notturno III material /text

Notturno III / Material is a 2-channel video installation, perceived during my stay in Italy at Casa Baldi/Olevano. After Notturno I (2013) and Notturno II (2017), the first two parts of an autobiographically tainted trilogy about aesthetic impressions embedded into the horizon of contemporary history, Notturno III / Material will give insight into the invention of images and the backgrounds of my way of operation. It will form the starting point of the closing part of the trilogy.

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ulrich polster - markale|2016

The video-collage Markale|2016 is a unification of recordings from the years 1992-95, 2006 and 2016 as well as live broadcastings in Europe during June/July 2016. In its genesis this video work refers to two former works of the artist - MISH (2006) and REPORT (2016). MISH is a travelogue about the Balkans and REPORT a recherche labor about the coverage of the balkan wars and their documentation, starting from the 10-Day war in Slovenia 1991 up to the peace treaty of Dayton in 1995.

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wir sind das volk /concept (excerpt)

It is myself I have never met,
whose face is pasted
on the underside of my mind

Sarah Kane, “4.48 Psychosis” 2000

This video/sound installation examines the slogan “We are the people” with regard to its social relevance in 1989 and today, focusing on its inherent meaning in the light of the misuse it experiences from society and the media, on the one hand, and its romantic idealisation on the other. At the same time the piece inquires into the current state of affairs in Europe and discovers the local in the European context, and vice versa.
The fascination of this installation comes from the way it depicts a backward gaze with a melancholy hue, a poetically transformed reality, and the contradictoriness of life in Europe in the year 2014.

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versprengung /concept

We started off our collaboration with a common will structure. We began with a formal vision that was to bring our individual processes together, and give us clarity and security. But our tendency to quote, to recycle our own sounds ans images, and the pursuit of each our own artistic handwriting changed the structure and eventually dissolved it comoletely. At the end of this process there was a pause, a concentration on the Versprengung, the scattering, which allowed us to let something arise that was outside each of our separate worlds. Oscillating between touch, individuation, ignorance and destruction.

Ulrich Polster
Translation by Juliana Hodkinson

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flusz /concept

“The willow sees the heron’s image… upside down.”

This Haiku of Basho gives the parable of the hypothetical construct of world view and our individual anchoring in it.
On a ride through foreign places, the glance on cultural identity separates into its fragments. The fragments arise from interior, medial, dreamt pictures, fed on yearnings, projections and surfaces. Sequences occurs which allow complex layering: the token picture is the picture of the picture of the picture.

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