++++ It was one of the first works for Manifesta 4 to be seen. Pia Greschner's films were included in the first presentations of a Manifesta program which at that time was only vaguely outlined. As exemplary works they appear hermetic and enigmatic, and in a certain way they remain so even in the context of the entire exhibition.
They are striking by virtue of an indefinable attractive power and a peculiar aesthetics. A young woman carrying a child in her arms walks slowly towards the camera and past it. It is night-time or very early in the morning. The light is bluish, somewhere there are white, cold light sources, it is certainly somewhat cool and the ground is wet with dew. The scene could be a camping ground, a refugee camp or a cluster of allotment gardens. The child is sleeping, there is no emergency, the woman is not in a hurry. But she radiates an intense unfalteringness whose origin could be desperation, fear, resignation — there is obviously something there without it revealing itself.
"In my work I show images of moments between reality and fantasy, dream or hallucination," the artist explains, who was born in Cassel in 1967 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg and at the Central St Martin's College of art and design in London. "I transpose my idea of transcendence, timelessness and fiction into these moments which are simultaneously strange and normal and connect us with the universe for a few minutes."
Blue Hour 1-3 are three short 16mm films with a similar formal language. As if in slow motion, somnambulantly, and all the more implacably, the protagonists stride through the picture without once looking at the camera. The sound is also insistent; the grating steps in the stillness underscore the drama of an event which in itself is not dramatic. Pia Greschner's staging aims precisely at this uncertainty. The work of the German artist engenders with its camera direction and its conception of image a diffuse tension, an almost alarming mood, a series of unfinished questions to which there are no answers because they cannot be concretely formulated.
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Holbeinstraße 1, until 25 August. hoh