HERE BUT NOT THERE

experimental video
HDV PAL/NTSC 2022
total time 00:04:16:00
Sound, Hee Haw, solo vocal performance by Elise Kermani,
composed and recorded with live processing in Houston, Texas, USA, 1990.
Concept and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Experimenting with pure black and white forms of light paired with a disembodied female voice - aleatoric, rhythmic and without reason or purpose - just being 'here' and not 'there'. Disconnected from any intelligible object or recognizable words, the sound converges with the abstract image flow.

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THE MAGIC MIRROR SEES BLACK AND WHITE

experimental performative video
HDV PAL/NTSC 2019
total time 00:04:14:00
Electronic Music Score recorded, composed and mixed by Elise Kermani, 2019.
Concept, Performance, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Mirrors have long been associated with female knowledge and power, and mirrors can be fruitfully used to think about how the fantastic represents and responds to everyday experience. The centrality of the magic mirror allows the doubled, divided, or multiplied self that reflects women's psychological experiences to be fully portrayed.
The mirror was a driving metaphor for Luce Irigaray, whose 1974 book, the one that got her expelled from Lacan's circle, was entitled 'Speculum of the Other Woman', punning on the use of the word 'speculum' to mean 'mirror'. Irigaray continued to work with this metaphor also in further writings such as 'This Sex Which Is Not One'. Simultaneous with the rise of second-wave feminism, Lacan's mirror stage and issues of the internalized male gaze described through the metaphor of the mirror by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in 'The Madwoman in the Attic', the mirror became a highly significant issue during the 1970s. With Naomi Wolf's book 'The Beauty Myth', the question of appearance as a feminist issue took on new urgency, and so was the age-old relationship between women and mirrors interrogated anew within 1990s feminism. The mirror doubles the boundary between the subject and object, self and other, I and not-I. The mirror emerges as a potent source of self-creation, magic, and ultimately story-telling itself. Contemporaneous theory argues that the mirror becomes a symbol of telling stories through a feminine subjectivity that is characterized by permeable ego boundaries and connection with others, as well as with the alienation from the self under conditions of patriarchy. The mirror's - and fantasy's - illusion of another world, identical and yet opposite to ours, creates a space for expressing the lived experiences of women and envisioning the feminist change necessary to improve those experiences.
(Source: Veronica Schanoes, Fairy Tales, Myth, and Psychoanalytic Theory: Feminism and Retelling the Tale. Routledge, 2016)

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FROM THE LIFE OF MY OLD WOMAN FRIEND

HDV PAL/NTSC 2018
total time 00:06:24:00
Music Composition and Sound Edit by Elise Kermani.
Concept and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

The video depicts a woman’s story from a far away century. Based on the images from the popular German novel ‘Aus dem Leben meiner alten Freundin’ by the female author Wilhelmine Heimburg in 1894, it depicts images of suffering and passive women, whereby the images have been created by a male artist. The video questions the translation of women’s stories passed on from one generation to another, and also questions of how we see the women’s images nowadays in a different century. How much of the images still belongs transferred into the current society without any nostalgia?

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ROOM THOUGHTS

HDV PAL/NTSC 2014
total time 00:03:04:00
Sound, Spiral Trom, composed by Elise Kermani with Kevin James, trombone and Elise Kermani, voice.
Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Thoughts and sound are circulating in a bathroom-door-hallway performative scenario. Visible are doors and a window, white walls, a person in the tableau of cut-out view. The video describes isolation and reflexion, repeated voices, solitude and emptiness, exhaustion. As a performative video it is an adaption and convergence of body to room perspective.

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BLACK BLUE ABSTRACT

HDV PAL/NTSC 2014
total time 00:08:11:00
Sound, Rising Mix, composed by Elise Kermani with Natasha Kermani, violin, 2014.
Concept and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

In an abstract form, black and blue are visualizing a color surface for the screen. The color movements are vanishing and reappearing in a constant flow. The abstract surface for the screen describes endless possibilities of contingency.

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HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE SUN AT NIGHT ?

HDV PAL/NTSC 2014
total time 00:03:02:00
Sound and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Regarding the question, what do you think about life?, persons offer views and glimpses on their visions. Light circles across them and the ways of seeing. Architecture of public housing provides a framing of the people and their perspectives. The title of the video, referring to the question of the possibility to see the sun at night, is a metaphor for the good in humans, the good in life, the light in the dark and the possibility to grasp the impossible.

>> extended video synopsis
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STARS AND STRIPES ON DARKNESS

6 channel video installation
HDV PAL/NTSC 2013
loop / total time 00:02:00:00
Sound by Elise Kermani, RawBells, 2013.
Concept and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

This video installation is conceptually based on the idea of vanitas, light, and love. Light and stripes of digitized reflections on dark water surface capture the eternity of traveling flow. The impossibility to grasp the light play and its intrinsic character as embodiment remains to the visual experience and memory only. Through the audio-visual perception of the installation it becomes possible to dive into the dark water, catch some stars, and wander with the sound.

These six video pieces are meant to be installed in a single projection room, to create an entire room of darkness, light and sound experience.

Preview Video >>

ROOFTOP SHORT

HDV PAL/NTSC 2013
total time 00:02:56:00
Rooftop Sound Collage composed by Elise Kermani.
Concept, Performance, Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Special credits to Maria João Salema.

A woman positions herself at a rooftop space within a ghostlike paradox situation. The open functional architecture provides a surface for experiments with a person in a usually abandoned area. As a platform, it is theatre space for uncanny moments in an urban context.

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HOW TO BE AN EFFECTIVE ARTIST

HDV PAL/NTSC 2013
total time 00:10:42:00
Thoughts and Statement by Salomon Faye.
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Salomon Faye gives great advices for artists.

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WHAT IS LOVE?

HDV PAL/NTSC 2013
total time 00:10:16:00
Concept, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Special credits to Eric Payson.

What is Love? follows the question by various answers from short interviews of women. The visual background to the video is a car driving perspective, providing a view to think about the issue. It reminds to a couple driving together on a journey, but both are experiencing their own state of mind instead of sharing their time. The given statements are diverse, but at the end, the question remains unsolved. So, What is Love?

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LES BLOCKS

3 channel video
HDV PAL 2013
total time 00:01:10:00
Concept, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Special credits to Kharlique Gardner.

Showing the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) blocks at the Lower East Side in Manhattan, this video piece depicts the living situation in a desperate perspective, surrounded by all equal blocks as a political statement.

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1901
VOTES FOR WOMEN

HDV PAL 2013
total time 00:03:06:00
Concept and Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Sound, Hearth Dirge, Vocals and Electronics composed and performed by Elise Kermani, 2013.
Text Excerpts, Woman Suffrage or The Child-Bearing Woman and Civilization by M.M. Mangasarian, 1901.

"Votes for Women" describes the beginning of a century within the women's suffrage movement of the first feminist wave. While the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901 to men who achieved greatest benefit on mankind, women were neglected and their position has been far from being equal. Further, Queen Victoria passed away and the Victorian Era ended, Europe was in the process of new formations, while the anti-Semitic movement has been spread all over politics and in society. The images describe the dominance of male supremacy over public and intellectual life as well as a society in transition.

>> This video work has been created for the project 100x100=900 (100 video artists to tell a century)
curated by Magmart International Video Art Festival.

>> view the single video

I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE

DV PAL/NTSC 2012
total time 00:08:45:00
Concept, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Female 'break ups' in relationships became sort of 'chic' in the Hollywood's since the 1990s as a rare film plot. These female contestations of terminating relations show also the rejection of both, the classic happy Hollywood endings of common film plots and the stereotype of the left woman. Through this, contemporary aspects of female empowerment and self-determination are encouraged as a film thread. This video piece strings together scenes where the male gaze is rejected through the female persona. While in earlier Hollywood films, scenes of raging women were associated with female hysteria and therefore with a sort of stereotyped sickness inscribed into women, in the last two decades it came to recognition of actresses who offer a counter behavior against male relational dependency.

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INTO THE CEILING
A Theory of Everything (Sort Of) and the Hijacked Crisis in Part I – III

3 channel video installation
DV PAL/NTSC 2011
Part I total time 00:10:17:00
Part II total time 00:02:44:00
Part III total time 00:02:39:00

Concept, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Headlines from The New York Times in August 2011 are floating into the ceiling as metaphors for weird politics and crisis.
The videos seem like a real time composition, when imagining a person watching a rainy day out of the window, where the textual parts in the video could assemble the reflections of the viewer.
The contemplative character of the three videos refers to a sensation of individual syncope.


Video Preview >>

INTO THE MIRROR

video performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2011
total time 00:05:21:00
Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Sound collage composed by Elise Kermani, with additional sound samples by Christine Bard, 2011.

A woman is intrigued by a door seen in a mirror and pondering on entering through the mirror and its door into a different reality. The door in the mirror seems to be hazardous, awkward, a mystery, and a miracle at the same moment.
This video work was inspired by Alice's mirror and the encounter with a different world when entering through an imaginative door. Further, personal encounters with viewing doors in mirrors lead to this video work with the wish to explore this picture in a performative context, as to realize a wish to enter the door in an imaginative relation and doing a step into Alice's world.
The video work does not disclose the world behind the door for the viewer, but is leaving this open for any imaginative perspectives.

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THE ART OF AGING

video performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2011
total time 00:03:29:00
Performance, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

This video work reveals the irrational use of anti-aging products in times of a youth-obsessed culture and its ageism. Even the sophisticated naming of cosmetic products are obscure and describe promises far from any reality. The world anti-aging products market stands enthused by the growing need for appearance-enhancing and age-defying skin cosmetics among the aging population according to a report by Global Industry Analysts. In addition to changes in lifestyles effected by modern consumers to increase their chances of longevity, changing practices in personal grooming is resulting in more time and money being spent on external grooming to minimize visible effects of aging.
Despite great demand, many such products and treatments have not been proven to give lasting or major positive effects. Researchers found out that the top-rated products smoothed out some fine lines and wrinkles by less than 10 percent over 12 weeks, which is barely visible to the human eye.

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WOMEN IN WAR

DV PAL/NTSC 2010
total time 00:03:05:00
Sound and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

This video work came into being during a research on the tag 'women' on YouTube, and through this finding stereotyped videos with women's images entitled like 'Most Beautiful Women', 'Famous Sexy Women', and so forth. By re-editing the found videos and underlaying the material with sounds from reports on women in war and violence against women, the final video became a strange subversion of women's media images and the woman as a commodified object becomes obvious. The video is split between women's images in media and the sound of the real, to break with a world of male illusions and to enter the field of male transgression. 'Women in War' is a metaphor for women's images in the media war and real war.

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Exquisite Corpse Video Project Vol.3 TRANS

DV PAL/NTSC 2010
total time 00:02:00:00
Sound and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

When spending this year 5 days in the U.S. and hunting during these days to 5 different airports while being on transit, I shot with my photo camera during this trip videos from cabs and the plane, and compressed all the footage 1200 percent up to final 2 minutes, where actually the editing of the final video was done by the rhythm of the transportation. The outcome of the video is a dense picture of movement within urban transportation and architecture, through a rainy window as well, and sometimes the picture is vanishing and getting abstract.

>> Created for the international video collage Exquisite Corpse Video Project Vol.3, under the theme TRANS, curated by Kika Nicolela.
>> view the entire collage
>> view the single video

WATER PORTRAIT I-IV

DV PAL/NTSC 2010
4 channel video installation
total time 00:02:06:00
These videos are each in two versions of languages, in Slovene and English.
Text and voice by the portrayed women Carmen Lipush, Majda Gregoric, Ines Zgonc, and Asja Trost.
Concept, Sound and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

This video series faces women's portraits of images mirroring from the water surface,
filmed at the Ljubljanica river in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
These video portraits reveal experiences of violence against women, dedicated to the water.
The form of this video work is an expansion of the former silent photographic portrait.

Video Preview >>

SILENCE

experimental performative video
DV PAL/NTSC 2009
loop / total time 00:01:00:00
Sound by Elise Kermani, Ear Music, 2001.
Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Textual structures on body fragments as inscriptions on the female body of metaphorical injuries by rape violence are merging into an image of speechless suppression by male supremacy. Rape remains as a silent terror and global transgression, as a silent field of unspoken reality, because the afflicted women are broken.

>> This video work is created for FemLink The International Video Collages, on the collage theme of 'Aggression'.
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BLUE HOUSE
Dance Improvisation Performance

DV PAL/NTSC 16:9 2009
total time 00:25:18:00
Performer: Klaudia Ahrer, Tina Gressl, Judith Meister.
All music composed, performed and recorded by Elise Kermani, Copyright 2008, Licensed by BMI.
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Three women are performing in a blue coloured house. The scenario of persona and interior all in blue seems like a Bluebeard's tale, but transformed into women acting in a gendered private space.

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LAND OF OZ
YEARS OF CRYING
A Performative Tableau in VIII Parts

3 channel video
DV PAL/NTSC 2008
total time 00:24:38:19
Sound collage of John Maxwell Hobbs Cinema Volta Daily Ambience tracks.
Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Special credits to Pooneh Maghazehe and Eric Payson.

LAND OF OZ is a video collage of urbanity, artificial nature and movement, all in all as a personal performative tableau embedded in an American context.

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TABLE TALK

video performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2008
loop / total time 00:02:34:23
Sound by Borut Savski, Random Activities, Activity 7, 2000/2001.
Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Special credits to Nina Sobell for access to her renovated kitchen.

In an exaggerated gender specific communication role, a woman is constantly giving positive encouragement toward an unseen male discussion partner, without having an own opinion, or something else to say than to support the male counterpart.
In this performative video work, a gendered communication role model is directed to an imaginary male opponent and describes how the usage of language can be defined as a relation and structure of power between the two social sexes.

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ROSE IS A ROSE

video performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2008
total time 00:03:52:16
Performance, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

This performative video work shows a woman engaged in covering her face with rose leaves.
As a metaphor for the absurd above and beyond term "beauty", the fragility of beauty and the canons of beauty, the video reveals an obscure image of woman, which is also shaped by transiency and impermanence.
Excerpts from the poem "Sacred Emily" by Gertrude Stein, in which she created the sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.", form the sound collage to the video piece.

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HITCHCOCK DISHING

DV PAL/NTSC 2008
total time 00:01:17:05
Sound and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

A short video about the danger of daily dishing as a sublime metaphor for the unpaid daily work of women with its loss of time and energy for other more meaningful, useful, and creative activities.
"Hitchcock Dishing" is also articulating concealed domestic violence.

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PAS DE DEUX

dance video
DV PAL/NTSC 2008
total time 00:05:22:00
Sound collage of John Maxwell Hobbs Cinema Volta Daily Ambience tracks.
Performance and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

A fairy is inviting to a dance rehearsal under the attic.
A female dream of the dance and a dancer as a parody of torture, rise and failure in an abandoned space like in a fairy tale from the childhood. Both performer are entering and vanishing as there has not been anyone in the space before and after, except air and dust remembering on passing by images of dreams and illusions.

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NINA SOBELL

video interview
DV PAL/NTSC 2007
total time 00:22:18:00
Interview and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Art Engineers vs. Machine Divas
A Retro-Utopian Investigation of Machine Theater
A video interview with Nina Sobell for the ongoing research and networking project by Andrea Sodomka and Eva Ursprung of IMA Intitut für Medienarchäologie. In May 2007, Andrea Sodomka and Eva Ursprung started their investigation on "Machine Divas" - woman artists using technology for their work in nowadays expanded "theater space". The first results were presented at the IMA Salon #7 07 at Ars Electronica in Linz and put forward for discussion on a panel with Inke Arns, Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth.

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WHITE BAND CUT

video performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2007
3 channel video
total time 00:09:25:00
Performance, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.
Special credits to Nina Sobell for access to her studio.

The ritualised cutting of a white band wrapped around the body symbolizes the metaphoric disposal of inner and outer bonds as restrictions in an internal monologue. The woman can be seen as a gift as well as a captive. The white band describes muted halcyon segues flowing in a void space.

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STRUCTURAL MODEL

video performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2006
3 channel video installation
total time 00:03:00:00
black and white, mute
Concept, Performance, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

A female person is reflecting the structures and dynamics of Freud’s model of the psyche in terms of an unresolved pattern.
Researched parts of connections between the three layers of Freud's model and women appear in the textline to represent some main thoughts about the complexity of (t)his system.
A video installation of the intermediation of the ego between the id, the superego and the external world from a female perspective.
This video performance work has been realized at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria, within the media class by VALIE EXPORT.

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New Media Workshop 2D MUTANT ZOMBIES

documentary video
DV PAL 2006
total time 00:02:25:00
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Documentary video of the New Media Workshop '2D Mutant Zombies' held by Dejan Grba in Pirot, Serbia, at the International Summer Art School of the University of Arts in Belgrade, 2006.
Photographs and video are combined into a documentary to give an impression of the workshop and the Serbian culture.

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INSIDE THE OUTSIDE

dance video
DV PAL/NTSC 2006
loop / total time 00:05:32:23
Dancer Inside: Klaudia Ahrer.
Sound by Cherry Sunkist: People don't belong to people, What I want / Why do I even ask
[roughly mixed not mastered].
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Moving beyond a surface, an outside, a window into a different world – what are the reasons for moving within a certain space of femininity? The questions of the moving shape circulate around the other, the captured difference, the identity and the self. By acting as a body with its language, this remains from the self and questioning shape. The body as a shape for self-reflective questions within a female room seemingly protected against the outside but exposed to the gaze.

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RED VELVET

DV PAL/NTSC 2006
loop / total time 00:09:30:03
Sound by John Maxwell Hobbs, Daily Ambience / Chartres 16-09-05.
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

Computer generated red velvet as a structure for the screen: experimental video, artificial structure, color symbolism.
For the perceptional surface of this video work, computer generated red velvet is developed as a structure for the screen. The color covers the screen with haptical sensations, and it is kept as an experimental video with its artificial structure, defining color symbolism and reflections toward its deep metaphorical character. Red velvet, formerly sacred to influential superior persons like regents and cardinals, becomes here combined with the monitor a sacred object itself, which opens up for further reflections on its relevance and connotations, also toward the media itself, its images and its aspects of use/abuse of power and sexuality.

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AU VA ET VIENT

DV PAL 2005
total time 01:00:56:22
Original Sound
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

As the title suggests, pedestrians are passing by, only visible by their feet.
You can imagine yourself the stories around the people by:
prenez un cafe, allumez une cigarette, regardez, ecoutez et imaginez le cafe avec la fontaine
AU VA ET VIENT, 6 Place Felix Eboue, 75012 Paris, le jeudi 28 juillet 2005 entre 17 et 18 heures.
AU VA ET VIENT is a video in between one hour picture, real time composition and cinéma vérité.

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GENDER TRANSMISSION
WO:MAN#1 WO:MAN#2

dual channel video installation
DV PAL/NTSC 2005
loop / total time 00:03:03:00
Performer: Siegrid Frohnwieser, Alexander Samyi.
Concept, Sound, Video by Evelin Stermitz.

These two videos question the relation and boundaries between man and woman in a philosophic and psychological manner. In the psychological theory of Jacques Lacan woman and man mirror themselves in terms of 'the Other', which is aimed to be visualized in this video installation. By establishing two mirrors through video, the situation resembles a real mirror, where man and woman are confronted to each other. There is always a surface, a shape for interacting constructed here through a digital code. But what will remain is always an imaginary shape which meanings are constructed not through the shape itself, but by the society in which we are living.

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KONCENTRACIJSKO TABORIŠCE LJUBELJ

dance improvisation performance
DV PAL/NTSC 2004
loop / total time 00:14:32:20, black and white
Music by Irena Havlova and Vojtech Havel, jako motyl na tve dlani, 1999.
Dancer in the morning: Klaudia Ahrer.
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

At a cruel place, one woman moves; determined with pain, fears and depression but also with hope for a way out. The dancer is standing for the painful feeling of women in concentration camps, but also for physic and psychic discrimination of women in general. Actually this place is more imaginary and not bound to the real place as it could be any place where women suffer from cruelty and hopelessness, so it could be any woman who suffers from violence. The sense of feeling and moving is transferred into a contemplative video, where the camera also adopts the powerful eye of the observer, the voyeur, but in opposite also the eye of a person deprived of the power to aid. As a dance video it has been created by a silent improvised performance without spectators, where experiment and unrepeatable time have been captured.

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DAROVANJE MESECU / A GIFT FOR THE MOON

DV PAL 2004
total time 00:03:37:00
Music by Iva Bittová, kapitulni sin, 1994.
Video by Evelin Stermitz.

This video is an interpretation of the poem by Maja Haderlap. It shows a moving and twisting face in the dark. The face seems to observe the spectator, so it is a break and change of the traditional rules of watching and being watched at the normal situation of the spectator watching television. The poem deals like the video with watching, looking and finding something.

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VECERKA - NIGHT SHOP - NACHTGESCHÄFT

DV PAL 2004
loop / total time 00:06:43:00
Sound Collage by Ales Zemene.
Concept and Video by Evelin Stermitz.

A hypermarket has been filmed to show the superfluity of the consumer society. The footage has been filmed by hand camera and sometimes quite fast, so a strange feeling occurs by watching it. It is the same feeling as going into a supermarket - being influenced by the colors and diversity of the products, but finding it impossible to find the thing you actually need, because there are too many of them.

This video is part of the room installation of the social art happening project by BROCCOLI Art Group >>
View the video >>