Ein Ding Mehr

2006 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
20:41 minutes

Ein Ding Mehr , or ‘one more thing,’ is part of a long-term collaborative performance series by artists Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam, which consist of the pair embodying an array of material through holding various poses for extended periods of time. As the artists perform each gesture, we see them gaze on the preparatory drawings, which act as an instructional score of sorts. The drawing itself, besides featuring carefully drawn sketches of each position, also contains a list of the source material that inspired them: a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, Salo, Eugène Delacroix’s Pietà, and a reference to a monument by Auguste Rodin among others. The performance takes place in what appears to be a local gymnasium or basketball court where the couple is filmed and photographed. Described by the artists as ‘visual scenographies,’ their poses in Ein Ding Mehr oscillate between a striking intimacy, complicity and eroticism to the solitary, challenging and even humorous.

Prinz Gholam is a Berlin-based artist duo consisting of Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam. For nearly a decade, the duo have developed a performative practice that, through a series of choreographed sequences, aims at embodying a range of source material—from ancient paintings, sculptures to contemporary art, film and images from the media. Reminiscent of Gilbert and George’s living sculptures, the long-term collaboration revolves around a corporeal interpretation of the world around us: their various gestures and poses act as a form of mapping through the body of the array of information they internalize. Often performed in historically loaded venues, like a graveyard or an archaeological site, their work speaks of the information we carry in our bodies and how we experience and negotiate the world through images the mind already contains. In addition to their performances, the duo often use drawings to sketch the poses that they reenact. These preparatory studies, while referencing pictorial tradition, also play a role in their investigation: a negotiation between references, and the physical and pictorial self.

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