Milena Gierke

born 1968 in Frankfurt am Main

 

1989 - 94 Studies at the Frankfurt Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, in Peter Kubelka's class “Film + Kochen” (film + cooking)

 

In 1994 she studied sculpture at the Cooper Union in New York City with Hans Haacke and film history with James Hoberman. Other teachers have been representatives of the US film avant-garde such as Ken Jacobs or Robert Breer. Jonas Mekas has greatly inspired Milena Gierke in her diary films. In 1995 he screened a three-hour retrospective of her work at Anthology Film Archive.

 

Since 2001 she has been a member of the curatorial group "Filmsamstag" ("Filmsaturday", www.filmsamstag.de) at the Filmkunsthaus Babylon, Berlin.

 

The concept of her experimental work with Super 8 is to approach the essence of humans, things, and places, of everyday gestures and unusual occurrences in the moment of their reception, thereby analyzing hierarchically structured visual habits. The peripheral comes into the center during the screening, when the details of the everyday expand into the filmmaker's silent shots, composed in real time. What sets her films apart is "in the essence: Choosing an object, observing it with the attention that all living things demand of us, but that we always turn away from." (Nicole Brenez).

 

Milena Gierke projects her films inside the screening room itself. The sound of the running projector becomes its own rhythm, becomes the musical accompaniment. Each of the programs that she puts together takes into account the architectonic occurrences of the place, which are created by the space and the audience. She shows her work not only in cinemas, but also in galleries and other places of interest to her, for example: 2001 "Vorgestellt" Earport (young composers were presented to and put in relation to visual artists), "Mittagspause", the closing event in the old Staatsbank, in which Roland Ketschmer gave a reading of Robert Musil's Buch "The Man without Qualities" and showed Milena Gierke's film ZEIT in connection with it, "Filme ohne Ton" ("Films without Sound") in the Berlin Center for the Deaf, including a discussion with an interpreter.

 

Milena Gierke thinks of herself as an artist whose cinematic work, in terms of its light and image composition, is strongly influenced by old Flemish painting.

In her live performances, newly conceived compositions of quiet are constantly unfolding which intensify into atmospheric tableaus and in their movement visualize the irreplaceable volatility of each moment. A web of memory is created on the screen, transported through light and sound frequencies, which come from somewhere in the darkness of the movie theater, from the place where the performer stands at the super-8 projector.

 

The artist has been living in Berlin since 1998.

 

We offer a glimpse into the Super 8 work that has developed in the last 15 years through three of the artist's conceived programs, which are not fixed, but can constantly be varied anew in consultation with the artist. From each of the thematic complexes of the works available, a sixty to ninety minute program can be put together.

 

 

in distribution

 

Milena Gierke – Programm 1: Reise- und Tagebuchfilme

Milena Gierke – Programm 2: Konzeptuelle Filme

Milena Gierke – Programm 3: Kurze Filme / Stimmungen