Sasha Pirker

A grand piano, wrapped in foil in an attic surrounded by mountains. The instrument is disassembled and reassembled, the interlocking of keys, hammers, and strings carefully examined and observed. Sasha Pirker portrays the work of piano tuner Stefan Knüpfer as an inexhaustible diversity of hand movements. And the precision of the preparatory work for the desired sound experience.

Night, a full moon shown in a long shot. Sasha Pirker divides this miniature into three movements with different types of sound to accompany the dark image. “Ma” refers to the Japanese concept of negative, empty space. After “me” and “ma” comes the “moon” in the audio form of a rousing music track, whose dynamics build up extreme tension against the image. Now the unfinished film is perhaps finished after all—as a liberated dance under the Moon.

A momentary still life, a scene setting: ironing board, iron, and a pile of shirts. And then the clapper-board: “Films” as title of the film—as the earlier films were called. Scene 25, Take 1, Roll 1.

A pie in the face is as old as cinema itself. In this essay, an ode to activism, Sasha Pirker pays tribute to the original pie-thrower Mabel Normand, the pioneering Alice Guy Blaché, the illustrious ballerina Anna Pavlova and her eponymous confections…

Sasha Pirker approaches the Viennese artist Heinz Frank through a playful, cinematic-architectural exploration of his extravagant home. In doing so, she discovers a labyrinthine arrangement of rooms and hiding places in which the building turns into a film, and vice versa. Nothing about it is deceased, instead, the enduring vitality of artistic creation becomes evident.

Sasha Pirker´s conceptual experiment Closed Circuit, 2013 is a meeting of two analog formats – Polaroid and 16mm film – as well as of the predetermined units of time and the aesthetic aspects inherent in each material. In this work, the development time of Polaroid images correlates with the predetermined length of a 16mm film reel, which is three minutes – exactly the length of Pirker´s single-take film. The subject gradually peels itself into the picture, revealing a woman with a movie camera, or perhaps even the production process itself. The short, very concise film thus makes it possible to directly observe the development of a photographic image in an ambiguous gesture – the process of developing a static image using moving images – thus causing the viewer to reconsider the specifics of the respective media (photography and film) that have been directly interwoven in this piece.

Sasha Pirker's Real Time is concerned in a two-fold sense with recording artistic creative processes. Shooting with a Bolex camera, the filmmaker documents the form-finding creation of a drawing in real time. Line follows upon line only to reveal, by the end of the film, what film normally conceals: the woman with a movie camera - as well as the artist Gerlind Zeilner who has captured their mirror image in her collective portrait drawing.

As white paper cups are prepared for the brown rum balls, a familiar togetherness and well-known images of family and home unfold. But the director’s instructions from off screen interrupt the cozy scene—turning the home movie into a film about making films.