Stadium (2008)

  • Installation view, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2008 (photographed by Richard-Max Tremblay)

  • Installation view, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2008 (photographed by Richard-Max Tremblay)

  • Stadium -first cut, Installation view, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2007

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Video Clip

Excerpt - 04:00
High Definition video instllation | 10:54

projection with sound, floating screen and vintage cinema seating

The Olympiastadion in Berlin, the infamous site of Leni Riefenstahl's film on the 1936 Olympic Games, is both setting and protagonist in Stadium. The video employs techniques favoured by Riefenstahl, including the crane shot, long circular travelling shot and low-angle shot. The resulting footage exhibits the persistent legacy of representations of power and control in photography and cinema all the way up to contemporary imaging from video games to epic films. Faithful to this notion, the film opens with a 3D animation of the architect's model of the stadium's recent renovation and transitions to the site itself with sweeping multiple camera perspectives that produce sensations of vertigo and banal repetition. Here, a figure in white performs a careful choreography of gestures building a tension between the pedestrian movement of public space and physical ideals reminiscent of early Olympic callisthenic dances and design. In Stadium an uncanny dialogue is created between the mechanistic, standardized and absolute uniformity of the architecture and the anonymity of the individual.

Credits:
  • Performer: Gail Skrela
  • Choreographer: Ayman Harper
  • Composer: Stefan Nemeth
  • Cinematographer: Daniel Sippel
  • Camera Crane: Matthias Wahle, JibArt
  • Gaffer: Tobias Castorph
  • Grip: Michael Gänssle
  • Dolly: Peter Zöphel
  • 3D Animation: Sol Rogers
  • Post Production Supervisor: Christoph Manz
  • Production Assistants: Johannes Bock, Kevin Lindemann, Hadley + Maxwell, Irmgard Berner, Mi-Kyung Jun and Bahar Sanli
  • Filmed on location courtesy of the Olympiastadion Berlin GmbH
  • 3D data model of Olympiastadion Berlin courtesy of Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partner, Hamburg/Berlin and Architectura Virtualis GmbH, Berlin

Funding: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Vertretung der Regierung von Québec, Botschaft von Kanada, University of Hertfordshire