3’
29 September 2004 – 2 January 2005
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANFURT
Romerberg
60311 Frankfurt, Germany
phone: (+49-69) 29 98 82-0
fax: (+49-69) 29 98 82-240
welcome@schirn.de
www.schirn.de
Jonas Akerlund, “Turn the Page”, 2004, Still /16 mm / Digital Betacam (c)Jonas Akerlund, Courtesy Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2004 3′
The contemporary trailer, advertising and music clip industry confronts people with a density and speed that has never been seen before. Short films that have the same emotional quality as feature films but last only a few minutes are now enjoying a boom on the Internet as well. Visitors to museum exhibitions are confronted with a variety of video and film booths, which always produces the same pattern of behavior: the viewer enters the room, joining the film at minute 4 or 5, only to become anxious at the thought of all the works left to see, and thus leaving at minute 11 at the very latest in order to rush to the next film. The film may be eighteen minutes long and chronologically structured, but it remains unseen. Against the backdrop of this very development, the Schirn Kunsthalle commissioned to Doug Aitken, Jonas Akerlund,Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Isaac Julien, Sarah Morris, Philippe Parreno, RothStauffenberg, Anri Sala, Markus Schinwald, and Yang Fudong to produce one three-minute short film each on the themes “Condensed Information” and “Condensed Narration.” Both through their subject matter and by technical means such as cuts, fragmentation, poetic compression, and appeals to the viewer’s emotions, the films by these ten artists demonstrate new perspectives on the compression of content and on patterns of perception The exhibition setting was designed in collaboration with the New York architectural team Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture).
The exhibition’s curators – Max Hollein, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Martina Weinhart – comment: “3′ is an exhibition whose standard unit of measure is not a given floor area but a specific interval of time: ten films of three minutes each produce a thirty-minute exhibition in condensed form. 3′ is therefore above all an exhibition that seeks to give the audience an opportunity to relate the film and its duration to each other in a new way. And, not least, 3′ makes it clear how the work of a series of artists develops against the backdrop of the altered mechanisms of perception of a society that has been conditioned to have a ‘limited attention span.’”
The Schirn provided all the funds for the commissioned work. This was made possible by the generous support of T-Online International AG, which will also be presenting videos of the exhibition online under www.t-online.de/3minutes.
CATALOG: 3′. Ed. Max Hollein, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Martina Weinhart. With a preface by Max Hollein, Interviews with Lars Henrik Gass, Ingvild Goetz, Boris Groys, John G. Hanhardt, Alexander Kluge, and Peter Weibel and texts by Max Hollein, Gertrud Koch, Mark Nash, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Pfaller, Ulrich Wegenast, and Martina Weinhart. German/English, ca. 240 pages, 270 illustrations, DVD included (low res). ISBN 3-8321-7488-5, DuMont Verlag, Cologne,
ARTISTS: Doug Aitken, Jonas Akerlund, Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Isaac Julien, Sarah Morris, Philippe Parreno, RothStauffenberg, Anri Sala, Markus Schinwald, and Yang Fudong.
DIRECTOR: Max Hollein
CURATORS: Max Hollein, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Martina Weinhart
OPENING HOURS: Tue, Fri-Sun 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Wed and Thur 10 a.m.-10 p.m.
INFORMATION: www.schirn.de
