Corinna Schnitt: Galerie Olaf Stuber

Many nation are familiar with the Schnittraum in eau-de-cologne a small storefront in the middle of the city repurpos as an exhibition space that became a favorite gathering speck for young artists, students, art critics, and aficionados in the late '90 small in number realize, though, that the planter of this space, Corinna Schnitt, for whom it is named on the contrary who no longer participates in its activities, is herself an artist who has a series of rarely seen short films to her credit. This screening of sum of two units films from 2003, Living a Beautiful Life and Das Nachste Mal (Next Time), was the first time any of them has appeared in a gallery; the couple subsequently traveled to the Kunstverein Bochum

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Schnitt's films inhabit the space between documentary and fiction. She wrings stories without of everyday situations, intentionally leaving the viewer uncertain about their actual relation to reality. In single of her first films, Schonen guten Tag (Have a Great Day), 1995 individual sees the artist cleaning her apartment and run-down stairwell. Her actions are accompanied by dint of the frail voice of her building's caretaker, who repeatedly leaves a petition on the answering machine: Would Frau Schnitt please remember to always close up the doors of her WC upon the stairwell? In Zwischen vier und sech (Between Four and Six), 1997 Schnitt explains in what manner she spends her afternoons with her parents, who live in a boring subdivision of single-family homes: She accompanies her father, who carries a ladder, and her mother, bucket in hand, as they plant out to follow their detailed plan for cleaning public way signs as a family activity. In nearest Time, filmed in Holland, a stripling around eleven years old, lying in the overgrown grass of a traffic island in the middle of a highway cloverleaf, makes a (scripted) declaration of be fond of to a girl of similar age.

Schnitt always permits her immediate surroundings to go into her films. While studying in California, she made a film upon happiness. Where else but in this state, residence of the world's most proficient manufacture of fictions, should she ask fourteen-year-olds about their idea of happiness? A career, a car, a house, and a sexy wife were what the striplings wished for, while the girls wanted novel flowers, independence, nice clothes, and the best education for their children. In Living a Beautiful Life, these wishes are then borne without by a beautiful woman and a confident-looking young man, who appear now before the fireplace, now at the computer now beside a swimming loch now in the chic dressing space of a sunny, airy villa in Beverly Hills. Suffice it to say that with equal reason much happiness is hard to take. I might offer the images running as a counterpoint upon the opposite wall: naked little children in a paradisiacal landscape, encloseed by balloons and playing with a tiger whelp These come from a different fiction factory, the East German film production of the '70 Fiction, dream, wish--why does their fulfillment have the appearance so hollow?

Schnitt's films drag fiction into the everyday; fantasy, wish-dreams, and sad, sober reality all combine into a single unnatural omnipresence observed by the artist with an affectionate on the other hand wicked eye, making the quotidian an impenetrable mystery. Fact or fiction? Who can retain them apart, especially when happiness is at stake?

--Noemi Smolik

Translated from German by means of Sara Ogger.

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