Corinna Schnitt (DE)

still from: Once Upon a Time

Schnitt's films inhabit the space between documentary and fiction. She wrings stories out of everyday situations, intentionally leaving the viewer uncertain about their actual relation to reality. Schnitt's films drag fiction into the everyday; fantasy, wish-dreams, and sad, sober reality all combine into a single grotesque omnipresence observed by the artist with an affectionate but wicked eye, making the quotidian an impenetrable mystery. Fact or fiction? Who can keep them apart, especially when happiness is at stake? (Noemi Smolik)
In her videos Corinna Schnitt deals with social conditions and relations in such a way that the mostly petit bourgeois façade of the apparently everyday and banal cracks open: with a penetrating gaze or a surprising turn the conflicts smouldering beneath the seemingly intact surface are revealed. Corinna Schnitt's fascination with the seeming normalcy of mostly bourgeois everyday life, which, when seen through her eyes, reveals itself to be not so normal after all, manifests itself even more clearly in her work from the 1990s than that of a later date: The artist brings to light peculiarities, which sometimes appear strange – such as the ritual performed each Sunday by a family and commented by the grown-up daughter in “Zwischen vier und sechs” (“Between four and six”, 1997) –, now and then also uncanny – for instance in “Raus aus seinen Kleidern” (“Out of your clothes”, 1999), in which the action of the young woman on the balcony of her apartment shaking out a sweater reveals itself as not motivated by an ordinary need for cleanliness. Precise camera-handling and the use of sound as an additional level of narration, often introducing an irritation, characterize Corinna Schnitt's single-channel videos.