FACT FICTION

Documentary forms and strategies have gained enormous importance in recent videos and films. This goes hand in hand with the resurgence of the narrative in art and the high storage capacities that characterise new media. What meaning and function can the recording of the real, the substrate of a document, still have if everything is immediately narrated, manipulated or documented? Life transmission, webcam, real-time soaps (like Big Brother at first), backup manifest new structures and perspectives of our visual culture. Has the ‘documentary’ survived merely as a stylistic device? Is it still crucial to know whether something is fact or fiction? The artists of this exhibition consciously stage the strategy of the documentary in their work, making the boundaries between fact and fiction increasingly invisible.

Kerry Tribe: The Audition Tapes, 1998, video, 21min
Employing interview-like situations, Kerry Tribe records audio samples for an experimental documentary dealing with family stories and memories. It soon becomes apparent that the characters are actors who refer to and ‘perform’ authentic-looking reports and memories. In the process, they change roles several times. Over the course of the video, the stories begin to contradict each other; different representations are offered while the actors project their own wishes and views onto the characters. The work touches a grey area between autobiography and confession, history and memory, documentary and feature film. Kerry Tribe, born 1973 in Boston, lives and works in Los Angeles, studied at the University of California, Los Angeles and was a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1998. Participation in exhibitions since 1995.

Sandra Schäfer: England - Deutschland, 1997, 1-channel video installation, stereo, 2h51min
Side by side on one screen, the viewer simultaneously sees the English and German broadcast of the football match England - Germany from the 1996 European Championship.The match ended in a draw and led to a penalty shoot-out after extra time. The doubling of the images and the time delay of just under a second alienate the usual view and reveal an enormous distance and ideology of two national perspectives on the same issue.Sandra Schäfer, born in Altenkirchen in 1970, studied art and art education at the Gesamthochschule Kassel. She spent guest semesters in London and has been doing postgraduate studies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe since October 1999. Videos are at the core of her artistic work in which she addresses approaches to documentaries.

Elmar Hess: Kriegsjahre, 1996, video installation, video (Betacam), 35min
Elmar Hess breaks a taboo in ‘Kriegsjahre’. Documentary archive images and the aesthetic cinematic vocabulary of the Third Reich are incorporated without blending into the construction of an individual war story in which the symbols and signs of war are mixed with metaphors and scenes of the battle of the sexes. The inventive montages are reminiscent of the old illusionary machinery of the early film era. Salad bowls are transformed into halls of fame, stacks of toast into monumental buildings, eggcups into oil refineries, tablecloths into urban arrangements. It is not the memory of actual events, but the memory of television images and photographs that forces the suggestive power of the documentary. Elmar Hess, born 1966, studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He has participated in exhibitions since 1991. His film War Years was last shown at the German Open in Wolfsburg.

Jeroen Offermann: The Great Escape,1999, 1-channel video installation, colour, 10min
On a British coast, the camera films the landing of a hovercraft. The boat approaches, the noise becomes thunderous, the hatch opens. The camera itself is motionless. Its fixed setting changes neither the frame nor the angle. A man runs towards the boat and disappears inside. The boat departs. ‘The Great Escape’ is a homage to the science fiction genre and the romantic landscape painting of Caspar David Friedrich. Jeroen Offermann, born in Eindhoven (NL) in 1970, has lived in London since 1997. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breda and at Goldsmith College, University of London. He has been involved in various group exhibitions since 1994.

Stanislaw Mucha: Ein Wunder, 1999, colour, Super 16, Beta SP, 7min

Can miracles be filmed? The place of the miracles is not marked on any map. For a week, the inhabitants of the smallest village in eastern Poland and many pilgrims from the surrounding area have been standing in front of a house. They fix their gaze on a windowpane. Some recognise the Blessed Virgin there, others only an oil stain... The people's longing for miracles crystallises. They believe in what they see. And they see what they believe in. Mucha, born in Poland in 1970, studied at the Academy of Theatre in Krakow, later film and television directing at the Academy of Film and Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg. The film A Miracle was made in 1999 and received awards at the International Film Festival in Stuttgart, among others. His most recent documentary film Mit Bubi' heim ins Reich premiered at the 50th Berlinale.