July 3 - 24, 2005
Corinna Schnitt – Living a Beautiful Life - exhibition

„Living a Beautiful Life”, 13 min, DVD, 2003
vs. Found footage from East German productions of the seventies

„Das nächste Mal”, 6 Min, DVD, 2003
„Schlangenkinder” – photographies, 2004

Imagine a life you dreamed of for yourself when you were a child. A perfect life. Seemingly naive, Corinna Schnitt embraces common desires and conventional ideas of happiness, staging them up in an almost merciless quasi-documentary scenery. A handsome couple in a stylish villa high above LA confide to the camera that they possess, and that they represent, everything we ordinary people can only dream about. This exhaustive litany of complete bliss is hardly bearable. Bizarre as such a wallow in clichés seems, Corinna Schnitt's work is far from simple parody, cheap effects and punch lines. She masters the dramaturgically effective method of subtly combining artificial and naturalistic pictures. It's characteristic for Schnitt’s precise films that they leave us with an irritating ambiguity, causing a sometimes amusing sometimes disturbing problem of decoding. That’s how her barely moving pictures pull the rug from under our feet – gently and very friendly.

About found footage from East German productions of the seventies:
Small naked children playing with a baby tiger in a heavenly landscape, surrounded by large balloons. This material doesn’t originate from Hollywood, the factory of fictions, but from an East German film production of the seventies.
The confrontation of both films within an installation throws fresh semantic perspectives on each of them. Contrasting two seemingly hermetic utopian fictions shows them cracking at the seams.