#53: Marcel Odenbach

Marcel Odenbach’s works on video and video installations attest to his crucial role in promoting and shaping the international development of this genre. From the early videos, which were still conceived for presentation on monitors, to his complex installations including large projections, the screening illustrates the subtlety and formal variety with which Odenbach stages the moving picture and its acoustic accompaniment.

Marcel Odenbach presents:

Gespräch zwischen Ost und West, mit Gabor Body, 1978, 3:40 min
In stillen Teichen lauern Krokodile, 2002/04, 31:20 min
Disturbed Places, 2007, 34 min
Im Kreise drehen, 2009, 15:50 min
Im Schiffbruch nicht Schwimmen können, 2011, 8:15 min

The selection of works combines this retrospective orientation with an attempt to cover the major thematic emphases in the artist’s oeuvre. The close critical engagement with the problem of how to deal with the past, in particular, illustrates that his art is an exemplary reflection on the German post-war era and its social situation. Yet Marcel Odenbach also worked early on to embed this thematic emphasis in a wider horizon, expanding on the specifically German issues to achieve a more universal perspective. He studied different cultures and political constellations and integrated his observations into his work, drawing connections between the German trauma of Nazi rule and the Rwandan genocide, between images of masculinity in Turkey and the role of women in Venezuela, between the familiar and the foreign, between his own biography and the history of others.

Odenbach’s videos and graphic works are complex narratives the artist creates by means of a unique collage technique out of recorded film and television footage, archival material, and pictures he has produced himself. Montaging public and private imagery, he spins stories that interweave the larger frame of history with the emotions of the individual human being and his own biography. – Marcel Odenbach- Stille Bewegungen. Tranquil Motions, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart; Ostfildern 2013

book release „Take it or leave it. Marcel Odenbach“
Friday, March 14th, 2014, 18:00 | 6 pm
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, Clubraum
Buchvorstellung und Gespräch mit Marcel Odenbach, Einführung Wulf Herzogenrath, Buchvorstellung Slavko Kacunko, Gespräch Olaf Stüber

 

Marcel Odenbach (b. 1953 in Cologne, Germany) lives Berlin and Cape Coast, Ghana and works in Berlin and Cologne. He studied architecture, art history and semiotics at the Technische Hochschule, in Aachen, Germany, between 1974 and 1979. He has taught media art at several institutions in Germany including, Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe and Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne, and Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf.

Since the mid-1970s, Odenbach has created a substantial repertoire of tapes, performances, drawings and installations, and is considered one of Germany’s most important video artists. His work critically examines subject formation in the context of socio-cultural norms and historical specificities. He has engaged such topics as male identity and sexuality, as well as the trauma of German history.

Odenbach’s video tapes and installations have been exhibited extensively at festivals and institutions worldwide.