At the heart of Claudia Larcher’s work, whatever the medium, is a preoccupation with architecture, and with the traces of history and memory that suffuse particular places.
Claudia Larcher’s highly distinctive body of work encompasses photo-collage, site-specific video animation, and mixed media installation. Many of her moving image pieces take the form of digitally-manipulated explorations of interior spaces in which people are absent and yet their imprint is unmistakably present.
Her work has been shown internationally in exhibitions, cinemas and at film festivals: f.e. Anthology Film Archives NYC, Museum of the Moving Image NYC, Slought Foundation Philadelphia, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lisbon, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, Ars Electronica Festival, Kunsthalle Wien, Tokyo Wondersite Japan; Claudia Larcher currently lives and works in Vienna.
She is also lecturer at the Digital Arts Institute at the University of Applied Arts and the Institute of Art and Architecture at the University of Technology in Vienna.
noise above our heads
HD Video / 04:00 min / 2016
The video work ‘noise above our heads’ stages natural formations and architectural landscapes as utopian and dystopian scenario. The title of the work suggests a state of war and leads to several interpretations. The landscape shown in the smooth and vertical pan shot appears as copy of real world events, but are in fact multifaceted and complex artistic constructs that blur the line between reality and fiction and create room for other possible realities.
Self
HD Video / 07:50 min / 2015
The video animation ‘Self’ reflects the human skin as the border between “oneself” and the “world”. In analogy to the representation function of architecture, ‘Self’ contemplates the human skin through its potential to design one’s own representation. Yet, once the human body is understood as an architectural envelope, its picture can be expanded arbitrarily and freely modulated. Methodologically, this allows ‘Self’ to scrutinise the interplay of function and representation in different ways. Self-perception and the others’ awareness of oneself are thereby examined against backdrop of identity, gender and perfection.
Cyclorama
HD Video / 04:37 min / 2013
The video animation entitled ‘Cyclorama’ presents an insight into imaginary interior design. Claudia Larcher starts with different photo and video excerpts that are cut up and reassembled into a kind of collage with digital animation. A continuous camera movement guides the viewer through rooms that seem to be endlessly intertwined and resemble an empty office building. Real architectural details are mixed with abstract structures, forming a network of reality and surreal vision that seems to eliminate the parameters of time and space.
Heim
HD Video / 11:40 min / 2008
A sequence shot explores from attic to celler a large residence that, for the time being, is emptied out of its inhabitants. Their habits are betrayed by a multitude of details, as so many clues left for us to find, scrutinize, interpret or mark with our own groundless fears, fears that keep growing as we descend into ordinary hell. Our eyes cannot really grasp the cleverly mixed fixed and moving pictures, and this technical uncertainty is the very source of our anxiety: is it a mere villa we’re looking at, a crime scene, or a mausoleum of Austrian daily life? The entire gamut of a parochial idyll in the provinces is laid bare in Claudia Larcher's video animation, in the form of photos and moving images assembled into a seemingly endless pan shot. The audio track drones in the background, awaking something uncomfortable and sinister.