In legend, the director has always adopted the role of the all-powerful potentate. The greater his genius, the less inhibited his autocratic regime over the actors on the set. Perhaps it is repressed envy that leads the average citizen to conceive film direction as a licence to sadism.

Jannicke Låker does not harbour such prejudice, but she uses direction as a form of power, nonetheless. She develops experimental psychological set-ups from the relations of power involved in film recording and arranges simple situations from the screenplay and other guidelines like an experiment whose test persons are the actors. In the process, Låker ruthlessly shows things that the viewers would often prefer not to see: taxing, humiliating or painful situations and the test persons’ attempts to defend themselves. Playing with perspectives, Låker simultaneously turns the viewer into a voyeur.



Withered, Studio 2,
December 8th – December 23th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 07. December 2006, 19 h

Wim Catrysse's films and installations aim to make the viewer aware of the act of seeing and the experiences connected with it. His video films are investigations into the relation between the body and its surroundings: often the protagonists operate within an enclosed space that seems to determine their actions or their states of mind. On the other hand, every video has its own 'surroundings' - a place of presentation that corresponds to the space shown in the film. The viewer thus finds himself in an extension of the projected space.

In the video work "catch-as-catch-can", for example, we see two men who seem to be challenging each other to a fight, although they are both simultaneously struggling not to lose their balance on the revolving disc that serves them as a sparring ring. The camera films this tense conflict situation from outside of the ring, from the perspective of a viewer who is also standing on a similar disc and so rapidly loses all sense of orientation.



Caught In The Act, Studio 3,
December 8th – December 23th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 07. December 2006, 19 h

Maik Wolf's subliminally disturbing painting is a seductive attack on media gullibility. Demonstrating great virtuosity, his pictures cite the repertoire of glossy photography. His backgrounds are the very same sunsets and night-time atmospheres with which modern reporting even guarantees the advantageous journalistic use of crisis zones. Wolf radicalises this aesthetic exploitation of the banal until his works become visual puzzles reflecting our faith in images. He employs a fine painting technique, which sometimes appears to have been merely wafted onto the canvas, to lend suburbia and its local bank buildings, for example, an almost old-masterly artistic dignity. These pictures are always filled with quotations from and references to art history. But above all, they pose the fundamental question as to painting’s possibilities in a media world that can be manipulated – and thereby attack the aestheticism of commercial photography.



Falkenrot-Preis 2006, Studio 1,
December 8th – December 23th 2006,
Opening: Thursday, 07. December 2006, 19 h