NYAB Event - Loretta Fahrenholz “My Throat, My Air”

Loretta Fahrenholz “My Throat, My Air”

Ludlow 38 / The Goethe-Institut New York

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MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 presents My Throat, My Air, a new film by Loretta Fahrenholz.

In Fahrenholz’s films, dialogue is often recited affectlessly, even as interlocutors are copulating as in Implosion (2011). But here the distanced delivery seems less owed to Bertolt Brecht than to the numbness of the characters and the coldness of their relationships: Fahrenholz treats filmic forms, narrative, and actors’ performances as discrete elements, meaningful structures that can be broken apart and juxtaposed with one another. Set in artistic milieus, her films adapt a diverse range of genres and styles associated with the contexts they portray. They stage filmic forms rather than story lines, and bodies more than subjects. Dancing, sleeping, vomiting; yoga, push-ups, DIY orthopedics; art performances, receptions, concerts; hands, handbags, buttocks are overlaid or interspersed with singing, whispering, dialogue. What is being talked about is rarely what is at stake. In their desperate attempts at communication and understanding each other, Fahrenholz’s protagonists frequently resort to the history of cinema, citing Lars von Trier’s Dogville or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death as Fahrenholz herself cites Berlin School-type neo-neorealism or recent video art aestheticsin her films. It is mostly through such references that the close, often claustrophobic communities of her films— recent art school graduates sharing an apartment, an artist collective, a street dance crew, a family—relate their internal dynamics to a larger social context. Fahrenholz’s films tell of their attempts to negotiate the terms of living together, to gain agency—within or beyond language.