The images of this work, made in June 2001, are talking about several months the artist spent living in the World Trade Center in New York. Invited to join other artists in setting up a studio on an empty floor as part of an artist-in-residence program, Carola Dertnig discovered a number of empty rooms during her excursions in both towers.
a room with a view in the financial district documents these discoveries in the form of frozen moments showing abandoned architectures with traces of a working environment. These pictures, shot with the photo button of a video camera, show worn or decaying relics of wired (dot.com) offices; capacious empty spaces, their ceilings, floors and walls falling apart; discarded work clothes; and the debris of meetings, lunches and coffee breaks. These images are punctuated by framed views of Manhattan and its skyline as seen through windows. Dertnig combined these clear shots, which play with the format commonly used in documentary photography, with a first-person off-camera narration. Observations concerning economic structures and he circumstances of personal lives, artistic production and financial power, surveillance methods and empty spaces which ar both mobile and available flow together in a circling dynamic. Dertnig, by relocating movement outside the images and into the editing and off-camera, shifts the act of representation between the audiovisual levels and into a many-layered performance of architectures and persons, their eloquence offering subtle opportunities for further formulation of critical views.
Lives in Vienna and New York.
Studied at The University for Applied Arts,
Vienna, 1986-91
Whitney Independent Study Program,
New York, 1997-98
Participation in various single and group-shows.
Selected Videography:
I Dont Wanna Know Your Name 1995/96
Dancing with Remote(s) 1997
Byketrouble 1998
Loveage 1999
Revolving Door 2001
A Room With a View in the Financial District 2003
Strangers 2004
Newspaper Only 2004 (with Ulrike Müller)
amovie@earthlink.net
|
|
 |
a room with a view in the financial district
5:34, Beta SP, Austria, 2003
Program: Security Blanket
|
|
|
|
|
