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...

Clouds paintings
© » KADIST

Benoît Maire

The series Clouds paintings by Benoît Maire features oil on canvas works in varying format, in which the artist depicts clouds, using a variety of tools, including a spray gun, paintbrush, or palette knife...

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...

Weather Forecast
© » 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...

Parallel Events The Grip/ La Mainmise
© » KADIST

Saturday, December 4 at 3 pm at Kadist Visit of the exhibition in the presence of the artists : Kate Mitchell, Ms&Mr and Arin Rungjang Please RSVP: assistant@kadist.org Wednesday, December 8 from 7 to 9pm in the Auditorium of Jeu de Paume “Fabrications: The Theatre of Everyday Life” presented by David Teh and Dougal Phillips “Unreal Asia” a thematic programme originally conceived for the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2009...

Sun Xun's 21Ke Hosted by Hou Hanru
© » KADIST

An epic hand-drawn animation based on research conducted by Dr...

Other works by: » Michel Auder  
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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...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
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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–)...

Far from Honolulu
© » KADIST

Mathilde Rosier

2003

Rosier’s body of films, gleam with that indeterminate in-between glow of twilight...

The Training
© » KADIST

Since November 2012, Kadist artist-in-residence, Zhou Tao (b.1976) has been working on his new film, After Reality , which will be presented in conjunction with Collector (2012)...