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The aesthetically extraordinary films by artist Saskia Olde Wolbers all follow much the same pattern: a voice off narrating a storyline that is visualised in seemingly fictitious and organically formed spaces with details that correlate to the spoken word. Olde Wolbers is inspired by news stories and narratives from newspapers and television that report on people with singular life stories, which are expanded both visually and acoustically by the artist in her videos.
The story behind Kilowatt Dynasty (2000) takes place in the future and concerns the phenomenon of the inverted dream syndrome – in which states of sleeping and waking become conflated. An unborn child tells the love story of its parents – a television anchor and an environmental activist. The two are situated in a television studio located at the bottom of the massive Three Gorges dam on the Yangtse in the year 2016. Slow camera pans guide the viewer into this predominantly monochromatic, surreal world, whose forms recall water bubbles and underwater plants. Here, the viewer finds associative correlations between word and image. Psychedelic and natural sounds echo the biomorphic forms. The sets for these miniature fantasy worlds – most of them coloured and embedded in water tanks – were created in the course of years of painstaking manual craftsmanship.
The work has been shown on the upper floor of the exhibition building.
