Mareike Bernien

Mareike Bernien works in a media-oriented manner between structural film, radio play and text, examining representation structures in regard to their fundamental social and media-related conditions. She most often uses existing image or text material which she recombines and recontextualizes in a process of translating appropriation. Acoustics and language play a crucial role that is not conceived as the opposite of the visual, though, but instead appears as its elementary component. Film images are expropriated and translated into language; they become linguistic images that build up and disintegrate moments of the visual without, however, retaining the burden of proof and the evident character of the visual image. What is at issue is less the agglomeration of readable combinations than a recurring critical analysis of the visual and its productivity regarding social relations and scenarios. The image is always addressed as connectable and controversial, thus fundamentally calling into question an image production that generates evidence.

Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, "As Found", 2009, video still

Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, "As Found", 2009, video still

The audio, visual and text works are usually created in collective and dialogical work processes. This also applies to the latest film work As Found (2009) which Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger jointly conceived and realized. At the centre of the film is the "as-found aesthetic" of brutalist architecture in Israel, the principles of which - e.g., including given markings of a site in the plan of design - are themselves taken up by the film as a citation technique. As Found examines the sight conditions predetermined and laid out in the architecture and sets them in relation to a search for translations between a here and an elsewhere, between projection and reflection, so as to establish relations to a place and be able to formulate contradictions.

Mareike Bernien, "Testbild", 2007, video still