Viktoria Schmid
REFLECTIVE LIGHTS
Viktoria Schmid has established herself as a sought-after film artist since her first releases in the 2010s. Her films are shown at renowned festivals, and there has been a growing number of solo presentations; her 16mm installations, alongside her cyanotypes, are exhibited in galleries and exhibition spaces worldwide. With a background in the punk music scene and as a DJ, she first encountered analog film material as a graduate of the School for Independent Film Vienna and later as a founding member of filmkoop wien.
Schmid’s artistic focus has since remained on analog film and photographic techniques in the broadest sense. She engages with the material itself, the single frame, screen and image formats, and, more recently, increasingly with historical color processes in analog film. From this research, she develops—through her own approach to the medium—short films that are at times raw, at times subtle, and often poetic, created for both cinema and exhibition spaces.
This in-person program, a collaboration between the Filmmuseum, Vienna Shorts, and sixpackfilm, is distinguished by presenting not only the artist’s films but also works by kindred filmmakers. Viktoria Schmid places these in dialogue with her own films in the form of a carte blanche selection. This creates thematic focal points that also reflect her artistic development. Rather than following a chronological order, these cinematic dialogues revolve around conceptual pairings that Schmid continually revisits, such as material & rhythm, landscape & screen, and light & color & time. (Gerald Weber)
In cooperation with sixpackfilm & the Austrian Film Museum