‘An artist is always questioning his choices’
Video installations from ‘Stille Bewegungen/Tranquil Motions’.
Engaging with the works of Marcel Odenbach demands attention and complete immersion. The 65-year-old’s oeuvre — considered pioneering in German video art — explores the difficult themes of migration, social repression of minorities and creation of conventional gender roles, while also reflecting on the nature of the medium itself. The exhibition ‘Stille Bewegungen/Tranquil Motions’, which opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai along with Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai, last week, offers a glimpse into the last 30 years of Odenbach’s career, featuring early works that were created to be viewed on monitors, complex installations with large projections as well as paperwork featuring his distinctive collages. The exhibition is curated by Matthias Muhling for the Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa). Excerpts from an interview:
A striking feature of your video works is the use of sound. How do you bring together the visual and aural elements in your work?
Right from the beginning, even in the early pieces where I did the sound by myself, I was giving the same attention to it as to the image. I also learned a lot from cinema, especially (Alfred) Hitchcock, about how much you can influence image by the use of sound. And my pieces are like collages, so sound-wise also, they are like collages. For example, for the images, I collect archival footage, images from magazines etc, and I work with sound in the same way.
Credit: indianexpress.com