RK: You designed your video work every street has your name (2023) as a diptych. You animated everyday objects that appears on the monitors: handles, car tires, ashtrays. The form of a two-part pictorial surface refers to altarpieces as they have appeared in Christianity since the early Middle Ages. What is the religious content of these very ordinary things that you show here?

 

FVV: They are religious in two ways. First, I show my modules as commodities, with a polished, capitalist aesthetic, like one does in advertisements. Second, they are filled with hopes and desires. The horizontally rotating car tires, for example, is decorated with the zodiac symbols. My objects want to be consumed, but also give consolation and solace. This transforms them into sacred objects, and there's a lot of irony in there, of course.

 

RK: A diptych takes up different concepts of early Christianity dichotomies: heaven and hell, Madonna and Jesus, creating narratives and telling stories in form of a book. But in your video work, significantly more than two figures appear.

 

FVV:  I take the Christian form and then open it. In fact, my characters only appear for a few seconds and then disappear again. Another religious aspect is that all the mundane things of everyday life dematerialize and become mere ideas. In this way they become completely spiritualized.

 

RK: In your earlier works, you repeatedly took everyday objects and converted them into materials that rendered them into something completely useless. Be it ashtrays made of soap or popsicles made of wax, for instance in your group of works bona fide (2020/21). Both materials tend to be lucid, becoming transparent when exposed to light, and dissolving when exposed to moisture or heat. But here you go a step further and all that remains is the image of an ashtray or a car tire, which disappears as soon as the film time passes.

 

FVV:  From the profane objects, I transition to the special objects. I show 3D models of monuments that I found in public space in Vienna or in Olomouc in the Czech Republic. In my film, these statues collapse while the profane objects grow into monuments.

 

RK: You gave some of these monuments your own face.

 

FVV: It is a performance of projection that we ascribe their meaning to all objects, whether profane or monumental. These objects do not carry this meaning within themselves, it is put into them afterwards. So all sanctity comes from ourselves. That's how important we take ourselves, and that's why this title: every street has your name. We consider it so important that all streets bear our own name. This can be applied to things that have acquired their sacredness from their constant presence in advertising, that is, things of consumption.

 

RK: But the fact is that you didn't opt for the classic symbols of the capitalist world of goods. We don't see the pictures of smartphones, Coca-Cola bottles or hamburgers.

 

FVV:  I keep it more abstract and that makes the moment of hope more general and stronger. Many of my objects also have something to do with movement: car tires, bicycles, e-scooters, the horses on the Maria-Theresa Monument in Vienna.

 

RK: What you carry over from the symbols of consumption is the aesthetic.

FVV:  Exactly – At the same time I show all these objects in a fluid and monumental way. In these clean and blatant colors. I believe an image cannot be more powerful.

 

RK: The idea urges to appear material. It's like the animated opening credits of a movie. The power of images is great. They become real: from the searchlights that cut through the film space like columns to the flights along the contours of the emblems of film production companies.

 

FVV: In my film, the tires and ashtrays sink into their surroundings as they rotate. This rotation takes place in a space without logical or physical laws.

 

RK: Your references here are numerous and varied: we have the pictorial form of early Christianity, a consumerist surface aesthetic, the spiritualization of everyday things...

 

FVV: It is important to me that all these different levels of meaning overlap and replace one another. On the screens the objects appear and disappear. Every possible constellation returns again and again in the loop. In this way, they can unfold in the exhibition space and in time in ever-changing ways.

 

Radek Krolczyk (*1978, Pyskowice, PL) lives in Bremen as an author and gallery owner. He works on the political implications of aesthetics. He has been a lecturer at the HfK since 2014 and in art history at the University of Bremen since 2019. In 2018 he was awarded the prize for art criticism by "Art Cologne" and the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine" (ADKV) as an author. He is the owner of Galerie K' in Bremen.