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Re-Actionism: Austrian artist Kerstin Cmelka explores the way art's icons are alive to the present.

Article Excerpt
Kerstin Cmelka is a visual artist who works primarily with photography, film and performance. Her recent works source film stills, film-production stills and documentation of performances, such as those of VAIAE EXPORT. While many of her works show subjects that were originally intended to provoke emotional extremes, Cmelka avoids indulging in the emotionally charged portrayal of her selected subjects by deregulating their original readings. Her subtle reworking of found materials brings new relevance to her subject matter, or offers a new reading of its existing qualities. Cmelka's recent exhibitions include the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, (2007); Overtake, at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Ireland, (2007); and the last Busan Biennale (2006). She lives in Berlin.

SHANNON BOOL Maybe we could start by you telling me what your starting point is in the works that you've recently made, Multistability (2006) and the Re-actions on VALIE EXPORT (2006). Can you tell me what interests you in the original materials?

KERSTIN CMELKA Mostly it is an image that I see several times that keeps on preoccupying me in one way or another. The VALIE EXPORT photos, for instance, are images I've known since I was a child and that have always had an effect on me. If some images always reoccur in my head--sometimes there are years in between--and if I keep wanting to look them up again and again, then I will start to work with them in a more analytical way. The way I use them, or the new work that comes out of them, is decided afterwards.

SB How would you describe this relationship to using the images as being analytical?

KC I mean to use an artistic method to deal with material that is not your own. So I don't mean analytical in a scientific sense, but more at first being attracted to something in an emotional sense, and then trying to find the parameters that attract you, the parameters that affect other people--why do these images exist, or how they are regarded as a part of a collective knowledge?

KC Yeah, your starting point is your own attraction, and then you start to think about perception in general. In German, you call it "intersubjektiv"--you know, something that happens to you, but can also be shared with other people.

SB Intersubjectivity.

KC Yeah, intersubjectivity. And this is always to me the kind of parameter that makes something valuable enough to be an...

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