SEEKING PATTERNS – the title of the video already expresses the analytical search for a formal language, but possibly also forms as language, as a means and medium of distortion and reflection.
In formal rigour, the essential proximity of physicality and geometry is revealed. An indifferent horizon becomes the staffage of perforated graphics. Epic pictorial surfaces, cut by clear and brushstroke-brittle lines and vague structures. The viewer is pulled into the imagery, separated only through the screen, the invisible surface dominated by circular structures and sharp-edged rectangles. Opposing image movements slide into each other without a rigid axis or vanishing point and create a weightlessness from co-existing antinomies, simultaneous events or dizzying parallel worlds.
In soft, fragile colours not only an imaginary space emerges, but a fictitious intimacy, or perhaps the agony of organic obscenity and geometric brutality. Unmistakably a response of the human to an abstract reality. At the breaking point, where almost contradictory surface structures meet, the bold idea of a pornographic voyeurism. Circles, lines and grids obscure the view and thus become objects themselves. In the virtual scene, the sharp contrast between the concrete and the abstract merges almost irritatingly harmoniously. Prostheses - a wig, a static mouth – are templates that counteract the surreal space, that is moved by abstruse bodies, and build a virtual collage. Through the anomaly shimmers the animalistic - icons of the animalistic and the soulful between which a machine perpetually turns.
Episodically, Dagmar Schürrer's video tells of pairs of opposites who are becoming transparent through their clashes. They seem to be volatile facets of the logic of the aesthetic, which seem to have many familiar yet unknown faces. The bizarre repetitiveness of a pattern becomes a confrontation with the mere form. As subtle as these allusions are, so visually powerful is the associative power in it. Cool poetic and deceptively sterile. Dagmar Schürrer dissects idealized normalizations and plastic exotisms with surgical precision. The seductive fragility of aesthetic parables comes to the fore.
Nina Lex
Dagmar Schürrer is an artist working with the moving image. She assembles found footage, digitally generated objects and animations, text, drawings and sound to form intricate video montages, evocative of painting, collage and poetry. She holds a degree in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, amongst others at the New Contemporaries at the ICA London, the Impakt Festival in Utrecht, NL, the Moscow Biennale for Young Art and the Transmediale Vorspiel in Berlin. Her videos have been screened at numerous festivals: SUPERNOVA in Denver, the Seattle Film Festival, the Horn Experimental Film Festival in Israel, Tricky Women Festival in Vienna, or the Diagonale Film Festival in Graz. In recent years she received the Goldrausch Scholarship of the Senate of Berlin, and was shortlisted for the Berlin Art Prize and the Tenderpixel Award in London.
