INSIDE – The Colour Version

It hisses, it blinks. A virtual, two-dimensional anaglyph flickers in red and green, unfolding a visual space true to the Brehmian aesthetic. Concentratedly condensed collisions occur between everyday life and the world, being and performing, symbols and icons. A human skull, human bodies, Castle Grafenegg as an architectonic stand-in for the uncanny ... Sex and crime, art and pop culture flicker at pixilated speed – the stuff of dreams – most penetrating however brief. The mundane alternates with the fetish, glimpsed in the blink of an eye, intersected by a long drag on a Chesterfield cigarette while the full-bodied, tube-amped slow-motion reverb sound of a guitar swings in the background.

The PRAXIS-Archive of Austrian artist Dietmar Brehm has been accumulating since the Summer of 2007, a "rampantly proliferating" cluster of videos according to the artist himself. Glittering like a pop kaleidoscope, this currently 18-volume collection of scenes affords perspectives on and insights into a world shaped by the aesthetics of advertising and cinema. A world the artist co-designs or coincidentally captures and into which he himself repeatedly intrudes; often smoking, looking straight into the camera, hidden behind dark sunglasses. Brehm himself appears as a pop icon, and he is omnipresent as an "image artist" (Peter Assmann) in his visual worlds – both in front of and behind the camera.

The title INSIDE aptly describes the program, the principle of intruding on film material (now purely digital) that Brehm has continually pursued and really celebrated in his work. Previously completed films are perpetually reinterpreted, changed or actively destroyed. The re-appropriation of INSIDE unfolds a kind of self-reflexive PRAXIS "best of", while resisting the numbing advertising logic of regurgitated music production: Instead of being guided by hits and top attractions, far more trust is placed in the principle of serendipity. The organically expanding visual body is doggedly dissected, scenes uprooted and newly assimilated. Imagery transformed by characteristic filter effects appears thereby to increasingly spread and multiply. So, in fact, this current incarnation of the work might also only be temporary – notably, a parallel companion piece already exists in black and white. INSIDE constitutes a retrospective view free of nostalgia and false glorification. It is contemporary and ragingly beautiful. In brief, a classic Brehm film. (Sebastian Höglinger)

Translation: Eve Heller