PRODUCTIONS
Videoart at Midnight Productions is a new initiative that responds to the specific needs of art productions at the interface between artistic cinema and the exhibition context, in order to bring Videoart at Midnight’s many years of experience in working with artists into the fields of financing, production, cooperation and distribution of video, artist film and moving image.
The focus is on artists whose new productions cannot be assigned exclusively to the field of visual arts on the one hand or the film industry on the other hand, as well as on institutional and private sponsors who want to support these artists and participate in the respective production processes.
Videoart at Midnight Productions aims to bring together resources, funding and presentation opportunities from both worlds – the art world and the film world – as well as to close funding gaps in order to support outstanding artistic projects of our time and their visibility.
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Cyrill Lachauer
SLACK (WT)
Essay film
Together with American photographer Mike Brodie (b. 1985), Cyrill Lachauer travels in freight trains across the United States in search of lost fathers, the limits of image-making, and an unattainable romance celebrated by pop culture but simultaneously rejected by society. The ashes of Slack, Mike Brodie’s girlfriend who died of an overdose, become synonymous with a generation scarred by the fentanyl crisis, raised in a climate of post-punk, TikTok and an unconditional will to be free.
Slack (WT) oscillates between artistic documentary and essay film, between feature and experimental film. It describes the life and travels of Mike Brodie and his friends – drifters, hobos and crust punks. They live in illegality. They live the ultimate inversion of the much-vaunted American dream, the promise of social advancement accessible to all. Ancient heroes wander the abysses of the so-called „first world“.
Cyrill Lachauer’s works are the result of long journeys that take him on freight trains through the outback of the USA. He immerses himself in his surroundings and their landscapes and reproduces his experiences as fragmentary stories in photography, film and text.
Lachauer, who grew up in the Bavarian Inntal, lives and works in Berlin as well as on his travels. He studied directing, ethnology and art in Munich and Berlin. In 2010 he completed his studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Lothar Baumgarten.
Complex ethnological questions often stood at the beginning of Lachauer’s work. These aspects, which were important in the preparation and research phase, were usually broken up, overturned by the realities on site, or suddenly no longer found any force that was convincing for the artist. Therefore, Lachauer turned away completely from ethnological questions and towards a radically subjective ethnography committed to his own realities of life.
Produced by Sammlung Goetz, Munich, and Videoart at Midnight Productions. Executive production by Flipping the Coin, Berlin.
With the support of Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Berlin, and Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.
SLACK is expected to be completed by mid-2024.
Cyrill Lachauer (born 1979 in Rosenheim, Germany) is the co-founder of Flipping the Coin Records, Films and Books in Berlin and has conducted several research projects in, for example, Ladakh and Columbia, and lived in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2015. Lachauer is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including a scholarship of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, USA (2021) and a fellowship at Villa Aurora Los Angeles (2015). He received the EHF 2010 grant by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (2014), a fellowship from Stiftung Kunstfonds (2012), as well as the 4th IBB prize for photography (2010) and the 3sat Short Film Prize Oberhausen (2008). His works have been presented at Sammlung Goetz, Haus der Kunst in Munich (2020), the Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst in Berlin (2017) and Museum Villa Stuck in Munich (2015).
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Gernot Wieland
The Perfect Square, 2023
Experimental short film
The Perfect Square examines an experimental survey Wassily Kandinsky conducted with his students at the Bauhaus Weimar in 1923. In his art theoretical writings, Kandinsky had assumed that there were direct correspondences between primary colors (yellow, red, blue) and shapes (triangle, square, circle), and he operationalized this assumption in the survey. The film then goes on to explore how aesthetic and social norms influence and control our society and artistic creation and our (Western) view of the world.
The film consists of filmed drawings, photographs, plasticine figures and animations with a voice over and music/sound. – Niels van Tomme, argos – centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels
Commissioned by argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels.
Produced by Fluentum, Berlin, and Videoart at Midnight Productions, with the support of Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.The film will be premiered as 16mm film installation in Gernot Wieland’s solo exhibition “Square, Circle, Square” at argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, 22 October 2023 – 28 January 2024.
Gernot Wieland (born 1968 in Horn, Austria), studied at the Universität der Künste, Berlin and Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. He lives and works in Berlin.
Gernot Wieland´s films combine historical accounts with personal recollections, scientific facts, fictional and real elements, developing stories between exciting sobriety and tragicomic and humorous incidents.
Gernot Wieland has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Main Award at 25th Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux, Paris, France (2023), the Main Award of the German Competition at 69th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2023), Honorable Mention, Cannes Shorts (2023), Cannes, France, the German Short Film Award for the best experimental film under 30 minutes (2022), the Best Film Award at the VIII Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia (2020), the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics (2019), and the Winner of the 20th edition of MOSTYN Open (2017).