MONTAGE NEU - NOVEL MONTAGE (2012)

4-channel video installation, Apple ProRes, 4 min 17 s, telecine transfer from 16 mm black and white negative film, stereo, German text

Keywords: historical film material, Workers' Olympiad, Wilhelm Prager Die Neue Grossmacht (1925), collective physicality and regeneration, comparison, film installation, montage

This work was produced during an artist-in-residence at Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal, Wiesbaden, in 2011, with support from bm:ukk (AT). Thanks to Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF, Wiesbaden.

Reanimations – Retelling (Hi)Stories (Gabriele Cram)

In Nathalie Koger’s artwork Novel Montage historical film material from the Workers’ Olympiad (Wilhelm Prager's The New Great Power, 1925) is juxtaposed with contemporary images and visual findings from a physical/militant investigation. The Workers’ Olympiads served as a contrast to the aesthetics and ideology of bourgeois Olympic Games, which were oriented towards discipline and competition. They were viewed as instruments of solidarity and collectivization, imparting information about physical regeneration.

The 1925 images primarily depict physicality within a group, in contrast to representations of bodies in privacy or under the influence of the economic system. However, these private and exhausted bodies seeking relaxation can only be sensed in the depictions of current body therapies and physical applications (touch, caresses, etc.) juxtaposed with the video footage of the Workers’ Olympiad. Manual techniques used today as individual body therapy were recorded and traced by the camera. The 2012 recordings show the forms of movement and the physical-tactile treatment by the therapists in cinematic pictures.

Direction, camera, postproduction, editing: Nathalie Koger
With: Beatrice Bornath (Tantra/Wiesbaden), Katja Sümenicht (Shiatsu/Wiesbaden), Janpen Tantz (Thai Massage, oil massage/Wiesbaden) 
Assistance: Mathias Windelberg
Composition: Uwe Oberg 

Excerpts from Wilhelm Prager's The New Great Power, 1925, 90 min. See also: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/new-great-power-first-workers-olympics-1925

Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal, Wiesbaden (DE), November 15 – December 9, 2012

(In German) Gabrielle Cram: Reanimationen - Geschichte(n) neu erzählen. Zur Arbeit MONTAGE NEU von Nathalie Koger / ISBN 978-3-939236-11-5