Director: Florian Zeyfang
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Biography: Florian Zeyfang born 1965 in Stuttgart, Germany. 1987 to 1993 at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. 1997/8 at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, currently Professor for Video/Installation at the Art Academy in Umeå, Sweden. In his texts, videos and installation work, the Berlin based artist, videomaker and writer Florian Zeyfang critically looks at the connotations of a globalized world of media signs and at the consequences for the society and the individual, taking into account historic aspects of both art and political movements. His projects are conceived within different forms of the moving image: film, video, slide projection, animation. Spacious installations as well as slide series ("slow films") form an important part of his discussion of “time-based media.” Florian Zeyfang regularly takes part in exhibitions nationally and abroad, recently in Kunstverein Köln, at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Artists Space, New York; at the 2nd Tirana Biennale, at ICA Moscow, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kunstverein Hannover, at the 6th Werkleitz Biennale in Halle and at the KW Berlin. Furthermore, the artist curates projects for institutions like CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warschau, sala rekalde in Bilbao, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the 8th Havanna Biennale, the foto festival in Houston, in the Museum for Applied Arts Wien, in the MAK Schindlerhaus in Los Angeles and the Swiss Institute in New York. Currently, Florian Zeyfang works on exhibition projects ranging between Art and experimental film (“Poor Man´s Expression”, Berlin 2006; “1,2,3 Avant-Gardes”, Warschau/Stuttgart/Bilbao 2006-2008).
Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger are architects and live in Vienna. Since 2001 Schmidt-Colinet/Schmoeger and Florian Zeyfang have collaborated on exhibitions and projects. Together with Eugenio Valdés Figueroa they published “Pabellón Cuba,” an extensive reader on art, architecture, and film in Cuba.
Country: Turkey
Year: 2003
Synopsis: "HAUNTED GÜRTELWALD [was] created within the context of Zeyfang’s working visit in Istanbul in 2003. The edit (…) condenses the mixing, montage, and alienation of various shots:
After a brief phase of accustoming oneself to the images, one recognizes at the beginning scenes of a light-flooded forest, families dispersed among the trees as if they were on an outing, while fragments of lively performed speeches are simultaneously heard. The images are obstructed by fluttering, fuzzy, vertical stripes that – without following a discernable logic – repeatedly spread across the image.
This principle of making anonymous is continued in the following scenes of a peace march on the brink of escalation, which was held in Istanbul when the war in Iraq broke out, and of a May demonstration. As one can see during the further course of the clip, these stripes are prolonged in "reality" in the installation, where real, thin tree trunks are situated outside the video projection area.
The "obstruction" within the image can be understood as a bow to the Surrealist scepticism about the reality of images and language – Magritte’s "Carte Blanche" (1965) may come to mind, the picture of a horsewoman in the woods who, inconsistent as regards the logic of the image, can be seen alternately in front of and behind the surrounding trees. Here, we already encounter a moment of distancing with the video-equivalent recourse to the displayed "flatness" of modernist painting, something which can also be observed in the following clips. The irritation that arises – in the interplay with the musique-concrète-like soundtrack – lends the edited loops of the different source materials a persuasive power.
The title, declaring the forest belt around Istanbul a haunted ghost zone of a superficially indefinable reality, does the rest to add to the structure of the installation, which promises conceptual simplicity, a kind of doubtfulness of rationality. So it is not only together with the real continuation outside the image space that a prevailing mood of association is created, encouraging one to shift what is viewed into the context of a more general statement on filmed reality."
(from: Clemens Krümmel, "Film and Drawing on a Tape of Florian Zeyfang", in: Florian Zeyfang: Fokussy, Frankfurt 2004)
Tags: Video Installation, Loop