Tricky Women/Tricky Realities: Modern animation by Austrian artists

Adele Razkövi’s short film deals with a common myth—the empty laundry bas- ket. Starting from the documentary, most likely autobiographical, and in any case philosophical question of what might be hiding at the bottom of the laundry bas- ket if it were ever to be reached, the pro- tagonist positions herself for the leap. Animation, painting, music, sculpture, literature, and dance—utterly different disciplines flow together and yield a pol- yphonic ode to a common object.

A tribute to the Austrian philosopher, sculptor and poet Melitta Urbancic, who fled with her family to Iceland in 1938 to escape the National Socialists. Her poems describe loneliness, the longing for exchange and the fate of an exile existence. This film is dedicated to Lava Garden, to one of her poems, in which she describes the impressive landscape of Iceland and the simultaneous long- ing for her place of origin. Lava rock, a beating heart and the immersive music of the Icelandic composer Ragnheiður Erla Björnsdóttir are composed into a visual poem in remembrance of Melitta Urbancic.

As in a modified computer game from bygone times, we glide through an an- imated labyrinth in a point-of-view per- spective. We first turn the corners over and over, past walls tiled with circular visual elements from various advertising brochures. This flow is accompanied by a collage of voice-overs offering moti- vational and inspirational slogans taken from social media channels: “Why not use the stones people put in your way to build something really great?” “Keep moving – or move over.”

A goose is robbed of her eggs – and of the ground beneath her feet – when a road is rolled out in the countryside. Searching in vain for her eggs, she gets lost in labyrinthine buildings. Together with other geese she eventually forms a resistance movement. A music video for Heaven Sent Cat, based on a 17th-cen- tury protest song against land-grabbing by the privileged classes.

An exploration of Mies van der Rohe that does not present his architectural innovation as a perfect greater whole. Instead, animated photographs break it down into its individual elements, inter- twining inside and outside. This creates spaces that deconstruct, rotate, overlap, recompose - and open up completely new perspectives.

Awards & Festivals:

Sympoietic Bodies is an artistic-philo- sophical exploration of the disruption of boundaries between the human body and its social and physical surroundings. The film experiments with a post-anthro- pocentric scenario, in which the body is decentred, deconstructed, and consid- ered to be the result of various interac- tions and relations. Borders are substi- tuted by linking network systems, rigid walls by flexible membranes. Fragments dissolve and transform into new skins, new bodies.

Michaela Grill’s experimental work builds on scientific films from the 1920s, with close-ups of cell divisions, time- lapse footage of growing fungi, pollen distribution and so on. By painting over and visually condensing the images and adding an almost vegetative soundtrack by Sophie Trudeau, she turns these im- ages into a multisensory attack. They become a psychedelic feast for the third eye, where the screen seems to be ex- ploding time and again. Welcome to the Pleasure Dome!

Awards & Festivals:

The self is an elusive thing. It exists, is essential, present, active, and yet we cannot grasp it. This film tries, never- theless. From 350 photographs of herself and using artificial intelligence (GAN: Generative Adversarial Network), Clau- dia Larcher generates a constantly mor- phing, distorting and deforming self-por- trait. At first, the overlapping images of a baby, a child, a woman, seem to be a chronological description of a person. But soon they become more abstract, appear deformed, grimace-like. Mean- while, off-screen, an artificial voice reflects on the self: a fragmentary nar- ration generated from excerpts of con- versations between the filmmaker and several chatbots. An experimental re- flection on the self in a constant state of becoming, never still enough to be com- pletely tangible.

Awards & Festivals:

The unpleasant loss of controllability of the body is mixed in with the pleasurable and imaginative transformation of every- day objects and processes to make tan- gible the illusionary character of cinema and the persistence of vision. In ISSUES WITH MY OTHER HALF, deep-seated fears are visualized as surreal night- mares in 23 short scenes. Nothing works the way it should or even the way one wants it to – except for the cinematic animation.

How many ways can the human body be divided into two parts? Top and bottom, left and right, up and down… For every part of the body, artist Anna Vasof devises a surprising, witty gag of separation and reversal, executed with seamless digital effects. Then she extends the game to the body’s relationship with mobile phones, pandemic masks – anything with which we interact. As in all her work, Vasof makes the familiar deeply unfamiliar.

Awards & Festivals:

At the bottom of the sea, we meet fem- inist underwater creatures who face a neighbourhood conflict. Four women playing: with themselves, with social ex- pectations, with the computer, keyboard, bass and vocals - shrill and quiet, virtu- oso and virtual, amateurish and abso- lutely professional. A music video as an ode to the joy of living.