Talking Head

1981 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

2 min 27

Michel Auder


Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again. It wasn’t the same thing. That thing. Was nice.’ But to her it seems to represent some imaginative narrative connected to the peeling back of the plastic wrapper. The viewer of the film feels as though he has been admitted to her innermost mind, the unconscious. The informal documentary nature of Auder’s films has had wide repercussions in terms of contemporary film making. This kind of low-tech practice informs the work of such artists as Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing and ran parallel to the fly on the wall practices of documentary filmmakers in the 1970s such as Ken Loach. The acquisition of works by Auder provides a reference point for a number of works in the Kadist collection (Laumann, McAlpine, Menick etc).


Michel Auder was born in 1945 in Soissons, France. He lives and works in Brooklyn.


Colors:



Sounds of War
© » KADIST

Laetitia Sonami

2006

Although at first the work Sounds of War presents itself with a degree of playfulness and humour, a close inspection reveals its painful undertone...

Bus Logos
© » KADIST

Yto Barrada

2004

In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...

The Exchange (The Horse)
© » KADIST

Étienne Chambaud

2010

In 2010, Kadist Art Foundation, David Roberts Foundation and Nomas Foundation successively presented an exhibition of the work of Etienne Chambaud in collaboration with Vincent Normand: The Siren’s Stage / Le Stade des Sirènes...

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The Town
© » KADIST

Michel Auder

1999

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings...

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Work No. 299
© » KADIST

Martin Creed

2003

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...

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© » KADIST

Guan Xiao

2016

Mixed clips from her collection of thousands of images found online, the three-channel video Weather Forecast is an inquiry into the necessity of a physical movement (a travel) for our identity to transform or change...

Organizers decry last-minute cancelation of Hanoi EDM festival (via Tuoi Tre News)
© » ARTS EQUATOR

Organizers decry last-minute cancelation of Hanoi EDM festival (via Tuoi Tre News) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles November 27, 2018 An EDM (electronic dance music) festival scheduled to take place just outside Hanoi from November 23 to 25 was asked to cancel only hours before its opening, despite sold tickets and foreign and local artists and volunteers already heading to the venue...

When Forms Come Alive: 5 Must-See Sculptures
© » AESTHETICA

Aesthetica Magazine - When Forms Come Alive: 5 Must-See Sculptures When Forms Come Alive: 5 Must-See Sculptures Hayward Gallery’s When Forms Come Alive is a lively and playful exhibition that presents different facets of sculptures...

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The Town
© » KADIST

Michel Auder

1999

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings...

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Screening by John Menick
© » KADIST

Artist, filmmaker, and writer John Menick will screen his short video “The Secret Life of Things” (2006), a work in which an unidentified man describes his fixation with “last person on earth” films — films in which a single person awakens to find that he or she is the sole living inhabitant of a city...

On Becoming Earthlings
© » COUNCIL ART

Film programmes exploring the attempts of humans to represent the different scales of environmental crises (2015–)...

Akram Zaatari, Conversation with an Imagined Israeli Filmmaker Named Avi Mograbi
© » KADIST

In this book, Akram Zaatari attempts to write his conversation with an imagined Israeli filmmaker who he named Avi Mograbi...

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© » KADIST

Ruth Patir

2019

Historical representations of the female form and the clichés and misunderstandings that surround them have been the subject of recent research and historical revision...