Still in Focus After All These Years

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Installation view of Auder's current show in Berlin. Photo courtesy of the gallery.

When we met up with Michel Auder in the fall, he was just wrapping up his feature-length fictional biography, The Feature, co-directed with Andrew Neel. Culled from over 6,000 hours of his archival videos from a life lived behind (and in front) of the camera, the film was a visual diary that took years to make. The film finally premiered at the 58th Berlinale and won the New Vision Award at the CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen  November.

Since, Auder and his videos filled with the dalliances with celebrities, sex and drugs have been traveling the European video art circuit. Adding to his list of impressive exhibition spaces (including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam), his show Heads of the Town is currently on view at the ScheiblerMitte gallery in Berlin.

Heads of the Town blends video and sound into a self-referential commentary on the medium of video. Like the rest of Auder’s works, this one plays on the role of the camera as a tool for social interaction, blurring the line between individual and social histories.

Video still from Portrait of Alice Neel (1976–1982). Photo courtesy of Michel Auder.

The gallery has also been showing some of Auder’s older films alongside this new work, including Portrait of Alice Neel (1976–1982). Considering her one of his closest friends, Auder presents an endearing narrative that follows the painter on vacations, at work and at her birthday party.

After Berlin, Auder’s work will move to the Inter Media Art Institute’s special show at the 43rd Art Cologne 2009. Both La Plage and L’Opium—two two-channel video projections—will have their screening premieres in a hall that will be transformed into a black box.

What comes after Heads of the Town? As he told FLYP, “the beauty of my material is all the missing things I don’t know are there…And I’m not done yet. There is another world coming out of me that I filmed in the past.”