Director: Christoph Girardet
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Biography: Christoph Girardet was born in Langenhagen in 1966.
He studied Fine Arts at the Braunschweig School of Art (Master’s degree in 1994).
Since 1989, he has produced video tapes and video installations, since 1994 some of them in collaboration with video artist Volker Schreiner and since 1999 regularly in collaboration with filmmaker Matthias Müller.
Girardet has participated in group shows at major institutions such as Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, and Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center.
Solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at institutions such as Walker Art Center, Galerie für Gegenwartskunst Bremen, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, Palais des Beaux-Arts Bruxelles, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Sean Kelly Gallery New York, and Kunsthalle Bielefeld statt. His work is part of various public and private collections.
He was awarded various grants and stipends, such as the stipend for the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2000) and the Villa Massimo stipend in Rome (2004).
He lives and works in Hannover.
Director: Matthias Müller
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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: 2006
Synopsis: Composed of densely atmospheric and highly stylized recycled commercial footage of young, picture perfect models pleasurably applying personal hygiene and cosmetic products in a quick cut montage of disembodied, glistening skins, hairs, hands, and lips, juxtaposed against the sensual application of assorted foams, lotions, waxes, and creams, these carefully constructed, plastic images begin to fade, speckle, crack, distort, and burn with the material deterioration of the celluloid itself, before being reduced to the stark whiteness – and unadulterated purity – of an empty projection. At once idealized and grotesque, the disintegrating images become an integral reflection of the title’s double entendre of hide as both an organic surface that inherently decays with time, and the deliberate act of concealing its irreversible plasticity. Using the materiality of film as a surrogate for the materiality of the human body, Girardet and Müller create a droll metaphor for the vain pursuit of consumer-driven eternal youth.
(Views from the Avantgarde, 2007)
