untitled

Video Nr. 18

video (DVD), 13 min. loop
assistent: Alexander Wolff, digital-editing: Bernharf Riff

signed and dated on DVD, certificated

In video no. 18, the artist himself can be seen trying to arrange a patchwork, a geometric image, with fabrics used for chroma keying, winding his way through the cloths and coming to no end. Every 60 seconds, one of the colors is faded out using the chroma-key video technique and replaced by the color white. In this way, Zobernig succeeds in replacing conventional compositional and visual methods with an anti-hierarchical, net-like pattern. Stripes become a kind of body painting that divides and fragments the figure.
Zobernig uses functional textiles for these and other works, which are used as backgrounds in the film and TV world. The colored Hitech fabrics are used for so-called chroma keying (formerly the bluebox process) to cut out people in films and to reinstate them in front of fictional backgrounds or to insert live backgrounds on television (for example news broadcasts). 
"Using elements that traditionally define works of art, Zobernig poses the question of what constitutes the institution of art, of the context and its boundaries, of the social function of art." Dirk Snauwaert, Kunstverein München, 1999.
(Christoph Fuchs and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna)