Gernot Wieland

Thievery and Songs

16:9, 22’40” video, sound, colour, 2016

Potato prints

Oil colour, watercolour, pencil on paper and cardboard, 2017

In Thievery and Songs Wieland has made an exceptionally beautiful, tragicomic and humorous work that is framed by the story of a dancer, Hilde Holger, who in 1938 had to flee from Austria into exile in Bombay because she was Jewish. This collage of moving images is composed of Super 8 film, video, watercolours, drawings, claymation, and Wieland’s father’s photographs. Each frame carries the distinctive atmosphere of its medium. The work includes stories of animals and psychotherapists; memories of Wieland’s Catholic education; the religious-like indoctrination of the Viennese actionists in Austrian culture; a transformation into a snail, which, in the turns of its narrative, bears a relationship to landscapes; the notion of memory and hierarchy; and a therapeutic session.

“We filmed dance movements in a government building, which was important to me. You can tell it is a government building, where you apply for a new passport, you can get married, there is a tax office – the official life, so to speak. I wanted that setting as a ‘quote’ for Austria’s past, since there were so many people who were responsible, who decided”, Wieland explains.

Artist's bio

The Austrian artist Gernot Wieland (b. 1968, Horn, Austria) currently lives and works in Berlin. He works mainly with film, drawing and lecture performance in order to examine psychological conditions in society and in human beings. In his works Wieland links personal narratives, historic reports, scientific facts and fictional elements with tragic and comic events, generating a sense of the uncanny, mostly in an ironic or absurd way. He was recently awarded the prize of the 20th edition of the MOSTYN Open for his work Thievery and Songs, and currently holds a research grant from the Berlin Senate Department of Culture.

Text by Zasha Colah, 2016