0 Comments'Folds' is a visually arresting new work by film artist Robert Seidel, which was recently exhibited at the Lindenau Museum in Altenburg, Germany.
The piece, a 2-channel video, HD, variable loop on 19th century plaster casts of Kladeos, Kephissos, Belvedere Torso, Seer and the Three Goddesses from the Bernhard August von Lindenau Collection, may be understood as a rapprochement with the history of the museum’s collection of plaster casts.
'I was particularly interested in the ancient, fragmented bodies – how through the loss of limbs they became almost abstract, fragmentary sculptures and yet still disclosed a nearly uncanny vitality.' says Seidel, continuing:
'Also noteworthy is that the collection entails sculptures, Greek in origin, that have been replicated time and time again. Hewn from marble and partially painted in colour, the originals were repeatedly copied in marble or plaster in different places across centuries, despoiled of colour and slurred in detail.'
Despite these multiple re-shapings that attend the loss of the original’s memory, new meanings and frictions arise with each copy in each respective present. They are the precondition for over 2400 years of the ongoing revitalization of the legacy of antiquity.
The fold, a continually recurring visual and conceptual motif in Seidel's works, is for him, the pictorial metaphor for these layers and distortions of meaning.
In the projection the fold becomes connected to the fragmentary sculptures, swirls around them, makes them flow with bygone colours, protects or clothes them, gives them peace and lets them come alive for a moment, in order then to be stored as a further layer in the sediment of oblivion.
Take a look at a fantastic video of the piece in motion here.
Documentation Editor Falk Müller.
Documentation Sound Heiko Tippelt.
Photography Jürgen M. Pietsch, Christian Seeling.
