MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 is pleased to present My Throat, My Air, a new film by Loretta Fahrenholz.

In Fahrenholz’s films, dialogue is often recited affectlessly, even as interlocutors are copulating as in Implosion(2011). But here the distanced delivery seems less owed to Bertolt Brecht than to the numbness of the characters and the coldness of their relationships: Fahrenholz treats filmic forms, narrative, and actors’ performances as discrete elements, meaningful structures that can be broken apart and juxtaposed with one another. Set in artistic milieus, her films adapt a diverse range of genres and styles associated with the contexts they portray. They stage filmic forms rather than story lines, and bodies more than subjects. Dancing, sleeping, vomiting; yoga, push-ups, DIY orthopedics; art performances, receptions, concerts; hands, handbags, buttocks are overlaid or interspersed with singing, whispering, dialogue. What is being talked about is rarely what is at stake. In their desperate attempts at communication and understanding each other, Fahrenholz’s protagonists frequently resort to the history of cinema, citing Lars von Trier’s Dogville or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Love Is Colder Than Death as Fahrenholz herself cites Berlin School-type neo-neorealism or recent video art aestheticsin her films. It is mostly through such references that the close, often claustrophobic communities of her films— recent art school graduates sharing an apartment, an artist collective, a street dance crew, a family—relate their internal dynamics to a larger social context. Fahrenholz’s films tell of their attempts to negotiate the terms of living together, to gain agency—within or beyond language.

At Ludlow 38, Fahrenholz will show My Throat, My Air, a quiet semi-fictional family drama shot in Munich’s petty-bourgeois Westend, starring former Fassbinder actor, Warhol collaborator, and horror movie director Ulli Lommel.

Loretta Fahrenholz (*1981 in Starnberg, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. Recent films include Haust (2010), Que Bárbara (2011), Implosion (2011), Grand Openings Return of the Blogs (2012), and Ditch Plains (2013).

MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 thanks Robert McKenzie for the loan of From the series Europa (I) (2011).

Curated by Jakob Schillinger