© Videonale e.V.
*1979 as Barbara Schmidt, lives in Münster GER
Studied of Fine Art at the Academy of Fien Arts Münster GER
Exhibitions [selection]:
2010 Berlinale Talent Campus #8, Berlin GER
Athens International Short Film Festival Psarokokalo GRE
2011 Dreaming with open Eyes, Rojo Nova, Fundaçao Casa França-Brasil / Escola Artes Visuais, Rio de Janeiro BRA
Blink! Light, Sound and the Moving Image, Denver Art Museum, Denver USA
2010 CUE: Artists’ Videos, Vancouver Artgallery, Vancouver CAN
Berlinale Talent Campus #8, Berlin GER
2009 Dreaming with open eyes, Kurzfilmprogramm, Art Center Nabi, Seoul KOR
9ème festival du court métrage de Nice, Nizza FRA
Beste Absichten., Zentrale der Deutschen Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main GER [S]
2008 L’Alternativa, 15é Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona ESP
kollateral, schade!, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund GER [S]
Open Cinema, International Short and Animation Film Festival, Sankt Petersburg RUS
2007 Tricky Women 2007, Internationales Animationsfilm Festival, Wien AUT
My faith is a poetical tribute to the belief in the triumph of reconciliation and harmony. In this animated film made from drawings, the artist narrates the archetypal history of relationship, separation and love in an imaginative manner. The description of the suffering and reunion of a couple enters into a dense dialogue with the visualization of the protagonists´ inner emotional states. Outer event and inner emotion become visually interwoven, influencing each other in their pictorial rendition. In addition to these narrative levels, the artist uses two overlapping means of representation. Now and again, the filmed hands of the artist in her role as hidden wire-puller reach into the animation and thereby into the happenings; they mend rifts and allow the protagonists to overcome abysses. Thus the title My faith also becomes readable as a credo concerning the power of artistic creation and the attainment of an ideal world being possible through art. In a free interpretation of Plato´s concept of the spherical human being such as expressed by the young Aristophanes in the Symposium, Schmidt portrays the two wrenched-apart protagonists as maimed beings which have need of each other in order to be complete.
Dorothée Brill