Ink in Milk

On Saturday, 10 May at 12:30 pm otte1 will present a video cocktail by Gernot Wieland after the market.

Gernot Wieland (b. 1968 in Horn, Austria) studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His films have been shown, for example, at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the Kunstverein in Kassel, the Kunsthaus in Graz and the Liverpool Biennial. He lives in Berlin.

Ink in Milk, received the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Art Critics, Osnabrück (2019) and honorable mention at the Short Film Festival Hamburg (2019).

Shot on Super 8, the video by Austrian artist Gernot Wieland brings to life the disturbing world of childhood: the painful experience of boundaries where the right to free development meets institutionalised violence. First exclusion, then inclusion. The perfidious architectures of disciplinary measures penetrate the bodies and become so internalised that the disciplinary measures work all by themselves. The narrative of Ink in Milk thus develops into a poetic, almost tragicomic circumstantial trial against power structures, with captivatingly awkward line drawings, plasticine figures and sculptures made of burnt wood serving as evidence that defiantly rejects any kind of standardised truth.

Gernot Wieland’s work is characterised by the interweaving of man, artist and artwork. His art and his person convey a quiet, lasting fascination for his environment and the things that have influenced him or shaped him since his childhood. These impressions – be it strange memories or even tragic experiences and the incessant confrontation with what has happened – find their way directly or indirectly into his artworks and his conversations. In addition to self-analysis and representation, his art also analyses social norms and repressed aspects of society that are expressed, sometimes violently, in hegemonic structures, for example at school and in his dealings with children. His sketches and film narratives convey a lasting impression of the mixture of trauma, repression and feelings of guilt imposed on his generation, as well as the obscene and absurd manifestations of the Austrian condition.