Norbert Pfaffenbichler and Lotte Schreiber, who are active both as artists and as filmmakers, have selected seven films that share a focus on the “filmic” in film. The works engage the fundamental conditions of the medium―its history, its techniques and technologies, the iconography of film, and dramaturgic conventions. Taking up the tradition of seminal Austrian experimental films created in the 1950s and 1960s by Peter Kubelka, Kurt Kren, and others, they also lend new topicality to it, not least by employing and addressing digital technology.

Whereas the lively discussion in recent years about the ways in which filmic works are presented in the art context largely focused on installational aspects of cinematographic technology, Pfaffenbichler/Schreiber propose an almost contrary approach. They have developed an exhibition architecture consisting of projection rooms that are completely black inside and outside; installed as spaces within the space, they explicitly gesture toward the cinematic apparatus. The black of the wallpaper is punctuated only on the entrance walls by white letters that spell basic information about each film. In the fashion of multiplex theaters, the exhibition shows a single film per black box, affording viewers the linear perception of individual films characteristic of the cinema as well as parallel receptions directed by the individual visitor’s course through the exhibition.