The American artist Anita Di Bianco (*1970 in New York) works with film, video, and print media. Her short films pursue strategies of the restaging of works by well-known writers such as Winfried Georg Sebald or Gertrude Stein and in this way destabilize the notion of inviolable authorship. The text selection is analytical, the images purist: Di Bianco’s remakes make hidden structures visible and open up new avenues of interpretation. The artist’s most recent works—Com Viet (2008) as well as the two-channel video Installation of the films Du rêve et des drogues and Ballad in Plain D with the title DerVersteller (2007)—will be shown at the exhibition in the Kunstverein’s depot.

Com Viet restages a 1980 interview with the French author Marguerite Yourcenar. Her entire life, Yourcenar, who traced down all of the conceivable forms of unconventional love in literature and even tested them in experiments, sought out alternatives to the “great staged feeling,” which she considered a characteristic trait of French culture. The corresponding passages from the interview are played off-camera against the background of a Vietnamese restaurant and in part recited in a monologue by an actor on the premises of a Berlin laundromat.

Anita Di Bianco’s cinematic methods, the camera angles, and the succession of cuts contradict conventional, quickly clocked media images. The prolonged, sober shots cause what is being spoken to achieve a suggestive urgency, and the image a downright demanding intensity.