Nina Könnemann, still from "M.U.D." (2000). Video, 8 min.

March 2009 Field Guide

Ellen Gallagher

Jerzy Grotowski

Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussy

Do Look Back in Anger

Christian Jankowski

James Coleman

The Collection

William Kentridge: Five Themes

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In Nina Könnemann’s videos, ordinary slices of life are anything but prosaic. The Berlin-based artist focuses on scenes of no immediate import—the wasted aftermath of a music festival, a subway platform bedecked with tired, drunken Berliners—that gain meaning as the clock ticks. What is the camera waiting for? What are all those people waiting for? What are we waiting for? This indeterminate sense of time, coupled with the physical and mental foreboding it elicits, gives Könnemann’s videos a noirish chime. More recently, the artist has delved into animation and films composed of stills of Hollywood film posters, which take her rejection of conventional narratives to new extremes. Her video work on view at Portikus breaks the third wall altogether, accompanied as it is by a series of objects that relate to the video itself, spent citizens not included.

portikus.de "Nina Könnemann" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.