Tearing Shadows (Teaser), 2013



Projection on sculptures, video, HD, stereosound, loop, dimensions variable, 401contemporary, Berlin





OTHER SELECTED VIDEO INSTALLATIONS

folds, 2011



2-Channel Video Installation, video and sound, HD, colour, variable loop on 19th century plaster casts of Kladeos, Kephissos, Belvedere Torso, Seer and the Three Goddesses from the Bernhard August von Lindenau Collection, Lindenau Museum, Altenburg, Germany

The work folds for the Lindenau Museum (Altenburg, Germany) may be understood as a rapprochement with the history of the museum’s collection of plaster casts. Seidel was particularly interested in the ancient, fragmented bodies – how through the loss of limbs they became almost abstract, fragmentary sculptures and yet still disclosed a nearly uncanny vitality. Also noteworthy is that the collection entails sculptures, Greek in origin, that have been replicated time and time again. Hewn from marble and partially painted in color, the originals were repeatedly copied in marble or plaster in different places across centuries, despoiled of color and slurred in detail.

Despite these multiple re-shapings that attend the loss of the original’s memory, new meanings and frictions arise with each copy in each respective present. They are the precondition for over 2400 years of the ongoing revitalization of the legacy of antiquity. The fold, a continually recurring visual and conceptual motif in my works, is for me the pictorial metaphor for these layers and distortions of meaning. In the projection the fold becomes connected to the fragmentary sculptures, swirls around them, makes them flow with bygone colors, protects or clothes them, gives them peace and lets them come alive for a moment, in order then to be stored as a further layer in the sediment of oblivion.

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scrape, 2011



LED Façade Artwork, video and sound, colour, 2:49 min, loop, GanaArt Center, Seoul Square, Seoul, South Korea

Seoul seems to be a glowing, crystal-like urban canyon, each chasm illuminated and infinitely reflected in flat facets of glass. The film shows abstract formations that are scraped and cut out of the missing darkness of the city. They reveal a light volume overcoming the flatness of the façade by breaking into the space from the front or dissolving it from behind.

In its slowly evolving, almost biological structures the work is reminiscent of deep-sea creatures. These complex life forms try to attract their prey with emission of light, so-called bioluminescence. In this case the “prey” is the potential audience, who nearly lose sight of the nearby billboards and city lights as they follow a hypnotic contrast to the pulsating city life of Seoul.

scrape uses a colour palette of warm shades of blue, red and green which originate from the defined raster of neutral light sources of the media canvas. The moving afterimages painted in pure light extend over the orthogonal framework of the façade, providing a view into a stream of forms and colours. Voluminous black spaces divide and separate the scene into ever-changing ambiguous sculptural formations. With their constant process of growth and decay into darkness they seem to exist in the flat surface and the spatial depth at the same time.
Overall the film maps the fluid dynamics of the inner forces of an organic structure, recapturing and quieting a world agitated by technology.

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black mirror, 2011



Projection on Paper Sculptures in front of a Mirror, video and sound, HD, colour, variable loop, Young Projects, Los Angeles, USA
Sculpture #1: 1,6 x 1,2 x 0,8 m
Sculpture #2: 2,1m x 0,8 x 0,9 m

The title "Black Mirror" refers to the dark mirror used in the 18th century for landscape painting, also called Claude glass. Woven by laser into scarcely discernible forms, gossamer papers inspired by bark beetle traces float in the exhibition space. Light-structures invade these delicate paper beings, shower them with dazzling colour, caress them with flowing powdery haze. A mirror reflects the viewer’s incidence angle of vision and seems to open up a unifying space that nonetheless remains only a surface.

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chiral, 2010



Projection on Paper Sculptures, video and sound, HD, colour, 2:58 min, loop, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipeh, Taiwan

Chirality is a scientific term describing a structure that is not identical to its mirror image. Chiral collects cinematic etudes, which develop various conceptual approaches in order to expand the two-dimensional image into space. They are projected onto a sculpture (510 x 260 x 370 cm) and a screen (250 x 200 cm) made from handmade Taiwanese paper and develop very different lives on these configurations of the same material.

The amalgamation of volumetric lights sets ideas from Chinese calligraphy into motion and melts them with influences from European Art Informel as well as impasto painting to an abstract-organic sculpture. The installation is completed by a soundtrack by Austrian composer Richard Eigner.With the premiere in MOCA Taipei the first iteration of the long-term project was presented...

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_grau, 2004



Experimental Film, video and sound, HD, b/w + colour, 10:01 min

_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally … various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds.

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E3, 2002



Experimental Film, video and sound, HD, 4:3, b/w + colour, 3:00 min

E3 (∞, E = eternity, 3 = 3 month) is the first work of Robert Seidel trying to capture his drawing and painting style into a moving picture. The movie is a 3-month-diary that he created while studying in the UK.

It captures the beginning, with all its enthusiasm, energy and more or less sub-conscious hope that things develop differently in a new space. Followed by the phase were everything slows down to finally result in a complete breakdown into everyday life. This cycle happens over and over again, in all scales, in all relations … sometimes it can be a cozy, pleasant state … while other times it seems like Don Quixote, fighting against windmills …