Songs of Experience: Gernot Wieland
The 7th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival welcomes Gernot Wieland for a special masterclass titled Songs of Experience, offering a focused encounter with one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary experimental cinema.
The program brings together three of Wieland’s works: Family Constellation with a Fox (2025), You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts (2025), and Portrait of Karl Marx as a Young God (2011). Through these films, the artist’s singular approach—where autobiographical fragments intertwine with fiction, and personal memory meets political reflection—unfolds in poetic and often disarmingly humorous ways.
Following the screenings, Wieland will engage in a masterclass exploring his artistic practice, narrative strategies, and the conceptual frameworks that shape his work. Moving fluidly across mediums such as drawing, Super 8 film, collage, and voice, his films construct dreamlike spaces where psychoanalysis, social norms, and repression intersect with wit and emotional precision.
Wieland’s universe brings together figures from childhood with cultural icons, tracing fragile connections between past and present, intimacy and history. Songs of Experience invites the audience not only to watch these works, but to enter a reflective dialogue on memory, storytelling, and the subtle mechanisms that shape human experience.
Family Constellation with a Fox, 2025
18 min, Super 8 film transferred to 4K video, 4K video
Family Constellation with a Fox attempts to heal inherited, collective wounds by bringing the unspoken to the surface. Wieland reimagines family constellation as a therapeutic scene unfolding inside the belly of a whale, populated by figures such as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Ingeborg Bachmann. Ceramic forms stand in for the narrator’s ego, family and psychic structures. The film navigates generational trauma within male-dominated Western art history, weaving together memories, fairy tales, biblical narratives and fragments of personal and cultural history. Through an associative flow of images and narration, it gently probes repression, where humour coexists with the lingering shadows of violence, loss and silence.
You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts, 2025
16:21 min, Super 8 film/HD Video
The film You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts can be read as an experimental coming-of-age film that illuminates the traces of three characters from the filmmaker’s youth: Maria, Daniel and Jackpot. In the stories, which Wieland narrates in his own voice from a first-person perspective, autobiographical and fictional elements merge into a dense poetic space. The personal is combined with the political and slowly develops into an analysis of social norms and repression with the help of constantly flickering humor.
Portrait of Karl Marx as a young god, 2011
00:59 min, Stereo, Sound
Portrait of Karl Marx as a Young God is an absurd documentary about political desire. The film consists of collages and drawings with voice-over comments by a telephone speaker. The images visualize specific historical incidents from recent German history, while the voice-over extends these images with a multitude of absurd and humorous interpretations.
Programmed by Aslı Seven.
This screening is supported by the Austrian Cultural Office and realized in collaboration with İmalat-hane.
