ROMANA SCHEFFKNECHT 1982 2013 - romana scheffknecht videos

The tabletop installations that Romana Scheffknecht has been making since the early 1990s
with found objects, electrical appliances, plastic figures, drawings, video cameras and monitors
are experimental artistic arrangements that address society and its mediatisation, not without
always keeping an eye on the conditio humana. Scheffknecht has mechanical devices for
changing the camera’s viewpoint and direction made by specialists for these installations. Her
machines are small- and large-scale monstrosities that often trigger movements by other machines.
The key functions of these constructions always appear to be translation and steering.
The little motor and long arm connecting the motor and a swivelled mirror with one another
are patently not made to be the most efficient solution. It may be assumed instead that somebody
was at work here who takes pleasure in making ironic use of machines.
II. The case 4
Architectural plans of the Galerie im Taxispalais, floor plans, elevations, sketches and notes made
by the artist for the exhibition are spread out on the table. Everything here is about the venue,
the space and the exhibition 1982 / 2013 — in the planning. In Wittgenstein’s idiom, one could
say: Fact (case) and the idea of the substance meet. A fan introduces movement into the
unsorted papers, making a sheet of paper with a view of a room flutter upwards. It is filmed
by a compact video camera that is lying on the table, and fed straight to a monitor. The image
appears on the monitor like a three-dimensional room with a door, on which the camera
focuses — an entrance and an exit. Again, the process of the changing of reality is revealed
by depiction as a translation into another dimension, but also imagined as the possibility of
gaining knowledge.
You could speak of institutional critique in the sense of taking a (critical) view of the exhibition
space and its role as a public institution in connection with artists’ work. Although to state
that this is a key aspect of Romana Scheffknecht’s work would be an exaggeration. It is more
the case that it is in the nature of the thing when you engage with everything ‘that is the world’.
For Romana Scheffknecht the key issue is the perception and exploration of the conditions in
which the artist finds herself, or — metaphorically speaking — around the way in and the way
out. The venue, the exhibition and their histories are subjected to reflection, where the idea
and the planning process are declared as part of the artwork.
III. coincidence
A video, that shows the billowing snow — also known as ‘white noise’ 5 or static — that the
screen would show when broadcasting shut down for the night in the era of analogue television,
and which was often ascribed to background noise from the echo of the Big Bang — is
projected on the table. The artist decides on the form that this takes during installation at the
venue, or it is left to chance.
Coincidence and the random are key themes in Romana Scheffknecht’s artistic mindset. The
on-screen static stands for one of the simplest scientifically explicable random processes.
Accordingly, it is a recurring motif in the artist’s collages and installations, either as a photograph
of a television screen or as video footage. In 1996, for example, in a piece in the Philoso-
phische Untersuchungen block of works produced since the early 1990s: a miniature figure
of a woman (approx. 7cm tall) with a poodle and carrying a handbag looks at a monitor waving
a handkerchief. The monitor shows video footage of static. There is a mirror positioned behind
the woman, alongside her are projections of two photographs of the Vierwaldstättersee, the
place where Friedrich Nietzsche thought about the “Eternal Recurrence” of all Being.
IV. Mistakes
A drag lift runs in a loop via four discs and slowly pulls a book behind it, which drags along
the tabletop. Directional interventions are a favourite technical arena for experimentation for
Romana Scheffknecht. We are familiar with the process from the adjustable view using a
mirror. The drag lift was completed specially for the exhibition at the Galerie im Taxispalais. It
pulls the book four metres in one direction before completing a loop. It is a copy of Sigmund
Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which is only apparent on closer scrutiny and may
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