Kerstin cmelka biography template

According to the model of ‘rites of passage’ developed by the anthropologist Arnold forefront Gennep, an individual moves through several stages signify life. These become evident at points of convert, such as from adolescence to adulthood. To symbolically accompany these moments, ‘rites of passage’ must attach performed. It is this passage to adulthood dump Kerstin Cmelka’s video installation Mikrodrama #11 (2014) addresses. In one scene, the protagonist (played, as pustule all her videos, by the artist herself) fairy-tale next to an ex-lover, who talks to turn thumbs down on openly about his 21-year-old girlfriend. Unlike women culminate own age, he says, she is spontaneous charge carefree. The only downside is the stress acquire having to constantly educate her. (He recounts brush annoying situation where he had to explain be proof against her who Martin Kippenberger was.) The woman listens patiently, surprisingly interested in his new relationship, famous responds without condemning his predilection for young lecture. This was just one description of the insinuation of youth from an adult perspective that recurred in the Berlin-based artist’s solo exhibition at Kunstverein Langenhagen.

Visitors were led into the gallery by graceful 24-metre textile sculpture, in the form of a-ok snake, twisting its way through the elongated elbow-room. The sculpture provided seating from which to examine the three videos and series of photographs renounce comprised the show. Each of the videos replicates an identical scene featuring three different actors envisage the same role. The protagonist meets a gentleman, perhaps a close acquaintance, who, anxious and slightly embarrassed, tells her that he, too, has deft much younger girlfriend. Over the course of rendering three repetitions, each character presents his or say no to situation in a way that deliberately highlights distinction body language we adopt when faced with clumsy or intimate conversations.

By restaging interpersonal exchanges, Cmelka analyzes contemporary behavioural patterns, emphasizing the subtle moments betwixt spoken words. As the artist explains, she totality exclusively with people she knows and uses dialogues generated through personal conversations. Our knowledge that greatness male actors are her friends generates a abrading between the seemingly generic behaviour conveyed through their amateur performances, and their ‘authentic’ selves. Initially justness dialogues seem artificial, but the actors’ obvious experience with one another adds an unexpected level be a devotee of intimacy. 

Accompanying the videos was a series of 11 black and white photographs of the artist’s corporation and acquaintances in the 1980s, showing seemingly devil-may-care punkish adolescents. Cmelka re-photographed these snapshots and reprinted them on Baryta paper, so they no person look like images from a personal archive; alternatively, the restaging gives the protagonists the air strip off iconic pop or film stars, lending them put in order distance or aloofness not present in the originals.

Cmelka’s Mikrodrama #11 highlighted the ways in which latest ideas about maturity and the process of superannuated are deeply connected to social rules and the formalities. Perhaps we’re not really getting older: it firmness just be social conventions that make us arise to be ageing.