Körperschleusen (Liquid Souls) 2013

SR Media Art Award 2013

Rainer B. Schossig (art historian an reviewer, Bremen) on the awarding of the SR Media Art Prize 2013:

"The multi-channel sound and video installation "Liquid Souls", which Claudia Brieske developed together with the Swiss composer and vocalist Franziska Baumann already for the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2011, was the result of a joint exploration of utopian models of staging. The title "Liquid Souls" also points to this: it means something like "liquid souls" but also "liquefaction of the soulful".
Claudia Brieske is concerned with the fluent timing of gliding images, with the fusion of space, voice and atmosphere. The results of this process: precisely synchronised, interacting sequences of images and sound, which have been recomposed by Claudia Brieske for the installation here on the grounds of the Völklingen Steelfactory as rhythmic "body sluices" consisting of moving images and photographic elements, of historical and contemporary sound and linked in an illuminating way to the spatial context of the former steelworks.

The brutally booming soundscape in the bunker of the "Paradise" is reminiscent of the former production of coke at this site of the Stahlhütte. Claudia Brieske metaphorically reanimates this archaic industrial process not only acoustically but also visually. A thankful task for the technology of the new media. In the process, the technological as well as civilisation-historical distance to the metallurgical processes of the past becomes sensually tangible.
Several large still photographs as well as two video and sound sequences show simple physical-plastic gestures: on the one side, two hands that grasp an anonymous head protruding into the picture less empathetically than roughly, as in a first-aid operation, rhythmically tearing open and closing its mouth again.
On a second projection, a half-figure appears in profile, spitting out water at irregular intervals. The powerful sound underpinning the images supports and intensifies the drama of the situation. The opening and closing of an anonymous human mouth is paralleled by a mechanical, industrial sluice.

In this way, before our eyes and ears - which are already wide open when we walk through the Völklingen Stahlhütte Claudia Brieske deliberately leaves the inner connection of both aspects of her work to the viewer. She is one of those few artists who do not work on the quantitative enlargement of the abundance of optical and acoustic overwhelmingness, but on its qualitative penetration and thus critical enlightenment. The fact that she does not forget that art always has first and foremost sensually perceptible, i.e. aesthetic qualities, is optimistic."

 

Körperschleusen (Liquid Souls)
2-chanel video and sound installation + photografies (UV-prints on aluminium) realized in the former coke oven of UNESCO world cultural heritage Völklinger Hütte

actors in photografies and video: Jeannine Hirzel, Jean-Claude Pellaton
sound: Franziska Baumann