What is the position of the artist here? What is their function and how can they carry it out in a credible way? Is it simply a case
that art, like many other social institutions, simply uses migration, migrants and asylum seekers as raw material for (aesthetic) speculation within
the system itself? Can art production ever fundamentally question existing structures and power relationships and if so, under what conditions? The film Phantom
Foreign Vienna attempts to formulate an approach to this thorny constellation by intervening in the flow of exotic images more radically than the
(original) transformation from super 8 frame to large format photograph ever allowed. Throughout the film Ponger relates material from her diary, written
during the original project in 1991/1992, along with reflections from her present point of view within the discourse and including aspects of visual
and informational organisation. She renders the categories of thought visible along with the people and the structural vocabulary of filmic (and normal)
reality fitting those categories. Simultaneously she destroys the categorial territories she has just led us into. Multiple ambushes. So the situation
around a Ugandan theatre performance becomes representative for the whole film, question marks dangling thickly in front of our eyes:
“What am I really seeing here?
A missionary who wants to convert two natives to Christianity?
Is he giving them a rosary, or paying for a new church with a shiny necklace?
Or are they spiritual leaders debating their belief systems, exchanging presents as an indication of mutual esteem?
Or are they Ugandan students who are putting on a play with a friend from Development Aid?” or, unasked, all of these at the
same time? |
