Mirros and cameras – in this case a video camera – are the tools of self-reflection which the artist applies in her work. Following a traditional subject, which has found ever new and alternative figurations in the history of Western art – from Parmigianino’s “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror” (1523) to Claude Cahun’s “Self-portrait (reflected in mirror)” (1928) or Francesca Woodman’s “Self-Deceit 1” (1978), to name only a few – the artist scans her reactions on a reflecting surface and records them analytically, as part of the process of self-reflection, with a camera.

The “polar inertia” of travelling on the motorway is mirrored on the face of the artist and becomes a self-portrait. In the trembling vanity mirror of the passenger seat the fragility of subjection, a sense of unease, is reflected. The camera records these together with their own motions; it registers the kinetic energy that the drive exercises on the body. It reveals the anxieties soothed by habituation and the aggressive power hidden in the banal act of car driving.
Danger lurks in the aerodynamic forms; the airbag, a possible rescue, associates the potential risk, the interruption of the film.

The soundtrack opens up a further narrative level, the loud noise of the motor is partly drowned out by the car radio: two texts from audio books can be heard, fragmented, repeatedly interrupted: a brief passage from “Psychopolis” by Ian McEwan, which associates the discomfort in the interior of a car with blood and shame, and two text fragments from the book “Verbrecher und Versager” (“Criminals and Failures”) by Felicitas Hoppe, which hold the promise a narrative, yet do not deliver; they fail the crime…

_{* “Polar Inertia” Paul Virilio, London: Sage 1999.}

_{Videostill, 2009}

_{Videostill, 2009}

A sleeping male body, a landscape of a special kind. The skin, with its inclines, is a stage for the actions of a warrior figure of our age. The figure traverses the body and scans it like enemy territory. The regularity and constant repetition of the mechanical movements of the figure, together with the rattling noises of the toy, represent a contrast to the immobility of the resting body. The rigidity of the artificial material chafes against the vulnerable surface of the body, until the “bitter end”…

Parallel to the body landscape, nature footage of a dense mixed forest is repeatedly shown over the course of the video. Images that suggest a savage wilderness, which only on first glance reminds us of exotic sites of war. On closer inspection the forest area reveals itself as an old hill of debris restored to nature. The soundtrack, composed of forest sounds and sounds of war sampled from movies, increases the sense of threat that seems to haunt the images.

Overlifesized portraits of young people are superimposed alternately on the projection surface of the video “La nascita di Venere,” which dates from 2002. These are images of artist Alba D’Urbano’s students in Intermedia Studies at Leipzig’s Art Academy, and they are responding to questions posed by their professor. In these conversations, structured as interviews, the young artists are asked in turn about their self-conceptions as artists, about their attitudes toward the art system and their positions within it, but also about their expectations of their professor. It is of interest to observe upon which images, projections and myths this process is based, and with which perspectives and personal events it is associated. The focus, then, is not on the influence of external systems, but instead on the intimate relationship that is established between teacher and student. Also included in the video are additional sequences taken by an observation camera affixed to the ceiling of the class’s workroom. Visible here is the collective worktable, the central site of artistic productivity. The elevated, almost surveillance style perspective of the camera not only suggests the omnipresence of the absent teaching staff, but also visualizes and interrogates the transformed structures of teaching in light of new technologies.