#16: Mario Pfeifer

Mario Pfeiffer’s work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film, in locations ranging from Mumbai to California to the Western Sahara. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. Often, Pfeifer collaborates on publications that reconsider these projects, offering research materials and critical investigations by writers and thinkers of related fields, concerning issues suggested in his projects for a wider social-political discussion.

Mario Pfeifer present recent works and current projects in progress:

The first part of the screening resembles recent film and video works
Untitled [»Two Guys«], 2008, 8:00 min
Yet Untitled [»Pieces of Nature«], 2008, S16mm to Beta SP,  12:oo min
Reconsidering THE NEW INDUSTRIAL PARKS NEAR IRVINE CALIFORNIA by Lewis Baltz, 1974, 2009, 16mm to HD, 13:00 min

Intermission: to Hari – a short video from South India (2010)

During the second part of the screening Mario Pfeifer will introduce current projects in development and post-production from Germany, the US and India (working title: A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue & Epilogue).

“Mario Pfeifer in this work creates an exceptional visibility of the protagonists, the viewers, the author and the medium that is the global circuit of lifestyle culture. They all appear as actors; the video is the site of their conflict-ridden entanglement, in which no one ultimately exercises control or follows their interests. The all-embracing mediality manifests itself in random set-offs of immanent violence – a power that functions without being owned. »Untitled [Two Guys]« captures and deconstructs the functioning of (sub)cultural codes in a “globalized society” and the mechanisms of image-production and reproduction.” – Jakob Schillinger on Untitled [»Two Guys«]

“Pfeifer’s particular synthesis of the real and the symbolic, the representative and the sensuous ultimately manifest the philosophical depth of the piece without straightening out the paradoxical discomfort of his very medium.” – Julia Moritz on Yet Untitled [»Pieces of Nature«]

Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974 revisits one of the industrial structures Lewis Baltz documented in his historic “New Topographics“ from the outside and depicts the interior setting of a metal workshop with an eleven minute tracking shot. During this time, the 1974 book version has been reconsidered from back to front, each turning page a montage within the continuous 16 mm black and white footage. An interview with J.R. Billington, a company owner in this building for nineteen years, discusses the socio-economical situation in military manufacturing in Orange County in the 1980‘s and today.

 

Mario Pfeifer (b. 1981 in Dresden, Germany) lives between Berlin and New York. After his studies in Leipzig (HGB) and Berlin (UDK), Pfeifer graduates from Willem de Rooij’s class at Städelschule Frankfurt in 2008. He is a Fulbright fellow in Los Angeles (California Institute of the Arts) in 2008/09. Further grants and projects lead him to Bangkok, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Beirut, Tierra del Fuego, Santiago de Chile, and New York.

Mario Pfeifer’s web site: www.mariopfeifer.com