Monika Rechsteiner ja Birthe Zimmermann
“fictitious landscape…”
Video / Installation

MUU galleria 26.11.-19.12.2004
Exhibition opening on Thursday 25th November at 5-7 pm

Director of Goethe-Institut Eike Fuhrmann opens the event.
Welcome!

www.muu.fi/fictitiouslandscape

Muu Gallery presents the Video Installation of Monika Rechsteiner (Basel/Berliin) together with the Installation of Birthe Zimmermann (Berliin) under the title ”fictitious landscape...”.

Artists
Monika Rechsteiner (Schwitzerland) has been working in Finland in 1998 and 2002, recently in Finnish Artists´ Studio `Foundation in Tapiola. Her working methods are photography, film and film and object installations.

Birthe Zimmermann (German) has been working in Finland in 2002 and studied in Academy of Fine Arts with the stipend of DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Artwork
The Cinematic projections of Monika Rechsteiner convey the viewer with the play of Landscapes. They bring forth enigmatic, dreamlike chapters of stories that never could take place. The visual imagery is displayed through constant movement that sporadically ceases. Through the viewpoint of human sensation and valuation this piece could be categorised as a Landscape study. The piece of Rechsteiner, as well as the process of creation behind it can be defined as a paradox of similitude of movement and the immobilised.
In fictitious landscape there will be a 42 minutes video of a Swiss mountain and a super8 film looped on a video which interact with the sculptures of Birthe Zimmermann.

In the work of Birthe Zimmermann the American minimalism of the 60's is shifted to the “arbitrarily” esthetic post-structuralism. Zimmermann places on display collage objects that merge into a whole, which as such give impression of architecture or landscape miniatures. Installed in a gallery space as wall and floor pieces they form “model rooms” that remind the viewer of virtual landscape architecture. The concept of Landscape thus shifts into the hypothetical structures of digital worlds of imagery.

Monika Rechsteiner and Birthe Zimmermann conclude their work in a similar, vacillating binary between artificial and authentic. Defined by different media and techniques of rendering these nearly opposite artwork anyway form a unity. This exhibition travels between the visions of natural beauty and the aesthetic characteristic to the end of the Industrial Era. Virtuality and 'non-placeness' entwine the expectations of the concept of Landscape. The natural beauty conceptualized coalesces with the apparitions of virtual spaces.