Ute Aurand

Stories from the lesbian subculture in West Berlin, about being in love, clichés, desire, and conflict – "shot as a narrative, with real lesbians at real locations about real feelings."

Portrait of Canadian artist Susan Turcot in 1993 and 2011.

Four women film each other getting dressed in this four-part film. The motive for making the film was to work with a Bolex camera. A protected space is created, to which only women have access – and in which the female gaze is directed towards the female body.

Throughout her work, Aurand frequently makes her camera and her images felt as an active, moving body—spinning, rushing, departing, returning, expanding, contracting, hanging upside down. In A Walk, her film goes walking. The camera occupies a snowy Swiss setting, as Aurand creates a material, tonal landscape that is both nebulous, serene, and wonderfully energetic.

An imaginary journey on a ship. We turned the building of the Film Academy into a ship. Claire and Solange from a Jean Genet piece, a polish woman with her Madonna, screaming sailors are a few of the passengers on this artifical journey.

A walk, a moment at the beach... And the Japanese filmmaker Utako Koguchi behind the heard piano.

Experimental film about a train ride. The carriage window becomes a screen, the landscape a mood, the mood a landscape.

Scenes in the park of the Rietberg Museum in Zurich with its collection of Asian, African and Indian art.

Two memories from a longer visit to New England in Autumn 2012: a group of elderly ladies playing bridge followed by the stormy ocean at Cape Cod in Winter while listening to Etienne Grenier's music practice.

A filmic encounter with Brazil, which Aurand visited for the first time in September 2022 for screenings of her films and Margaret Tait’s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Aurand’s 16mm films are portraits of people and place, often prompted by the discovery and experience of travel. As George Clark has written, the journey is a cornerstone of Aurand’s filmmaking: "“Her work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, Aurand’s work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading and dissecting space."

Shot on 16mm, Ute Aurand documents the archive of Kino Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst before its contents underwent a thorough 'repotting' operation

A short portrait of the filmmaker Renate Sami.

For a year at monthly intervals, Ute Aurand and Bärbel Freund filmed In the Garden, a lovely portrait of a Potsdam-Bornim garden designed in 1910 by gardener and philosopher Karl Foerster. An extraordinary variety of flora, natural lighting effects, textures and colors unfold in this gentle, expertly edited film, which forms a bridge between the natural world and the individual soul.

A film structured around Detel Aurand and Jon Sigurgeiersson.

A new short film portrait that, as often in Ute Aurands work, was filmed over several years and in different places, in this case Germany and Japan. "Filming portraits allows me to emphasize private gestures and moments, and thus to transcend the narrative or documenting." (UA)

Short film featuring images of flowers.

“Fadenspiele 2“ (Toying with String 2) is an animation made with the painter, my sister, Detel Aurand. We filmed inside the studio and outdoors in the forest and fields. From various elements like paper, wood, plastic and fabric come images that continuously change their form. We see one image evolving out of the other, becoming something new.

A portrait of the filmmakers Bärbel Freund and Karl Heil like a song in its changing verses, the locations were chosen according to mood and season: in spring, in snow, in Venice, in the flat, alone and together.

“In the day after seeing Terzen, there was a surprising sense of the film that developed for me. The rhythms were still present and helped to unify a multitude of impressions. This lead me to reconsider the general tone of the film because, as I reached beyond its quick pace and rhythmic lightness and beyond the everyday content, I realized that its Heiterkeit grows out of a serenity or courage in facing mortality. This is the surprising sense of the film, its inner music. (…) Early in the film I recall a chair held in the strong afternoon sunlight. Even though you show it from many angles, it has a potent stillness. This strikes me as a good example of how you embody an active sense of seeing in your filming, and you reflect back to us the paradox that it is in movement that we create stillness. The eye, constantly moving yet creating stillness." — Robert Beavers

One day in Neubrandenburg, filmed in a small city 130km north of Berlin in September 1995.

"Here it is very nice at the Moment" is a triptych. In the first part, "Maria und die Welt", Ute Aurand films Maria Lang in 1995, who moves to the countryside to take care of her mother. The second part, "Familiengruft - ein Liebesgedicht an meine Mutter" was produced by Maria Lang in 1981. It tells about what we most often keep quiet - prohibitions, barriers but also love. Twenty-two years later, Ute Aurand films Maria's daily care of her mother, now ninety-six years old: edited in 2006 by the two filmmakers, "Der Schmetterling im Winter", composes the last element of the triptych.

The two 11year old friends, Franz and Pablo, run with angel-wings, stand under giant leaves and improvise on their trompet and piano.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?