PRODUCTIONS
Videoart at Midnight Productions is a new initiative that responds to the specific needs of art productions at the interface between artistic cinema and the exhibition context, in order to bring Videoart at Midnight’s many years of experience in working with artists into the fields of financing, production, cooperation and distribution of video, artist film and moving image.
The focus is on artists whose new productions cannot be assigned exclusively to the field of visual arts on the one hand or the film industry on the other hand, as well as on institutional and private sponsors who want to support these artists and participate in the respective production processes.
Videoart at Midnight Productions aims to bring together resources, funding and presentation opportunities from both worlds – the art world and the film world – as well as to close funding gaps in order to support outstanding artistic projects of our time and their visibility.
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Cyrill Lachauer
SLACK (WT)
Essay film
Together with American photographer Mike Brodie (b. 1985), Cyrill Lachauer travels in freight trains across the United States in search of lost fathers, the limits of image-making, and an unattainable romance celebrated by pop culture but simultaneously rejected by society. The ashes of Slack, Mike Brodie’s girlfriend who died of an overdose, become synonymous with a generation scarred by the fentanyl crisis, raised in a climate of post-punk, TikTok and an unconditional will to be free.
Slack (WT) oscillates between artistic documentary and essay film, between feature and experimental film. It describes the life and travels of Mike Brodie and his friends – drifters, hobos and crust punks. They live in illegality. They live the ultimate inversion of the much-vaunted American dream, the promise of social advancement accessible to all. Ancient heroes wander the abysses of the so-called „first world“.
Cyrill Lachauer’s works are the result of long journeys that take him on freight trains through the outback of the USA. He immerses himself in his surroundings and their landscapes and reproduces his experiences as fragmentary stories in photography, film and text.
Lachauer, who grew up in the Bavarian Inntal, lives and works in Berlin as well as on his travels. He studied directing, ethnology and art in Munich and Berlin. In 2010 he completed his studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Lothar Baumgarten.
Complex ethnological questions often stood at the beginning of Lachauer’s work. These aspects, which were important in the preparation and research phase, were usually broken up, overturned by the realities on site, or suddenly no longer found any force that was convincing for the artist. Therefore, Lachauer turned away completely from ethnological questions and towards a radically subjective ethnography committed to his own realities of life.
Produced by Sammlung Goetz, Munich, and Videoart at Midnight Productions. Executive production by Flipping the Coin, Berlin.
With the support of Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, and Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.
SLACK is expected to be completed by mid-2024.
Cyrill Lachauer (born 1979 in Rosenheim, Germany) is the co-founder of Flipping the Coin Records, Films and Books in Berlin and has conducted several research projects in, for example, Ladakh and Columbia, and lived in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2015. Lachauer is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including a scholarship of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, USA (2021) and a fellowship at Villa Aurora Los Angeles (2015). He received the EHF 2010 grant by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (2014), a fellowship from Stiftung Kunstfonds (2012), as well as the 4th IBB prize for photography (2010) and the 3sat Short Film Prize Oberhausen (2008). His works have been presented at Sammlung Goetz, Haus der Kunst in Munich (2020), the Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst in Berlin (2017) and Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2015).
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Gernot Wieland
The Perfect Square, 2023
Experimental short film
“The Perfect Square” by Gernot Wieland
will premiere at 74th Berlin International Film Festival – Berlinale Forum
Premiere, 19 February 2024, 13:00 | 1 pm, Arsenal 1
Screening 2, 21 February 2024, 21:00 | 9 pm, Betonhalle@silent green
Screening 3, 24 February 2024, 16:00 | 4 pm, Arsenal 1
all screenings in the presence of the artistGernot Wieland worked for twelve years with an animal trainer who taught birds to fly in circles or squares. Whereas the indexical image captured by the camera is a testament to the difficulty of training the birds to do something on command, the title of the work itself invokes the intellectual purity of geometric forms, considered superior by analytical philosophy to describe the laws of nature. All this implies that beings that disobey a command could be a definition of an “other”.
The film also refers to an experimental investigation conducted by Kandinsky in 1923. He had assumed that there are direct correspondences between primary colors (yellow, red, blue) and forms (triangle, square, circle). It is by these means that The Perfect Square explores the question of how aesthetic and social norms influence and control our society and our artistic creation, and our (Western) view of the world.
The film consists of filmed drawings, photographs, plasticine figures and animations with a voice over and music/sound. – Niels van Tomme, argos – centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels
Commissioned by argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.
Produced by Fluentum, Berlin, and Videoart at Midnight Productions, co-produced by Tannenbaum Films, with the support of Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.The film, as 2-channel 16mm film installation, premiered in Gernot Wieland’s solo exhibition “Square, Circle, Square” at argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, 22 October 2023 – 28 January 2024.
Gernot Wieland (born 1968 in Horn, Austria), studied at the Universität der Künste, Berlin and Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. He lives and works in Berlin.
Gernot Wieland´s films combine historical accounts with personal recollections, scientific facts, fictional and real elements, developing stories between exciting sobriety and tragicomic and humorous incidents.
Gernot Wieland has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Main Award of the German Competition at 69th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; Aus-Blicke Award at Blicke Filmfestival, Bochum; Main Award at 25th Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux, Paris (all in 2023); in 2022 the German Short Film Award in the category experimental short film up to 30 minutes and in 2021 a Special Mention at ARKIPEL – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival; in 2020 Best Film Award, VIII Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, St. Petersburg; in 2019 the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics at European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, and a Special Mention at 36th Short Film Festival, Hamburg, and in 2017 he was the winner of the 20th edition of the MOSTYN Open, Llandudno, Wales.