Archives

Julian Rosefeldt

Asylum
09.22.06 - 10.15.06
Video installation — Hôtel-Dieu

Julian Rosefeldt, Asylum (2001), exhibition view, Hôtel Dieu, Toulouse, 2006
Vidéo nstallation on 9 screens, film 16 mm transfered on DVD -

Duration : 52' 

Courtesy Arndt und Partner Gallery, Berlin ; Max Wigram Gallery, London

© Printemps de septembre, photo André Morin

Born in 1965 in Munich (Germany), he lives in Berlin.

 

Julian Rosefeldt's films are conceived as typologies of media photos through which the artist tries to enact a critique of our world of images.

 

With Asylum (2004), screened in the Salle des Colonnes at the Hôtel Dieu, Rosefeldt looks into the commonly held view of asylum seekers. The condition of immigrants is usually dealt with in a sordidly realistic, miserabilist way, but here it is presented in a dramatic fashion. In a set of emphatically artificial pictures, Rosefeldt mixes stereotypical figures of the foreign worker with the kitsch of exotic imagery. Like Sisyphus, the characters are shown performing absurd and endless tasks in unlikely surroundings. The extremely pictorial aesthetics of the film combined with its slow pace and muffled atmosphere help to lend a ritual aspect to their actions. Through these time-lag effects, this fiction film manages better than any documentary to give the foreigner a visibility and make him, in his view, "emotionally close" to us.