Felix Gmelin
Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, 2002 After Gerd Conradt’s Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne, 1968 Two-channel video installation, 16 mm film and DV, transferred to two DVDs, each 12 min., silent, 2002
Felix
Gmelin’s works are about political symbolism in images, language, and
utopias. He focuses primarily on the 1960s and 1970s by using his
father’s film material (who was a lecturer at the German Film and
Television Academy in Berlin from 1967 to 1968), integrating it into
his artistic investigations, and making it a basis for new questions.
His video installation, Farbtest, Die Rote Fahne II, which was
premiered at the Biennale in Venice in 2003, consists of two
projections. One shows Gerd Conradt’s film of 1968, in which a group of
young men, including Gmelin’s father, run in relay through Berlin’s
streets carrying a red flag; the other is a reconstruction of the
original, which Felix Gmelin directed 34 years later in the streets of
Stockholm.
Although the appearance of urban streets has changed
noticeably in the two films, it is striking that the jeans and parka
outfit of demonstrators has survived the decades. The unchanged
aesthetics seems to correspond to the still-valid rituals of political
activism. Authenticity in political convictions appears to express
itself through actions that repeat themselves. If one compares the
intentions of the two videos, however, they differ according to the
location and the period in which they were made.
Conradt’s
film dates from the time of the 1968 student revolt in Berlin, the
original was about a revolutionary symbol and the idea of appropriating
the urban space. In the more recent version, shot in 1992 in Stockholm,
the emphasis seems more on the ritual-like character of the action.
With his remake of the film, Gmelin explores how the young people of
1968 felt when they sent out a political signal. By returning to the
old film material, Gmelin makes it possible both to continue dreaming
the dreams of those years, and at the same time confronts them with our
visual and audio habits of today.
Maike Cruse
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