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Stranded is a kinetic installation based on a sound composition for frequencies below the human perception. Its silent layer can be, therefore, perceived only visually, as the vibrating strings are stretched from the loudspeaker’s membrane across the room and illuminated with ultraviolet light.

In the dark space, the installation emerges as an ephemeral moving sculpture. Like a three-dimensional luminous landscape, shifting between immateriality and materiality, the strings vibrate in a glowing play of wave forms which are reminiscent of both laser beams and generative computer art. The silence of the installation provides a metaphorical insight into the unhearable, that resembles an iceberg’s mass submerged under water. What cannot be heard can be sensed.

Brigitta Bödenauer (AT), born in 1972, has graduated in Theater, Film and Media Studies from the University of Vienna. She teaches and writes on film and visual media. Bödenauer has been active as DJ in Vienna’s noise and experimental scene since the early 1990s. Her visual work has been always inspired by and strongly connected to music. Extensive experiments – driven by her fascination for the sensuality of movement and material – mark the beginning of each of her works. She creates fleeting spaces by employing various acoustic and/or visual means often addressing the intangible, the hidden, or what eludes perception. She has collaborated with musicians, such as PRSZR (Rafal Iwański, Pure), CoH (Ivan Pavlov), Miguel Carvalhais, Susanna Gartmayer or Peter Kutin. Her films received a number of awards including the First Prize at the Diagonale Festival 2004 in Graz in the category “Innovative Cinema” and the “Best Abstract Film” at the London International Animation Festival in 2008.

In 2017, Bödenauer was an artist-in-residence at WRO within the residency program for artists based in Austria. In 2018, she came back to Wroclaw to continue her activities initiated then that resulted in the new audiovisual performance and installation We won’t close our umbrellas.

Additionally, before the opening of the exhibition, on Nov 28, 2018, at the Faculty of Arts, University of Umeå, there’ll be another WRO on Tour #29 Systems / Shaking / Sounding screening of the video works selected from the 2017 DRAFT SYSTEMS WRO Biennale program.

Presentation of Stranded in Umeå is a result of cooperation between the Vita Kuben Gallery and WRO Art Center and was kindly supported by the Arts and Culture Division of Federal Chancellery of the Republic of Austria and the Austrian Embassy in Stockholm.

curated by Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka