Moving image is the predominant device Gernot Wieland (b.1968, Horn, Austria) uses to subtly voice the complexities of living in our secular society. Through scribbly line, grainy film, and plastic forms, Gernot’s works blend various rag-tag fragments into complex, psycho-social narratives.

Select works

Films, exhibitions and projects

Square, Circle, Square, 2022
argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (Belgium)

Gernot Wieland addresses challenging subject matters via intricate modes of storytelling. Using drawings, photos, plasticine figures, animation, voice over, sound, and music, he opens up a space for reflection, suggesting the possibility of personal change despite societal restrictions and limitations.

Square, Circle, Square delves into two distinct yet intimately entwined psychological states: a shame of origins and collective repression. Gernot links these categories to unresolved pasts and undefined futures associated with growing up in the Austrian countryside, foregrounding them as generative instead of depressed conditions. He does this by zooming in on his surroundings, highlighting things that have affected and influenced him since childhood.
—exhibition text

read more about the exhibition here

HALB NACKT, 2023
Belmacz, London (UK)

Departing from his film-based work, Halb Nackt (translated as, Half Naked) is an iterative of narrative, told in English, Italian and German. Each translation of the text-based series alludes to the ways in which a self is always already more than its bare presence. Through drawing, print and reconstituted sculpture the chapters that compose Halb Nackt each convey a moment in a protagonist’s life; recounting, via scribbly memoir, how a self is fashioned through their experiences and encounters.

“As I see half nakedness as a search for some kind of truth, of something that lies behind the visible, and as you come closer to the truth there are more and more doors which should and can be opened and the search gets more and more complex. And something that one may not even be able to name always remains hidden, so the truth, if one wants to use this metaphor, is never naked, visible, but always half-naked.”
–Gernot Wieland

click for works guide with drawing transcriptions

Turtleneck Phantasies, 2022

Turtleneck Phantasies, 2022, is a poem that comes to us in fragments through video. The author’s life story forms the point of departure for the work. Born in Germany shortly before World War II, he wrote poems and worked as a sailor on a British cargo ship. In the 1980s he was one of only four people to survive a serious shipwreck. Severely traumatised, he was committed to a psychiatric clinic in England for several years and later moved to a home in West Berlin, where he lived until his death. In the homes he began tattooing words and (mostly illegible) texts and drawings on the skin of his fellow patients.

And so are images and language: In Gernot Wieland’s Turtleneck Phantasies (Germany, 2022), textual elements are key in providing visual and conceptual framework for the discomposed self. As in his previous Bird in Italian is Uccello (2021), Wieland’s (*1968) memories of growing up in rural Austria and the obscure biographies of outsider figures inspire eccentric parables illustrated by drawings, home videos, and original footage, all shot on 8mm film. Whether spoken or written, resembling a therapy session, a philosophical inquiry, or a conceptual graph, textual material dominates the screen. It even morphs into symbolic objects: Books, letters with handwritten poetry, maps, and decal tattoos offer the artist old obsessions and stories to retell. Joining Austrian writers Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard in openly despising his homeland – “a country of hidden structures of fear” – Wieland is also fascinated with mental disorder as a means of artistic creation, but also as the result of imposed societal structures. Relief may come with the erasure of any system, including the form essential to this film. The camera turns up to the monochromatic blue of the sky, exemplifying the artist’s only possible action to live in harmony with a world “where coincidence seem to rule”: to become invisible even to one own’s gaze.
–Clara Miranda Scherffig, review for Spike Art Magazine 

Bird in Italian is Uccello, 2021

Bird in Italian is Uccello, 2021, furthers Gernot’s interest in psychological states and the constitution of belonging in different social contexts. Drawing upon Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds, and its subsequent cinematic adaptation, Bird in Italian is Uccello (re)enacts a theatrical production of the horror-thriller. Working specifically with an account of a never performed theatre production of Maurier’s story – one that was meant to be staged at a psychiatric hospital in northern Italy – Gernot’s film inverts the original script’s roles: human characters become birds and the bird protagonists become humans. Deploying Slavoj Zizek’s notion of the ‘real,’ this role reversal not only shakes up ideas of reality, but through Gernot, becomes a way to connect socio-political fear to the migration of birds; conflating social psychology and nature to explore notions of power in turn.

A Perfect Square, 2020

A Perfect Square, 2020, is a three-minute long Super 8 film based on drawings, paintings and potato prints and includes a narration about Kandinsky’s square and doors and houses, consciousness and shapes, and recessive colors.

Ink in Milk, 2018

Ink in Milk, 2018, is a knotted string together of histories, fictions and images. Through the flickering vignettes of a schoolboy trauma, visits to a friend at a psychiatric institution and encounters with animals, Ink in Milk exposes the anxious, web-like structures that underpin the tragicomedy of existence. The artist’s narrative is accompanied by a series of schematic, childlike diagrams, line drawings, ink paintings, plasticine animations, and crystalline sculptural forms, punctuated with super 8 film clips. Sometimes these images illustrate the narrative voice as gathered evidence; at other points they are oblique documents, disrupting chains of causality.

Thievery and Songs, 2016

Lecture-performance recordings

> Depression in Animals, 2019
OGR Turin, 2018

> Past, Present, Present, Past, 2016-date
steirischer herbst, 2019

Drawings and prints

Artist editions

Press and texts

Ink in Milk | ArtReview exhibition review by Mark Rappolt

On carpets, cats, cages | Art-Agenda review by Barbara Casavecchia

Body Luggage | Artforum review by Prajna Desai

Reference and Experience | Mousse review by Gigiotto Del Vecchio

Gernot Wieland “Thievery and Songs” | Vdrome interview with Zasha Colah

For Hatred of Crystals | text by Oskar Korsár

Gernot Wieland in conversation | interview with Kristina Marberger

Notes on Commentary in the work of Gernot Wieland | text by Maxwell Stephens

Artist biography

Education. The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Fine Arts Berlin.

Select exhibitions. I follow memories, KH Künstler:innenhaus Bremen, Germany (2024); Square, Circle, Square, argos centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels, Belgium (2023); Halb Nackt, Belmacz, London, UK (2023); Turtleneck Phantasies, Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art – M 1 VideoSpace, Berlin, Germany (2022); ECOPOETICS OF GENERIC WORLD, DIVERSEartLA, LA, USA (2022); Transferencia, Kirchner Cultural Center, BIENALSUR, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2021); Quartz Studio, Turin, Italy (2021); Videonale, Festival for Video und Time-Based Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2021); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2020); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria (2020); ANIMA – Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan (2020); The Law is a White Dog, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, Ireland (2020); Zoo Cosmos, Casa Conti /Ange Leccia Art Center, Oletta, France (2020); Grand Hotel Abyss, Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz, Austria (2019); Ink and Milk, Belmacz, London, UK (2019,); Vdrome, London, UK (2019); Monitoring, Kasseler Kunstverein, Kassel, Germany (2018); Zeitspuren, Centre d´art Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2018); Shame, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Bremen, Germany (2018), Survival Kit 9, LCCA – Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia (2017); The Museum of Modern Comedy in Art – A Proposal, Projects Art Centre, Dublin, Ireland (2017); MOSTYN Open 20, Llandudno, Wales (2017); 9th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial, Vigeland Museum, Oslo, Norway (2017).

Screening. Villa Medici Film Festival, Italy; the 18th KFFK / short film festival Cologne, Germany; First Look festival, New York; Berlinale 2024, Germany; 36th Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media, Germany; 42nd Uppsala Short Film Festival, Sweden; Jogja Fotografis Festival, Indonesia; the 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; the International Short Film Festival, Hoberhausen, Germany; 36th Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media, Germany; Videonale, Festival for Video und Time-Based Art, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; IndieLisboa – International Independent Film Festival, Portugal; EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany; VIII Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia; Kasseler Dokumentar, Film und Videofest, Kassel, Germany; International Short Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany; Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Athens, Greece; International Film Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Indonesia; Gimli Film Festival, Gimli, Canada; Dobra, Festival de Cinema Experimental, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

Awards. Aus-Blicke Prize (2023); the Main prize at the 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2023); the best experimental film under 30 minutes at the German Short Film Awards (2022); a prize at the 24th edition of the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Paris (2022); Best Film at the VIII Kinodot Experimental Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia (2020); the German Film Critics’ EMAF Media Art Award (2019); the AG Kurzfilm prize for Best German Short Films (2017); in 2017 Gernot won the MOSTYN Open.

Gernot lives and works in Berlin.