Viktoria Schmid

A contribution in the vein of the long-lasting tradition of picturing the horse as well as a portrait of a longtime companion of the filmmaker. In front of the camera the horse behaves differently than in other known images in art history. The audio is generated by contact-printing the picture information.

This camera-less film was created in a darkroom from photograms of the ingredients of four dishes: alphabet pasta soup, goulash, the Austrian dessert Kaiserschmarrn, and coffee. The ingredients were placed directly on the film strip, exposed, and then developed by hand. The result is an abstraction of the cooking process itself – a series of images-touches of ingredients, arranged in the order in which they were mixed. “We no longer notice what is extraordinary in daily life. The artist Viktoria Schmid, however, takes this as her material. Schmid manages to draw out the fascinating potential in the interweaving of light and time. She makes traces of light visible, and turns them into the central focus of how she deals with time and space. While we generally only pay secondary attention to the play of shadow and light, she manages to draw attention back to these phenomena, and she does so with impressive reduction.” — Siegfried A. Fruhauf

Showcases a Manhattan apartment and the city from its window.

A film loop showing the similarity of the artist and her sister in 240 16mm single-frame portraits. The individual frames were recorded one after the other in camera without any editing in post-production. Due to the phi-phenomenon, the rhythmically fast cutting of the individual portraits becomes a mixed portrait of both faces. Alternating and increasing, the series of frames changes from one to a series of four portraits per person. At this pace, the eye is able to perceive a difference.

A self-built screen amid an expansive green landscape. On it dance silhouettes of the surrounding trees and bushes. A natural cinema – without a darkened cinema hall, without artificial light and without film. From various camera positions, Viktoria Schmid portrays her screen, installed in the sculpture park of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as a moving image within a moving image.

In her trilingual-titled film, Viktoria Schmid meditatively transforms forest and seascapes in Spain, Lithuania, and Lower Austria, by triple exposing 16mm color negative film—using red, green, and blue filters to create layers of color and time.

A touristic, romantic portrayal of the metropolis of Vienna as well as a fetish, stripped down portrayal of the medium film itself, made with contactprints in the darkroom. The soundtrack is generated directly from the visual information.

Florian Flicker’s documentary No Name City explores the tragicomic fate of the eponymous Western theme park in Lower Austria that proved to be a pipe dream. Viktoria Schmid’s W O W (Kodak) shows the demolition of parts of the Kodak company complex in Rochester—in reverse.