Saturday, 1 June, 16:00–17:30
Josef Dabernig: Melodramatic Film Miniatures as a Blueprint for Dematerialised Sculpture

The artist Josef Dabernig (Austria, 1956, lives in Vienna) is finally in Helsinki! He was invited by the Metakino experimental film festival, which is hosting an evening with Dabernig at WHS Teatteri Union on Thursday, 30 May at 20:15.

Kohta is very pleased to announce a conversation between Dabernig – whose uncompromising work deserves to be much better known in Finland and the whole Nordic region – and Anders Kreuger at Kohta on Saturday, 1 June at 16:00.

Film, Foto, Objekt, Text, Bau. Film, photography, object, text, and then a good German word that is hard to translate but means at least three things: ‘construction’, ‘architecture’ and ‘urbanism’. This is Dabernig’s own categorisation of his various kinds of works. They are distinct but interconnected.

Dabernig trained as a sculptor and says that he spent most of his time as a student measuring things. When he began to make short films in the mid-1990s, partly inspired by the Austrian tradition of experimental cinema, they were just as composed and articulated as his objects, and just as meticulously planned out, frame by frame, second by second.

Two films will be screened during the talk:

Wisla (1996, 16mm/DCP, b/w, 8 min). ‘In the anti-soccer miniature Wisla (1996) horizontal pans shot at different heights define the meta-filmic brackets around close shots of two protagonists in an empty stadium.’

River Plate (2013, 35mm/DCP, b/w, 16 min). ‘The various forms of such body parts as shoulder, arm, belly, hips, knee, and leg are examined in River Plate (2013) with the help of six women and men stranded on the banks of a mountain river. Added to the filmic equation of figuratively sculptural details are concrete fragments of freeway bridges.’

(The work descriptions are quoted from Josef Dabernig’s scripted lecture Melodramatic Film Miniatures as a Blueprint for Dematerialised Sculpture, on which the conversation at Kohta will be loosely based.)