode to represent identity, Manchot’s projects propose to record and mediate relations. The protagonists in her films re-enact personal and intimate encounters, taking place in public spaces. In the film Kiss the spectator sees two young people kiss during a nighttime bus ride, oblivious to their surroundings, or is witness in Fight to a confrontation between a bicycle messenger and a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club. A third film, Spat shows an elderly couple fighting. The camera closes in, revealing the heated gestures to be deaf sign language – only face to face communication is possible.
Hence her three new films could be seen as performative portraits of relationships: those between the two protagonists in each of the films yet also in an expanded sense the triangular relations between the camera, the subject and the viewers. The accompanying studio photographs of the participants remove them from the seemingly real-life situation depicted in the film. Here, the viewer is confronted face-to-face with the portrait and its subjects, rather than observing their actions as an invisible voyeur. Hence through the studio portraits the performativity is further investigated, extending ideas about staging and documenting through the formal elements of photography.
Shave, 2007
Slowly, the camera orbits around the figure of a seated man, bare chested, who is being shaved by a barber. The central image of the video installation SHAVE is projected larger than life on the wall, the depicted body generating an extraordinary presence in the room. A recurrent splashing noise steers the viewer's gaze back to the center of the room, to the video of a bowl in which the used razor is being continually rinsed in synchrony with the projection. This action takes place on a monitor into which one peers from above, as if into the real bowl.
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Kiss, 2009
1 channel 16 mm film, 10 min
Fight, 2009
1 Kanal, 16 mm Film transferred to HD
Spat, 2010
1 channel, 16mm film, transferred to HD, 8 min, with sound
Shave, 2007
2 channel synchron video installation, 75 min
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