Vika Kirchenbauer.

Like Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship

Date: 2012
Length: 24:33 min.
Format: 16:9
Specifications: Colour, Sound, Single Channel
Courtesy the artist

„Rats are glorious deserters and we must admire them. Rats don´t want to be captains trying to keep the cause afloat. But swim on open water.“ Vika Kirchenbauer’s “Like Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship” is a very personal work. In it she examines social conventions with the help of spoken texts, film material and background noise on various narrative planes. What does it mean, to be a man or a woman? What does it mean, not to fit into a gender role? The artist confronts the viewer with her own transidentity. In a series of atmospheric dense scenes, she shows the various ways of looking at this. She matches spoken medical reports with her own statements and memories. The accompanying film scenes, in their turn, refer to family, society, sexuality, the law and the state. These aspects are tied to the question of self-identity. Scenes in which one can only see people’s legs, shadows on zebra crossings, or people who cannot clearly be identified as a man or a woman emphasise this. Vika Kirchenbauer  works with contrasts: moving, expressive scenes alternate with imaginary family photographs, which the spoken text elevates to another level of meaning. The result is a complex web of text, film and sound.

Susanne Kube
 

Interview:

► 1. Your work has been chosen among over 2000 festival entries to participate in VIDEONALE.14. In which context do you prefer to present your work, festival/cinema context or exhibition? And what kind of difference does the respective mode of presentation mean for you / your work?

Generally I'm quite pleased that my single-channel video works find reception in such a broad range of contexts. In cinemas, for instance, I secretly enjoy the fact that even people who find a piece of work utterly painful tend to sit through it. That can create an interesting atmosphere. There are some works like Mangels Nachfrage/Due to Lack of Demand (2010) or my new collaboration with Martin Sulzer on The Pigeon Project (2013) that can only be
presented in exhibition spaces due to special installation requirements or the use of other media. So it just depends really… As a viewer I much prefer exhibitions, simply for the possibility of re-watching video work,
or of watching it several times in a row.

► 2. Art can be seen as a mirror that registers and reflects life or as a tool that  Is there a particular theme, concept or problem your art addresses the most?

In my practice I often examine the construction of narrative and temporal coherence in relation to memory.
Following observations about how 'coherent biographies' are constructed, and partly based on the psychiatric assessments declaring me 'incurably transsexual', in Like Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship I try to layer sometimes contradicting aspects of interpretation, information, memory and non-remembrance up to an ambiguous point where such terms as subjectivity, objectivity or the distinction between what is true or false become unimportant and obsolete. Although I myself do not believe that there is much sense to be found in my past, I took great interest in reflecting upon the way such apparatuses as state, law and psychiatry define the ways in which an individual's life is documented and interpreted in what one might call an 'official memory'. In a society heavily shaped by the idea of transparency, I consider Like Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship an attempt at a perversion of this concept.

► 3. In which way is the video medium an excellent possibility to express your intended subjects, especially in contrast to other media you use? Or do you work exclusively with video?

More recently I've turned to working more with objects or quasi-subjects that form parts of installations. I don't have any clear preferences in my choice of media, although I must admit that I find the element of time that is present in video and sound to be very attractive.