Installation view of Garage Exchange: Constanze Ruhm & Christine Lang and First Office. Photography by Joshua White, 2013.
The MAK Center’s Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles series at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments presented former artist-in-residence resident Constanze Ruhm in collaboration with German filmmaker Christine Lang and Los Angeles designers First Office (Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood).
At the Garage Top, Ruhm and Lang’s experimental film Kalte Probe (Cold Rehearsal) was viewed in an installation designed by First Office. Cold Rehearsal references a number of other films, both by the artist and by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkowsky. Its narrative focuses on Hans, a film director with a fading career entangled in a scheme orchestrated by a number of dead actresses who plot revenge. The ninety-minute film reviews Hans’s life and his final ordeal, a fall from a TV stage staircase. In the fantasy played out in the few seconds between his fall and his death, Hans encounters important women from his life, as well as himself as a child. Cold Rehearsal was screened in a continuous loop and is in German with English subtitles.
In the installation, entitled PARANORMAL PANORAMA, First Office and the filmmakers responded to a found photograph of the home of 19th century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, with its walls covered in a painted mural of a mountain range. Associating the image with one of Cold Rehearsal‘s characters–the Polish babysitter Ewa who falls to her death during an outing at Mont Tendre in the Swiss Jura Mountains–the domestic interior built for viewing Cold Rehearsal, which divided one room into three rooms, had its exterior walls covered with a panoramic painting of Mont Tendre.
about garage exchange
In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, The Austrian Federal Chancellery and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
This exhibition series is made possible by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture.