Camera Austria International 130
Featuring:
Carolin Förster on Zoe Leonard
William L. Fox on The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Jens Asthoff on Philip Gaißer
Luigi Fassi on Michael Höpfner
Column: Cinenova – Feminist Film and Video Distributor
Landscape appears to be omnipresent, perhaps since it serves as a validation of one’s own psychogeographies, as a tourism brochure, or even as confirmation of the catastrophic decline of ecological systems. Landscape is involved in an immense production of visibility and, maybe for this very reason, is at risk of disappearing through a kind of over- or double exposure, as suggested by Philip Gaißer‘s photograph printed on the cover of this edition of Camera Austria International. The image also demonstrates how landscape is never simply present, but rather in need of construction and re-construction in order to be understood as an articulation of the present. Gaißer’s work is characteristic of this operation between the acts of documenting and intervening “in which the cultural and civilising interpenetration of the setting manifests,” as Jens Asthoff writes. A production of landscape is likewise evident in Michael Höpfner‘s projects: created on his walks through Tibet, often lasting weeks at a time, are sequences of almost horizonless images. Instead of documenting what could be seen, they show what kind of spatial production provides the foundation for staging aspects of landscape. Finally, the bubblegum photographs by Zoe Leonard are also readable as a variation on landscape, whereby part of American cultural history has been deposited or can be reconstructed, being in fact so closely linked to everyday cultural aspects that, in a way, it also tends towards a banal lack of visibility. Within this framework we considered it essential to invite The Center for Land Use Interpretation to contribute to this issue. The countless photographs in the Land Use Database also substantiate the idea of landscape as an archive, as a depository for the contaminated residues of a society focused on consumption and exploitation. It is a plethora of images that confronts us with the question of a possible future for landscape.
In their second contribution to this year’s Column, Irene Revell and Kerstin Schroedinger from the collective Cinenova – Feminist Film and Video Distributor write—with a view to the question of a possible “feminist landscape”—about a “diffracted” gaze that “enables a vision that is diffracted, in more ways than one, with all that the material can offer at stake.”
Jeanne Faust curated the Forum section and presents a sequence of recent works by Linda Lebeck, Dani Gherca, Natalia Sidor, Wiebke Schwarzhans, Jan Mammey, and Till Megerle.
This issue is rounded off by Jan Wenzel‘s “The Revolving Bookshelf” and by responses to newly published books, as well as 21 reviews on 30 exhibitions from 10 countries, including: Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, Wiels, Brussels; Feminismen, Nordstern Videokunstzentrum, Gelsenkirchen; Vincent Meessen / Thela Tendu: Patterns for (Re)cognition, Kunsthalle Basel; Not Yet: On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Bouchra Khalili: Foreign Office, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Anna Jermolaewa: Good Times, Bad Times, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; 61st International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Andrea Fraser, Museum der Moderne Salzburg; 56th Venice Biennale.
Camera Austria International
published quarterly, 112 pages, German / English
