Praxis 12 - 12 Scenes (82-93)

82: Objektiv
83: Camourflage
84: Hello Dan Graham
85: Kein Hut/No Hat
86: Harmannsdorf
87: Hose/Trousers
88: Turm/Tower
89: Grafenegg
90: Visite/Ward Round
91: Schwarzensee
92: Waxenbergwald/Waxenberg Forest
93: Hallo Jesus

Almost all the images that make up Praxis 12 emerge from impenetrable blackness. But some mysterious events are taking place in the pitch-black space they come from. There’s a roaring, clattering and scraping, echoing and ringing, though what could be happening and the reasons behind it all can never be identified. Dietmar Brehm has worked on his Praxis series since 2007, creating a sequence of short scenes, shifted perceptions and strange associations: digital minimalism in gloriously bright colors. Scenes 82 to 93, which comprise the 12th part, were created in 2010 and 2011; in contrast to earlier entries Brehm did not use old film fragments in this case.
The artist enjoys exposing himself to his camera’s laconic gaze as a lonely Narcissus. In the first scene, bathed in artificial green light, he tinkers with the lens of his HDV camera, his face going in and out of focus. Later, he displays himself as a reproduced, broken phantom in the mirrors and monitors at an exhibition of video art. Brehm is a practitioner of Entwirklichung (de-actualization): He distorts and inverts the images he finds, coloring ivy ultramarine and preserving a view of Austria’s Schwarzensee in false naturalism. When traveling Brehm subjects old buildings to new views. He sketches traumatizing moods into a Baroque castle, at the same time showing a tranquil image of its tower on the subtly moving water surface — and once again himself, standing next to a ruined fortress in a positive-negative image, as if an alien who landed in the country’s Wachau region has set its sights on the building.

(Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: Steve Wilder