Diana Thater: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS, a video installation on LED-screens

June 28 � July 31, 2007 / Opening on June 28, 2007, 20 h
Part of the Festspiel+, in cooperation with the Bayerische Staatsoper and the
Pinakothek der Moderne in the context of the Munich Opernfestspiele 2007

Enormous chess figures, eleven moves executed by giant hands: the royal game in the fantastic world of Alice in Wonderland. The renowned American video and installation artist Diana Thater (*1962, Los Angeles) presents her installation within the context of the Munich Opernfestspiele Festspiel+ on seven light stelae in front of the ORSAM building as a satellite of the exhibition "... drawling, stretching and fainting in croils ..." on view in the Pinakothek der Moderne. The work, developed specifically for the Seven Screens, deals with Lewis Carroll�s fictional figure �Alice,� as do all the other works in the show.

In her work, Thater explicitly wishes to transform the non-narrative. As early as seventeen years ago, this approach led her to focus on pictures of animals. It is not the narrative that the artist seeks. She resists the belief that her medium, the video, must have a narrative character since, according to her artistic opinion, the actual subject of all videos is time and its inevitable course. An abstractly constrained video, such as OFF WITH THEIR HEADS, abstracts time itself in its persistence and translates it into an abbreviation.
Chess provides the possibility of portraying the universality of daily life - with regard to such things as rules pertaining to coexistence, maneuvers of exchange, loss, etc. - without having to fall back on a story. In her video Thater approaches the inherent meaning of chess and the game. �The game,� maintains the artist, �has a beginning, a middle and an end. However, like life, the game does not tell any important story.�

The game of chess in OFF WITH THEIR HEADS portrays the last eleven moves in Lewis Carroll�s novel Through the Looking Glass from 1871, in which Alice, from the unthinkable position of a pawn, wins the game by transforming into the queen and ultimately beating the red king in the end. In Thater�s installation mounted on the seven screens, situated in front of the OSRAM building, we see no players, but rather only their hands at extremely close range, an approach that acts to monumentalize both the fingers and the figures. On the front side of the screens the game is played forward, while on the back it is played backwards. Through this reversal of events and the oversized appearance of the perused parties, the game�s image is lent an even stronger sense of abstraction leading it to often be as nonsensical in character as Carroll� s story itself can be.

Thater regards Through the Looking Glass to be one of the �five most important novels� in her life and in 1998 she based a work, The Caucus Race, on one of the book�s chapters. Thater thus regarded it as a lucky coincidence when Kent Nagano invited her to participate in the Festspiel+ 2007 in order to create a complementary art program, together with six young artists - Leo Estevez, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, T. Kelly Mason, Katy Schimert, Jill Spector and Dawson Weber - marking the world premier of an opera, which also deals with the Alice theme, by the Korean composer, Unsuk Chin.

�The interesting thing about this collection of approaches by the various artists is that, in this way, Alice and the individual characters in Wonderland are recreated: everyone of them simultaneously represents everything. In this exhibition six artists are connected in a large common story,� saysThater, explaining the project�s concept. Because the artists themselves become part of the story, they are able �not to just talk about, but also with Alice.� This was the task, which Thater set for herself and her artists.

��The answers lie in me,� said Alice, as she walked through the mirror, laughing,� as Lewis Carroll divulged to his readers. In her video art, Thater passes this experience on to her audience.

Thater�s special project is part of the Munich Opernfestspiele and interrupts the installation on the Osram Seven Screens by Haubitz+Zoche that opened in April 2007 and that will resume on August 1.

Seven Screens

The Seven Screens are seven, six-meter high light stelae installed on a meadow next to the OSRAM building, which is located on Munich�s Middle Ring. Illuminated with LED, they are over-sized screens that are at the disposal of light and media artists and ORSAM invites artists at regular intervals to develop site-specific work for them. With the Seven Screens the company has extended its artistic activities into the public space. The light stelae are equipped on both sides with state of the art LED lighting technology developed by OSRAM Light Consulting. More than three quarters of a million RGB high performance LEDs are built into the columns and can be controlled from a central control room by means of fiber optics. Installed in gridded intervals of ten millimeters, the columns can be illuminated with static and moving images with 55,296 LEDs per light surface.

OSRAM Art Projects

OSRAM Art Projects includes not just the Seven Screens, but also a gallery and collection. OSRAM specifically promotes contemporary art, presenting various artistic standpoints in its gallery. The company buys works from the exhibitions that are added to its collection. In order to promote the integration of art into every day life at ORSAM, these works not only decorate office and conference rooms, but employees are also allowed to take them home on a temporary basis. OSRAM Art Projects is directed by the art scholar Dr. Christian Schoen.

Diana Thater

Diana Thater, born in 1962 in San Francisco, lives and works in Los Angeles. She studied art history at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and at New York University in New York City. She is the recipient of many scholarships and honors, including a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York (2005) and the James D. Phelan Art Award in Film and Video from the San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco (2006).