Marcel Odenbach - Stille Bewegungen. Tranquil ­Motions

With the exhibition Marcel Odenbach: Stille Bewegungen — Tranquil Motions the ifa presents one of Germany's preeminent video artists. The curator of this monographic exhibition is Matthias Mühling, Director of the Lenbachhaus art museum in Munich, Germany. With 14 videotapes, video installations, and works on paper from the last thirty years the exhibition is an exemplary presentation of the artist's production. The combination of exhibits opens a panorama of Odenbach's oeuvre, in which he tracks different cultures and draws an analytical as well as emotional portrait of the human being in a globalized society. Marcel Odenbach was born in 1953 in Cologne. His videos and video installations demonstrate how decisively he has influenced and advanced this genre internationally. From his early works conceived for presentation on video display units to his complex installations with large format projections, the exhibited works show the degree of subtlety and formal variety with which Odenbach stages the moving image and its acoustic accompaniment. The works on paper constitute a part of his oeuvre that is not of lesser importance.

In addition to the retrospective character of this exhibition, the selection of works follows the artist's thematic priorities. In particular his engagement with the trauma of the Nazi period demonstrates how his works reflect post-war Germany and the state of its society in an exemplary way. Very early in his career Marcel Odenbach had placed this theme in a very wide context, which put the specifically German issue into a more general perspective. He observed various cultures and political constellations and allowed them to flow into his work, drew connections between the German trauma of Nazi rule and the Rwandan genocide, between images of Turkish males and the role of women in Venezuela, between the familiar and the alien, between his own biography and the history of others. Odenbach's video works and drawings are complex narratives which he develops by means of a very distinctive technique to produce collages consisting of recorded film and television footage, archival material, and images he has created himself. This montage of public and private images creates a narrative that subtley connects overarching history with the feelings of individual human beings and the artist's own life. To focus the panorama of cultures on the locations of the touring exhibition, ifa asked the artist to select a specific work for each location of the tour. The selected work forms a distinct focus at that location with the aim of intensifying the local discourse and the discussion.