Maya Schweizer "L’étoile de mer"
In the organizer's words:
Maya Schweizer
L'Étoile de Mer
1.2.-14.4.25
Saturday, 1.2.25, 7 pm
Opening with artist talk
Jaro Varga in conversation with Maya Schweizer
Maya Schweizer's 2019 film L'Étoile de Mer begins underwater, more precisely in the Mediterranean Sea at La Ciotat near Marseille. While the camera initially hovers amidst fish in a wide variety of colors and patterns, other images quickly come into view in seamless cuts - glowing animal eyes at night, a hand holding a fossil into the camera, huge turbines lying around. The latter take on the radial form of the starfish whose name the film bears in its title and with which it refers to another film of the same name by Man Ray from 1928.
The title is not the only direct reference to the past 20th century, its avant-gardes and its leading medium, cinema. Like fragments of memory, other images, sentences and sequences emerge from the floods: the famous train, for example, which the Lumière brothers filmed in 1895/96 as it entered the station in the small town of La Ciotat in the south of France; or various intertitles and images from Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad (1961), a central film of European post-war cinema.
For almost two decades now, Maya Schweizer has been exploring history, the passing of time and the complex structure of memory in her primarily cinematic works. By and large, her films have primarily followed a logic of place, or more precisely, the place of memory, as developed by the French historian Pierre Nora in the 1980s.
L'Étoile de Mer now contrasts this fixed (and fixating) place with the sea and water in all its fluidity. The water figures here as an image for forgetting, which is just as much a basic prerequisite for the relationship to time and the past as its counterpart, memory. L'Étoile de Mer thus marks a turning point in the artist's work. On the other hand, however, it makes a historical transformation phase tangible, in the course of which our relationship to the past, history and memory is also fundamentally changing in the face of advanced digitalization and an accompanying new image culture.
ajh.pm
Dornberger Str. 2
33615 Bielefeld
Germany
www.ajh.pm
contact@ajh.pm
IG @ajh.pm
The room is open to the public every Wednesday from 7pm to 9pm.
Guided tours on request.
ajh.pm is an artspace that opened in Bielefeld in December 2020. Video works or art projects by international artists are presented here at regular intervals. The videos are shown in the loop at nightfall and are available on this website for a limited time. The initiator, Audrey Hörmann, wants to use this cultural offering to promote the discussion of young, lesser-known and established artists and their work.
Location
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