In the late 1990s, Barbara Breitenfellner had a residency at Kulkturfabrikken and lived in Copenhagen for almost a year. During that time she developed several projects and had a solo show at Overgaden. If her early works —based on low-resolution surveillance cameras and live video projections – have a rather different aesthetic than her actual production, her topics and themes have not changed: multiplication of the body, deconstruction of space or involvement of the visitors in the exhibition continue generating her art.

The German artist Barbara Breitenfellner (born 1969) plays a game with the viewer in an extremely involving way. Using a mirror, two surveillance cameras and two big video projections, she uses the viewer in the work as a marionette with which – with great scenographic ability – she plays her game with. On the way up to Breitenfellner’s exhibition on the first floor of Overgaden the solid ground suddenly disappears beneath you when you are confronted with a mirror trick in the staircase.

In the exhibition space, you are subsequently exposed to the experience of your own absence – after your own symbolic disappearance – when all of a sudden you find yourself in front of the recordings of the surveillance camera from the staircase you have just been standing in. In the end, as your gaze goes over the darkened space, you discover your own body doubled in the video recordings from the spy camera, which is hidden behind your back.

Breitenfellner’s installation aims to make the viewer conscious of the act of seeing – of the importance of the gaze and of the exhibition as a place for perception. This – in recent years so exploited – subject is not even the most interesting aspect. What really makes an impression in the work of Breitenfellner is her ability to draw your attention to the body, and at the same time, make you unfamiliar with it through a game of absence, shifting and doubling. A unique blend of intense closeness and invincible distance.

by Anne Ring Petersen, Berlingske Tidende, Copenhagen, 6 March 2000

Innocently you walk up the little steep staircase to the upper floor not knowing that all your movements are being registered by a surveillance camera and from there are being projected onto a wall in Barbara Breitenfellner’s video installation MU46. Without knowing, you play the lead part in other visitors’ visual experience, while seeing nothing else but the empty staircase. But you can’t escape your own image in the other projection, which opens up the wall with a video image of the wall. Both images are slightly blurry and immaterial, grey in grey, like the space itself, and by few means the artist succeeds in giving an experience of both, being concretely present and outside the real reality.

Barbara Breitenfellner graduated from University Mainz and Glasgow School of Art and exhibited in January at Under Dybbølsbro Gallery.

by Gertrud Købke Sutton, Information, Copenhagen, 7 March 2000