Loretta Fahrenholz

Opening: Friday, August 28, 2015

Loretta Fahrenholz is an artist and filmmaker who lives between New York and Berlin. She investigates different social milieus and the various fictions and desires that are played out, with whatever degree of intention, among actors, narratives, and the given means of production. In this, Fahrenholz gives equal importance to the act of manipulating a set of circumstances and the condition of allowing herself to be manipulated by them. She often references specific genres (e.g., disaster flicks, documentary, porn) allowing for narrative and formal contradictions to emerge that, in turn, simultaneously encourage and impede identification. This dynamic is echoed on a thematic level: In Fahrenholz’ films, isolated bodies attempt to function as a community. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don’t.

Kunsthalle Zürich presents Ditch Plains (2013), a streetstyle sci-fi film set in post-Sandy NYC; Implosion (2011), an adaption of the eponymous play by poet and feminist Kathy Acker (1947–1997); and a new trailer for My Throat, My Air by Hans-Christian Lotz. Also on view will be two new series of photographs: the serial smartphone work Recently Deleted, and a set of spatial surveys of a farm in Bavaria created using an industrial 3-D point scanner.

3 Frauen, the title of the exhibition, refers to Robert Altman's film of the same name from 1977. It depicts the increasingly bizarre relationship between three women in a small and dusty town in California.

“What struck me was her statement about ‘merging with the subject’ while making films – going too far to remain documentary, but not far enough for the films to be perceived as entirely fictive. Her approach seems to challenge the idea of reality as something non-artificial and the artist’s subjectivity as constitutional to authorship.” (Erika Langström)

In cooperation with Fridericianum, Kassel

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