Josef Dabernig. Films.

This film selection presented now in Bucharest contains works done by Josef Dabernig between 1996 (Wisla) and 2005 (Lancia Thema). The films can be read like a layered narrative of different contexts, not necessarily explaining them but working with the tension generated by their internal contradictions. The script is constructed similar to Dabernig's minimalist architecture interventions and grid structures, using rational methods to organize camera movements, tempo, actions - but at the same time considering imperfections, absences or lapses. His characters are performing usual, familiar gestures in a repetitive yet fragmented, disrupted way.

Florin Tudor

The work of Josef Dabernig sometimes seems to be a sort of personal archaeology of modernity. It displays an admiration for the utopian and rational, but also a certain pleasure at gaps, mismatches and failures in such ideally conceived structures. It is important that he sees modernity as marked by contradictions and as heterogeneous in spite of its claims for universality. Admiration for the rational forms and structures of modernity and a certain obsession with them are always combined with an ironic and distanced attitude.

Igor Zabel, 2003

thanks to: Barbara Steiner and Stiftung Galerie für Zeitgenossische Kunst Leipzig für Experimentale e.V. and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.

Pressetext

Josef Dabernig. Films.
(featuring G.R.A.M. and Markus Scherer)
Kurator: Florin Tudor