Album

Director: Matthias Müller    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: 1961 born in Bielefeld 1980 - 1987 Studied Arts and German Literature at Bielefeld University 1987 - 1991 Studied Arts at the HBK Braunschweig. Master’s degree Meisterschüler bei Prof. Gerhard Büttenbender 1994 - 1997 Guest Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main 1998 - 99 Guest Professor at the Dortmund Fachhochschule Since 2003 Professor for Experimental Film at the Academy of Media Arts, KHM, Cologne Matthias Müller is an artist working in film, video and photography. As a curator, Müller has organised numerous avant-garde film events, such as the "Found Footage Film Festival" (1996 and '99), the first German festival of autobiographical films, "Ich etc." (1998), and various touring programs. For more than fifteen years he has taken part with his films and videos in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Rotterdam. His work has also been featured in several group and solo exhibitions, for example at the documenta X, the Manifesta 3, in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris. In 1994, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, dedicated a retrospective to him. His films and videos are part of the collections of institutions such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, the Nederlands Film Museum, Amsterdam, the Australian Centre For The Moving Image, Melbourne, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Goetz Collection, Munich, and Tate Modern, London. His works can be read as an unwritten history of experimental cinema in Germany. He has been known in the film world for decades due to his presence in numerous short and experimental film festivals in Germany and worldwide and in communal cinemas. Furthermore, in recent years, he has made a name for himself in the art world as well with his video installations and photography. From the Super 8 movement in the eighties as well as the genre-crossing work with found footage, through the mutual interweaving of analogue and digital image media up to the cinematographic installation: In Müller’s biography as an artist and in his film aesthetics, Hollywood, avant-garde film and queer cinema meet, as well as the radical changes in media and representation technologies in the eighties and nineties – together with the resulting changes in the cinematic landscape, which for him too have opened up to include the art spaces. Müller's determined interest in questions of memory, traces of the past and the historical body makes his films, videos and installations the central point for a vast array of interrelated approaches. In 2005 edition arsenal experimental published The Memo Book on the films, videos and installations of Matthias Müller. Selected Awards and Honours 1988 American Federation of Arts Experimental Film Award 1991 Preis der deutschen Filmkritik 1992 Niedersächsisches Nachwuchsstipendium des Ministeriums für Wissenschaft und Kultur 1993 Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen für junge Künstler 1995 Great Prize, Festival Internacional Curtas Metragens, Vila do Conde 1996 Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1997 Preis der deutschen Filmkritik 1998 First Prize, Semana de cine experimental, Madrid 1999 Main Award, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 1999 Nomination for the European Film Award 1999 1st Prize, Viper Festival, Lucerne 2000 Preis der deutschen Filmkritik (with Christoph Girardet) 2000 Jahrespreis des Verbandes der deutschen Kritiker 2000 Kunstfonds e.V. Arbeitsstipendium 2003 The Ken Burns “Best of the Festival“ Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival 2004 Marler Video-Kunst-Preis

Country: Germany

Year: 2001

Synopsis: "ALBUM is nurtured by my personal arsenal of memories. Numerous moving images, collected by me over the years without any particular purpose in mind, are the visual source of this collage: flotsam and jetsam floating down a river, a plastic bag swirling around a wire, a shirt hanging in an open window. These motifs encounter each other, as do pictures in a photo album. Inserted texts revolve around processes of memory, appropriation and loss. Their recurring themes stay fragments – like single sentences lifted from a diary. They accompany and temporarily possess the images, only to ultimately leave them as they are: open, ambiguous and autonomous." (Matthias Müller)

Language: English

Tags: Experimental film