"Sad with Satie" 2007, installation view. DVD duration 7,20 min, video-projection, wallpainting. Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien Studio 3, Berlin

Sad with Satie - Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien Studio 3, Berlin

For the past several years, Erla Haraldsdóttir has traveled to select locations in Europe, the United States, and Scandinavia generating disruptions that radically alter the mundane. Such pieces have sought to challenge the existing dynamics between place and population through the lenses of globalization, gentrification, and racism. In dealing with these themes, Haraldsdottir has built an aesthetic language that presents the possibility of another, stranger world nested within the quotidian.

Haraldsdottir's most recent work, "Sad with Satie", which will be presented in Studio 3 at Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien May 11, marks a pointed departure from the artist's earlier subject matter. In this video/animation Haraldsdottir has approached her interest in fiction from a decidedly autobiographical standpoint. "Sad with Satie" is a patchwork of animated, hallucinatory events woven through hand-held video footage of the main character's circadian routine. Journalistic post-it notes and a confessional voice-over punctuate and amplify the tenor of what is recognizably a suspended state of lost love. Paradoxically, Haraldsdottir's vividly rendered, animated vignettes masquerade as an omnipresent yet alternate reality, thereby reinforcing the romantic notion that suffering is indeed the ideal state for creative insight.   What results is comical, self-deprecating, and destabilizing.

Text by Lisi Raskin

Text Lisi Raskin - Essay on Sad with Satie
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