Jürgen Reble: Artist in Focus

Jürgen Reble (born 1956 in Düsseldorf) is a German experimental filmmaker. In the late 1970s and 80s,
he was a member of the film ensemble Schmelzdahin. In the early 1980s he began making his own work in film, performance, and installation often rooted in manual processing of film footage using mechanic and chemical influences, and the reconstruction of the cinematic apparatus. Since 1992 he works together with the sound artist Thomas Köner in the fields of film, installation, and performance. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Auditorium of the Louvre, Paris; Filmmuseum Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 1997 he received a scholarship from the Kunstfond in Bonn. In 2009 he made his first HD digital work, Materia Obscura, using footage from his earlier film Instabile Materie (1995). Reble lives and works in Bonn, Germany.

The focus of the project Jürgen Reble and Thomas Köner presented on Syros in response to the Festival’s main theme in 2018 (“Is it Real?”) is  a visual insight into the beginnings of moving images (from the 19th- century zoetropes etc.) and the first years after the invention of the Cinematograph. The images are chemograms in 16 mm film, hand-processed and covered on a light-table with silver-active chemicals and dyes, receiving a picturesque quality with the impression of something that was concealed or buried for a long time. The performance at SIFF was a premiere of actual excerpts of a longer work in progress about early cinema together with the sound works of Thomas Köner.

Thomas Köner (born 1965 in Bochum, Germany) studied at Musikhochschule Dortmund and CEM Studio Arnhem. He is a distinctive figure in the fields of contemporary music, techno and multimedia art, working across the spheres of composition, visual arts, installation work and music production. For more than three
decades, his work has been internationally recognised, receiving awards such as Golden Nica Ars Electronica (Linz), Transmediale Award (Berlin), Best Young Artist at ARCO (Madrid), and many more. His familiarity with both the visual and sonic arts resulted in numerous commissions to create music for silent films for
the Auditorium du Musée du Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, and others. His works are part of
the collections of significant museums such as Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou Paris, Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal. His performances and installations are audiovisual meditations that explore our notion of time, memory and location. He invites audiences to enjoy impressions of depth, distance and disappearance, and to fathom the qualities of the space around our limits of perception.