Susanne M. Winterling

That the film projection is essentially a trick of the light is a fact embraced by Susanne Winterling. Her 16mm films are tight phenomenological articulations in which the subjects double back on themselves to articulate the conditions of the medium itself. ...the flickering light of the pictured fire, flame or sparkler simulates the flicker of the projected light.....Drifting bubbles, flickering candles, fizzling sparklers are all inevitably destined to burst or burn out, but here they become eternal in this short- looped filmic life.

Despite the phenomenological questions they pose, and their self-reflexive propositions about the nature of film, Winterling’s works are not entirely hermetic. They may use the propensities of film to suggest a kind of looking-glass alternative reality, but the tricks of perception she employs also reflect other reversals of a more social leaning. In Untitled (the pressure behind your nailcolour my dear), 2009, the wrestling arms are unexpectedly pale and hairless and while one the skin of one is decorated with graphic tattoos, the wrist of the other is wrapped with pearls. The masculine strength test is transposed to female protagonists, each with opposing personal styles. Winterling brings in lace, accessories, jewelry, trinkets and such inconsequential fripperies as unorthodox talisman to shed light not only on questions of a perceptual nature, but also about personal identity, gender inequalities, and the lopsided power relations between men and women. Often focusing on that precarious moment of change in a young woman’s life from girlhood to womanhood, Winterling opens up a space for possibility, where hopes and expectations are still unfettered and not stifled by the reality of social possibilities limited by gender. While Winterling does not depict a parallel world, perhaps it is true to call it a parallel vision, a de-centered view that sidles along the centerfield masculine outlook to suggest an alternative to the social authority it proscribes.
Kirsty Bell