GERNOT WIELAND

Gernot Wieland's work, whether in the form of films, drawings, photographs, installations or lecture-performances, approaches a number of universal questions - language, education, alterity, domination, control, social, political and psychic contexts - blending psychoanalysis with the artist's own childhood memories in narratives told in the first person. Gernot Wieland has built up the foundations of a unique and deeply emotional universe, criss-crossed by the reminiscences of memories that we can't quite decide whether they are the true tales or invented by a narrator speaking in the first person, without it being ever established with certainty whether this is the artist himself or a fictitious alter ego. The tapestry of his world is woven with a poetry uttered by the haunting voice of a Kafkaesque character, unfolding childhood stories and absurd narratives before our very eyes with the help of play-dough characters, crayon-colored scenery, extravagant diagrams, falsely naïve sketches and passages filmed in Super-eight. Gentleness and compunction mingle, revealing here and there the afflicted scoriae of rampant inhumanity, oozing from oppressive institutional machines, deviant educational carcans, gingerly unfolding neuroses like fragile origami. His films and all the visual material that emerges from them - drawings, photograms and photographs - radiate a poignant clarity, throbbing with a sickly beauty where incongruity and embracing feelings pulsate in unison. If Freudian psychoanalysis and the figure of Kafka inhabit, like wandering ghosts, this universe where Gernot Wieland's Austrian origins percolate, he has succeeded in inventing an extraordinary narrative and filmic form where the therapist, trapped in his own memories and associations, is no longer able to listen to his patient, where the authoritarian figures of Kafkaesque systems have dissolved like ink in milk, to quote the title of one of his films (Ink in Milk - 2018). The elusive intonation of his films draws the viewer into the inextricable meanderings of phantasmagorical stories, held together by a lucidity that seems to be carried by a stranger to the world observing - with candor and delicacy - its cracks, dislocations and vulnerability. 

His films have won numerous awards: Aus-Blicke at the Blicke, Filmfestival, Bochum, Germany; the main prize in the German competition at the 69th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany, all in 2023; in 2022, the German Short Film Prize in the category of experimental shorts lasting up to 30 minutes and the Best Film Award at the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux in Paris, France and an honorable mention at the Cannes Shorts Film Festival, Cannes, France; in 2021, Special Mention at ARKIPEL - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Indonesia; in 2020, Best Film Award, VIII Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia; in 2019, the EMAF Media Art Award from German film critics at the EMAF - European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany and a special mention at the 36th Short Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany; in 2017, he won the 20th MOSTYN Open, Llandudno, Wales.

His recent film, The Perfect Square, is selected for the 74th Berlinale - Berlin International Film Festival - Forum Expanded, Berlin, and at First Look 2024, Museum of the Moving Image, New York. His work has been exhibited at Argos Centre for audiovisual arts, Brus-sels; Kindl - Centre of Contemporary Arts, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Bremen; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; 3rd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America, Buenos Aires; Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, Riga; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Steirischer Herbst Festival/Kunsthaus Graz, Graz and Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei; Quartz Studio, Turin; Centre d'art Pasquart, Biel; Musée du château des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard; Museo Berardo, Lisbon. The MAMC+ / Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne (France) will devote a solo exhibition to his work in 2025, accompanied by the publication of a book co-edited by THE PILL and published by JBE Books.

Gernot Wieland was born in Horn, Austria, in 1968. He now lives in Berlin.