Curated by Stefano Rabolli Pansera
Michel Auder (born 1944 in Soissons, France) is a filmmaker who has been creating experimental movies and video art since the late 1960s. Auder is a poet of visual observation— his films bear an affinity to literary forms and can best be described as filmic poetry. He is known for his non-linear and non-narrative style, capturing his life and the lives of those around him in an intimate and fragmented manner.
Auder's work often blurs the lines between art, documentation, and personal narrative, the diaristic and oneiric. Throughout his career, he has produced a significant body of work ranging from fictional narratives to personal documentaries. Auder's early adoption of the portable video camera allowed him to document the everyday phenomena of his own private experiences, with a directness that was revolutionary at the time and that is still radical after many decades.
In New York he was involved with Andy Warhol's Factory and became a participant-observer of the New York social scene, capturing footage of many of the personalities and events associated with it. This connection led to a video archive of thousands of hours that offers a unique perspective on this period of American art history.
Over the decades, Auder has continued to work consistently exploring the potential of video as a medium. Through his works, Auder builds a connection between the personal and the universal. He allows viewers to see the world through his eyes, sharing experiences that range from banal to extraordinary. Through the intimate use of the filmic medium, Auder questions the nature of time and memory, juxtaposing real and fictional, perception and representation, intimate and exposed.
The selection of works presented in Bangkok Kunsthalle, unfolds along two interwoven trajectories: five works on Nature and nine works on the evolution of Auder's oeuvre through different genres.
In the first group of works, Michel Auder often describes his relationship to Nature in terms of time. He explains how the representation of Nature necessitated the invention of a specific editing technique in order to accommodate the nuanced temporality of natural phenomena.
In his seminal film 'Voyage to the Centre of the Phone Lines', (1993), Michel Auder juxtaposes covert recordings of anonymous mobile-phone conversations with a seascape— sand, water, the sun, the moon, wandering birds, not a human in sight. The images evoke an accepted universality of the timeless natural world, while the audio evokes a sense of mundanity and futility, a Joycean smattering of human drama and banality. People fret obsessively to one another about their personal lives, their frailties, the anxiety in their voices revealing their inchoate sense of mortality.
'Domaine de la Nature' (2023) is a collage of natural scenery employing extensive long pans and a slow rhythm.
'I am So Jealous of Birds II' (2011) is a 'video haiku' of New York City birds.
Finally, 'Flowers of Thailand' (2023) is a two-screen installation, produced in Bangkok, which evokes an epistolary correspondence between form and colour.
In the second group of works, a selection of chronicles, travelogues, diaries, video portraits, video poems and intimate recollections reveal Michel Auder's predilection for modes of editing and filming that enable multiple narratives to emerge.
'Yaowarat' (2023) depicts a daily scene of Bangkok streetlife, a voluntary choreography of people and commodities that are perfectly synchronized.
Video portraits of artists such as 'Cindy Sherman' (1988), 'Florence' (1975) and 'Alice Neel Painting Margaret' (1978 ed.2009)constitute extraordinary poetic documentations of the creative process of artists in their studios.
Auder's videos often take the form of intimate correspondences to impossible interlocutors such as 'Heads of Town' (2009). At times, his works take the form of collages, adopting the rhythmic structure of music and poetry such as 'Van Gogh' (2023), 'Gemaelde' (2011, ed. 2019) or 'Bangkok City' (2023).
'DAUGHTERS' (2023) is an installation which is shown for the first time.
It combines two videos: 'Talking Head' (1976) an intimate documentation of the artist's daughter talking to herself, and 'DAUGHTERS' (2023) a work which subtly inverts the relationship between foreground and background while the voiceover and words by Natalie Brueck assigns a simultaneously menacing and seductive sonic element to it.
Michel Auder's work has been shown in numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including solo shows and retrospectives in Moma PS1 (New York, USA), documenta 14 (Kassel, Athens), 2014 Whitney Biennial (New York, USA), Frans Hals Museum (Haarlem, The Netherlands), Fondation Vincent Van Gogh (Arles, France), documenta 13 (Kassel, Germany), Museum Ludwig (Cologne, Germany) and Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland). His work is represented in public collections internationally, including Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), FRAC Provence-Alpes-Cotes d'Azur (Marseille, France), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris, France) and Muhka (Antwerp, Germany), ICA (Miami, USA) amongst others.
Source: fyi bangkok
