Esther Hunziker
Frequency

In her video Frequency, Esther Hunziker compressed the found footage of a live concert so often that the band’s motions break down into constantly changing color fields. The fitting "electrospherical" soundtrack, as the artist herself aptly names it, consists of overlapping radio frequencies.

The work can be read as an opulent example of the age-old paragon of genres, which took place in the Renaissance between painting and sculpture, generating numerous wonderful works of art. Here one can see the competition between the individual image and the moving picture, with the help of a modern artistic strategy: the deliberate inclusion of weaknesses in media, in this case technical weaknesses, to create an aesthetic that is estranged from the original media, which in turn appropriates the strengths of other media. As in this case, the power of color is reminiscent of a Gerhard Richter painting or one of Thomas Ruff’s large-format, digital photos. It replaces linear narration with an extraordinary new kind of color composition that – as it morphs – appears to be stronger than the static of a single, fixed image.

(Text: Bettina Back)