Three Films by Gernot Wieland
Gernot Wieland's films resist easy categorization. Neither documentary nor fiction, neither autobiography nor myth, yet they carry traces of all these forms. The Austrian artist and filmmaker uses his own voice and memories as raw material, constructing a cinematic language that maps the repressed, the lost, and the unspeakable.
Three Films by Gernot Wieland brings together three works from different moments in the artist's practice, a program that oscillates between past and present, where the personal meets the political and humor is inseparable from pain.
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.
