Nadim Vardag

How do media image productions work, what structural and compositional principles do they follow and how are our perceptions dependent on illusion and reality? These questions are posed by Nadim Vardag (born in 1980) when he analyzes recurrent patterns and basic structures of film and cinema production and divorces them from their plot contests. Vardag is interested in the constructions and mechanisms of affect generation, imitates them in models and experimental orders, explores them in drawings, and installationally or -sculpturally formulated objects. The repertoire, based on film, the montage of structurally familiar techniques and binding motifs, that through their repeating use become as it were archetypical symbols, are the foundation from which he creates. Flickering lights, overexposed windows, slowly opening doors are motifs that suggest spookiness and the uncanny and play an important role in the building up tension in film. The artist smuggles in the knowledge about the creatability of illusion and desire be accomplices in the experimental arrangement and lets these components play a role of their own. Without showing film, Vardag communicates the feeling of filmic experience, marked by unfulfilled attitude of expectation he presents the event-like element on film, whose plot and end remain open for their own references and questions.

Works by Nadim Vardag have been on view at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2008), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2006), Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (2007) and Generali Foundation, Vienna (2006).