All attempts to make contact with the afterlife, whether through religion or magic, are doomed to failure. We cannot communicate with the dead, only with their effigies. The video Mother Father is Dead is a cool re-enactment of confusion around the death of one of the protagonists in the series Dallas. In an unhurried style, both scholarly and comical, Parallel Worlds investigates the phenomenon of the overlapping coexistences of the mediumistic and the real. 04302011 employs a 3D scanner to make copies of faces reminiscent of death-masks; but since the scanner is unable to cope with the minute movements of the living, the masks are flawed, as if deteriorated by the passage of time. In Haukka-Pala, Laura Horelli examines the nutrition shows of her now-deceased mother; these peculiarly dated and sedate children’s programmes contrast sharply with the artist’s attempts to establish emotional contact with her mother via her mass-media legacy.

Mutter Vater ist tot – Mother Father is Dead, RASKIN (Rotraut Pape & Andreas Coerper), de 1987, 7 min

Parallel Worlds, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, be 2010, 26 min
04302011, Sophie Kahn, us 2011, 4 min
Haukka-Pala – A Bit to Bite, Laura Horelli, fi 2009, 28 min

 
(Image: Mutter Vater ist tot by RASKIN)