“It is”,Tamara Grcic once said in a conversation, “intermediate states that interest me, points from which you can feel or see changes. When I track down these moments, capture them and transport them into the exhibition space, something moves from there.”
The artist Tamara Grcic, who is taking part in this year’s 53rd Biennale di Venezia with an installation, is only showing “light images” in the exhibition at the FOTOHOF. You can see the video “una serenata”, 2008, the single image projection “Heaven”, 2009, which moves across the wall using a rotating mirror, and the double slide projection “side by side”, 2009. The last two works were created for the exhibition at the FOTOHOF .

All three works are designed in such a way that they develop relationships with each other and a specific interaction arises in the space.

In the video “una serenata” various scenes are combined with one another. You can see a young singer practicing his voice in an interior room in front of an open window, “singing out,” so to speak. Outside the window there is a large tree that moves in the wind. Afterwards, a moving water surface can be seen in which wide-open fish mouths appear and take a breath. The silent movements of the mouths leave circles on the surface of the water. In the midst of the fish, the head of a young girl emerges from the reflected light, looks around curiously, turns her head and turns away, just as the fish had previously disappeared under the surface of the water again and again. Later we see an old Sicilian singer singing a serenade. It is an old Carolingian song that tells of a young prince who asks his beloved to show herself on the balcony and let him enter. As in the song, the entire film is about the longing to make contact, to step out of one’s own inner self with one’s voice in order to show oneself to the outside and touch it. The interplay with this is the shy retreat, symbolized by the fish that dive quickly under the surface of the water.

In the work »Himmel«, 2009, 80 projected individual images of cloudy skies move across the gallery wall. The scanned individual images are projected by a projector against a rotating mirror cube, which transports the images along the length of the wall. There are cloudy, rugged, moving skies behind which the sun remains hidden. The passing skies spatially connect the work una serenata and side by side.

»Next to each other« consists of two parallel slide projections, each with 16 motifs in an endless loop. In both projections you can see old and young men’s hands, photographed in an artificial interior situation under artificial light with a black background. In the left projection the hands are busy with red playing cards. Only the red backs of the cards can be seen. In the right projection, the hands are busy with strings. For this work, Tamara Grcic photographed an old and a young magician, both of whom perform the same tricks with cards and strings. The selection and sequence of the images is not about the representation of the respective trick. The very decided and practiced hand movements captured in the still image are placed one after the other in the slide carousel in such a way that a completely enigmatic, self-contained sequence of actions is created. The parallel projection of the two different pairs of hands creates a relationship or togetherness, but at the same time it is empty because it does not really result in a common, recognizable action and does not lead to a visible result.

The interaction of the three works is about the interplay between showing and hiding, concrete statements and enigmatic actions.