Installation view as part of the exhibition Intervals in the exhibition space Korridor, Vienna 2024

Moving Pictures

Michael Michlmayr’s videos, or better said, the “moving pictures” – as in his other photographic works – explore time and space, as well as the condensation of time and space. Quotidian scenes in urban space are filmed from one single position and are then assembled to “film-tableaux”. The same film sequence is multiplied and strung together. As a result of the synchronized and unsynchronized film sequences, a new stage of space-time is created.

In the video, Revisting past (2015/2016), Michael Michlmayr is concerned with the photographic image as a stimulant for subjective memory. He took negative strips from his archive of black-and-white images from 1981–2000 into his hands for a short time, turned them over, looked at them and photographed this act. These photographs were then edited together into a film, thus creating a picture-in-picture situation that takes the act of looking as its subject. In the background there are the regular clicks of a camera shutter release suggesting authenticity. Even very short visual stimulation is enough to prompt memories of the artist’s own life story, important persons, places and events, of previous art works and social and political events. For the viewer it remains an associative pictorial journey in which unequivocal visibility is denied because of the filmic re-contextualisation, the speed of the images, the superimpositions and turning of the strips as well as the lack of familiarity with the contents. It concerns engaging with seeing/not seeing, the structures of perception and the informational content of photographic images.

Petra Noll-Hammerstiel