Bildwerden

Isolde Maria Joham – the woman pictured – steps onto a mobile scaffolding. She very gradually climbs up one step at a time before nearly reaching the top when she stops to give a thumbs-up and mischievously smiles at the camera. Christiana Perschon presents the 90-year-old artist in austerely framed shot segments. Joham performs with the scaffolding, time and again peering through its struts to gaze into the camera. As delicate and fragile as the artist appears, she remains master of this tool which she learned to use over the course of her many years. Her paintings are also still here, but in the background. They virtually surround the artist and her scaffolding as a second frame – the third is constituted by Perschon's framing. Wonderful overlappings and correspondences result between the artist and her work, including one point when Joham almost appears like the robot – metallic yet fragile – who wanders through a lush field of flowers in the painting behind her.

BILDWERDEN constitutes another part of a portrait series Perschon is producing in creative collaboration with an older generation of women artists. It is about "elective affinities", correspondences and – last but not least – it is undertaken out of concern. In the history of modern art, "the female body becomes structurally connected with the image as a material object, " as well as an, "aesthetic category" (Silvia Eiblmayr). Women artists are continually working on this linkage. Perschon's film functions as a recovery of this structural connection of woman-body-image, but conceived in entirely different terms: It is about Joham's self-determination doubly reflected in visual dialogue with Perschon, through how Perschon places the artist Joham "in the picture" and simultaneously contemplates the becoming of the picture. It comes through in such incidentally plain and simple sentences as, "That is a super beautiful picture," or, "Now you have surpassed the picture." (Claudia Slanar)