In the series “HMKV Video of the Month” HMKV presents current video works by international artists in monthly rotation.
Vika Kirchenbauer: Untitled Sequence of Gaps
HMKV Video of the Month
Image: Vika Kirchenbauer, Untitled Sequence of Gaps, 2020, Videostill. © Vika Kirchenbauer & VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2020.
Composed of short vignettes in different techniques and materialities, UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS uses the form of an essay film to approach trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum – on what is felt but never seen. Carefully shifting between planetary macro scales, physical phenomena and individual accounts of affective subject formation, the artist's voice considers violence and its workings, class and queerness not through representation but from within.
The video’s montage is slow and rhythmic, yet also uneven. The flow of images is interrupted by gaps that hold no less significance than the imagery itself. Footage in which public visual memory stands in for personal remembrance exists alongside sequences recorded via infrared imaging and scenes captured under ultraviolet light or microwave radiation. While pondering the effects of the invisible and the power inherent in shifting violence beyond visibility, the piece simultaneously reflects upon the digital archives and technologies that help shape the contemporary human’s relation to past, present and future.
The work tests the limits of vision and recordability, contemplating instances where a subject remains opaque to itself. Ghosts appear from holes ripped into time by an unremembered childhood, and a recently abolished witch-burning ritual in the artist's rural home town serves as a foil against which to question the politics of visibility.
Suggested by Niklas Goldbach, as part of his solo exhibition The Paradise Machine at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmunder U, level 3 (until 1 September 2024).
“In the village where I had to live for a few years as a teenager, witches and sorcerers wore no costumes or masks and were visible from afar. Public bonfires were limited to the Easter Sunday drinking binge, and there was no sign of queer people, let alone relatives, until the horizon of the gridded agricultural landscape, from which only the rapeseed fields stood out, radiant and almost conciliatory, as yellow as the sun.
In UNTITLED SEQUENCE OF GAPS (2020), the voice of Vika Kirchenbauer gives an anecdotal and composed account of her upbringing and dates the onset of her memory at the age of seven, accompanying the start of school. No images before that, mostly isolated memories afterwards. Absence cannot be represented.
The fly screen-like structure of the microwave window, with which Kirchenbauer begins the work, becomes a matrix of gender relations. Sticky popcorn - home alone. Childhood as a fantasy for adults.
Inevitably one searches oneself and asks oneself which images of one's own gay childhood one has painfully overwritten, which violence one has banished to the shadow zones of memory... there can be no such thing as erasure, for "what is erased, occasionally returns as a ghost".
A renewed and solidary flare-up of my empathy at the mention of holiday jobs in factories and the questioning of one's own ability to perform and adapt, the reflection on one's own becoming. Nothing can be so difficult as humble beginnings.
An aunt, it is laconically reported towards the end, transformed her (queer) vulnerability into self-esteem and respect - and thus entered a different spectrum of light, from which she could hopefully have served as a role model for the artist, luminous and visible from afar, radically ultra-violet.” – Niklas Goldbach
Vika Kirchenbauer
Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. With particular focus on affective subject formation, she examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within institutional power structures. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kirchenbauer’s work have been presented at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna. Her videos and installations have been exhibited in group shows and screenings at, among others, d/p, Seoul; the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Berlin International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her first monograph is published by Mousse Publishing, and unites essays and works from the past ten years of her practice. Since 2022 she is Professor of Fine Art / Foundation Class ‘Film/Video’ at the Braunschweig University of Art.