Portraits in Motion

There's a long and illustrious line of artists embarking on eccentric projects, but Volker Gerling must be nearer the front than most for sheer balls and bloody-mindedness. He's a Berlin film-maker who makes flickbooks, capturing 12-second long portraits of subjects who think they're posing for a single snap. Here he tells the story of his 3,500 km tour of the German countryside on foot, asking people he met to view his work from a wooden tray round his neck like an avant-garde cigarette seller.

The art of the flickbooks is a record of these encounters, and their appeal lies in revealing the emotional truth contained within tiny gestures. Blown up with an overhead projector, an instant of awkwardness becomes vast, cinematic. In one, a teenage couple lean in to kiss for the camera and their female friend's face flickers quickly from a smile to blank annoyance. In another, adolescent boys pose with their fishing rod with disconcerting stillness: only the grass wavers. The images have the instant emotional appeal of thumbing through family albums, with just the slightest hint of creep from the two flickbooks where women flash their breasts for brief seconds.

Gerling talks about art, but what he's really doing is a kind of latter-day magic lantern show, full of nostalgic artistry. This is exactly the kind of accessible lecture/performance hybrid that Summerhall's spaces are made for, and the inhabitants of the old wooden pews form a rapt circle around him. They're as thoroughly captured as his photographic subjects.

 

http://festival15.summerhall.co.uk/event/portraits-in-motion/