My Kingdom for a Lullaby #4

Michaela Grill's visual work makes use of a concrete wall as the smallest identifiable element of urban music culture which forms a space. The visual organization of this barely recognizable representational surface is resolved through Takeshi Fumimoto's musical structure. The images illustrate neither the tone nor the rhythm; they follow the logic of the acoustic blueprint to create new forms of hearing through the processing of the found sounds. The camera makes a parallel searching movement along the rough surface. The images, which cannot be isolated, resist a representational aesthetic, and fleeting spatial landscapes and forms which illustrate non-repeatability and improvisation appear in the tension between concentration on the cracks and fractures and the camera's movement across them. Reduction to the plastic and sensorial basis sensitizes the viewer's gaze by making the structure comprehensible.

Experimental short based on a car ride.

A subtle-spherical text-image composition about South Georgia, an island group of the Antarctic—a stretch of coast into which humanity’s devastating overexploitation has been inscribed.

A short succession of splits-screens gathers women in the throes of extreme states, screaming, with eyes wide, arms thrown up in dismay, angular eyebrows, stunned mouths ­– laying, running, standing, leaping to their feet: instants of extreme emotions sought and found in silent films of the 1920s.

Experimental filmmakers from Jean Painlevé onwards have long explored the wonders inherent in scientific and medical footage, particularly when trained on microscopic phenomena. There are multiple universes of unfolding and exploding forms revealed in UNDER THE MICROSCOPE, but Michaela Grill is not content to leave these amazing images unadorned. Using the cinematic resources of colour treatment, flashing and strobing, looping and repetition, plus a rich counterpoint soundtrack by Sophie Trudeau, she fashions a symphony of mysterious, mutating movements.