Antoinette Zwirchmayr 1: Inner Longings are Very Close to Your Eyes

For over a decade Antoinette Zwirchmayr has been making analog films that give visual form to the fragile relationships between people, things, nature, and constructed spaces. Her work is scintillating and enigmatic, it encompasses fragmentary image compositions and autobiographical memory narratives, filmic treatments of theoretical texts, and abstract fictional films. Bodies, objects, landscapes, and interiors are condensed in these films into precise arrangements and choreographic patterns of movement. The synergy of materials, colours, surfaces, and textures creates a sensory space of hypnotic beauty that also harbours traces of the obscure and unfathomable.

In her films, Antoinette Zwirchmayr places people and objects in various natural environments in a way that is both incongruous and evocative, resulting in a fascinating confusion of scale, abstraction, and representation. Her work demonstrates an abiding interest in juxtaposing strikingly different kinds of substances – skin and stone, fire and ice, plant and textile – and an extraordinary ability to convey the emotional, mental, and physical frisson that results. She films both bodies and landscapes with such an attention to detail and texture that the bodies are transformed into landscapes, and vice versa. This is the case not only in the highly condensed, meditative fictions, but also in the personal essay films that explore the remarkable, troubled history of her own family in a singularly elliptical style.

Most of the films in these two programmes are screened on 16 mm and 35 mm.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr will introduce the screenings of her two programmes of films to talk more about her filmmaking.

Screened:
FRI 27/10, 19:00 SLOTTS