Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Everything Not Said, 2014, dual slide-projection
The dual slide-projection “Everything Not Said” (2014) traces the boundaries between the body’s interior and exterior. A large collection of single frames showing bandaged heads was compiled from movies, newly arranged and paired with extracts from psychiatric health questionnaires. Caught between transparency and opacity; vulnerability and one’s armour against it; individuality and anonymity, the faces condense into a panopticon of voyeurs under observation.
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Everything Not Said, 2014, dual slide-projection
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Everything Not Said, 2014, dual slide-projection
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), 2014, pigment print, 60 x 52 cm
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), 2014, pigment print, 60 x 52 cm
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Crime Scene, 2013, 2 light boxes, 66 x 20 cm each
In the dual light box “Crime Scene” (2013), Girardet & Müller change the sequence in four events of cinematic action. With their intervention, the artists obstruct what the movie seeks to represent through its re-enactment of forensic investigation, namely: evidence and factuality.
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Cut, 2013, DCP / HD-Loop, 1,85:1, colour and black & white, sound, 13'0'', exhibition view
The Work Cut shows a montage of 95 shots from 95 movies ranging from the late 1940s to the 2010s in which the human body is idealised and depicted as practically indestructible and highly mutable as well as being the cause of pain, anxiety, hysteria and delusion. It ties the phantasmagorical idea of the fully transparent, controllable and infinitely malleable body to the notion of corporeality as a wound that can never heal. The concept of the body that can be formed and disciplined is juxtaposed with a physique that is fragile and vulnerable to danger, one that terrifies, ages and dies.
“The bodies that spring from Girardet and Müller’s cutting board have lost their sharp outlines, instead becoming what Deleuze calles 'anorganic bodies' – decentralised bodies that have been stripped from their organisation and have turned into 'zones of indiscernibility' in which various persons blend into one another, and where technology seamlessly merges into body parts and vice-versa … a wholly new corporeal sense arises from the images and transfers itself onto the stunned viewer, who has no choice but to be overwhelmed by these unfamiliar sensations.”
- Johannes Binotto
Funded by the German Federal Filmboard
Cut was awarded the Best European Short Film of 2013 Award at the Curtas Vila do Conde Shortfilm Festival.
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Cut, 2013, DCP/HD-Loop, 1,85:1, colour and black & white, sound, 13'0'', film still
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Cut, 2013, DCP/HD-Loop, 1,85:1, colour and black &white, sound, 13'0'', film still
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Eye, 2010, 5 Lambda Prints, Artsec mounted on aluminium, 45 x 80 cm each, exhibition view
In Eye, a film sequence is dissected into five moments – reminiscent of phase photography. The circular shape of a spotlight is beginning to glow, to shine and then to disappear in semidarkness again. The high-gloss surfaces of the prints evoke the association of one's own reflection in the pupil of a counterpart when we are eyeball to eyeball with one another. The spotlight's stages of glowing, then gradually disappearing into darkness are mirror images of the constriction and dilation of the pupil.
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Eye, 2010, 5 Lamda Artsec prints mounted on aluminium, each 45 x 80 cm
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Eye, 2010, 5 Lamda Artsec prints mounted on aluminium, each 45 x 80 cm
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Reflex, 2013, DVD loop, 4:3, black & white, sound, 1'50'', exhibition view
"One is unaware of the process as it is happening,” these ten words – derived from a sentence on a theory of language acquisition – have been assigned to the fingers belonging to a patient’s both hands, in the video-loop "Reflex" (2013). Through a clinical trigger-response-test, a doctor presses onto the fingertips in various sequences, thus evoking the words. Whereas these words then appear correctly in the images, the person under examination speaks the binary opposite of the word they are typing out loud.