In Test Film (2017-2026), visual artist Katja Mater once again explores the boundaries of the film medium. The work consists of hand-drawn ‘interpretations’ of graphic 16mm test images, known as SMPTE tests, originally intended for calibrating film images with the aim of achieving an ‘optimal’ or ‘correct’ reproduction in print or projection. Mater’s drawn and subsequently filmed versions bring this objective of film as a representation of reality into sharp focus. Test Film emphasises the concept of film as an ephemeral construct of image and time.

A standard length for a roll of 16mm film is 100 feet / 30.5 metres. Filmmaker Minjung Kim approaches film as a physical medium, as a body. In a series of works, she explores the relationship between standard film length and duration. Count Footage consists of 100 feet / 30.5 metres of film. The length of the film is the subject of the film and is depicted exactly during the projection. To achieve this, the filmmaker filmed a ‘footage counter’ loaded with a piece of film measuring exactly 1 foot / 40 film frames in length, taped together as a loop. The camera is loaded with a roll of 100 feet of film and captures the passage of 100 revolutions of this film loop in a single shot. The analysis of film length and film duration is completed by displaying the exact number of seconds, feet, frames per second and frames per foot. The projector functions as a linear film counter.

In her film work from the 1970s, visual artist Dóra Maurer intensively explored concepts surrounding repetition and the measurability of displacement and movement. The concept of Timing (1973-1980) is deceptively simple. “Time is measured by folding a piece of white linen in front of a black background. I fold it seven times in total, starting over each time and making an extra fold. The dimensions of the cloth correspond to the image format of a 16mm film; the width being the distance between my two outstretched arms,” stated Maurer. With its variations and gradual irregularities in the divisions of the image — or rather, divisions of the projection screen — time, or the measurement of time, undergoes a transposition into the spatial. The idea of absolute measurability is subtly undermined.

Horror Film 1 (1971-2026)
Malcolm Le Grice (performed by Betija Zvejniece)

Originally trained as a painter, Malcolm Le Grice became one of the most important voices in the independent film world in England when he co-founded the London Film- Makers’ Co-Op in the late 1960s and used his positions as a teacher to introduce art students to filmmaking. As a filmmaker, he was one of the central figures of the ‘materialist’ film movement that formed in the United Kingdom. Horror Film 1 is a film performance with three overlapping coloured light projections, in which Le Grice transformed his own shadow into an image, a surface and interference patterns. Le Grice’s influential Expanded Cinema work is now presented as a ‘re-enactment’ performed by Betija Zvejniece. Although the action of the performance is improvised to adapt to each specific time and place, a consistent pattern is followed that has hardly changed since the first performance in 1971.

Referring to Newton’s theory of colour and light, Searching for White uses 16mm film to mix colours. We see a white wall in an industrial building, on which a three-metre-high (imperfect) colour wheel has been painted. Slowly, the image begins to tilt and rotate around its axis. This acceleration almost mixes the colours of the wheel, creating green. As it rotates, a black spot appears in the image. Mater begins to paint the wheel and changes the colours one by one, shifting the wheel from green to blue and eventually, after accelerating, to almost white.

Viktoria Schmid’s 16mm film installation I escaped from this into the cinema, ... (2018-2026) is based on James Clerk Maxwell’s method of additive colour mixing, which led to the first colour photograph in 1861. Footage of water features from different parts of the world, shot over a period of several years, merge into a new work using a trichromatic projection technique. At each location, three shots were taken on black-and-white film, each through a filter of a different colour (Red / Green / Blue). By projecting the images with three projectors through the corresponding filters, and by adding extra screens, they manifest themselves in varying degrees of overlap to form a final colour image. The projection ‘dispositive’ makes the relationship between colour and time tangible. Panta rhei — everything flows.

The 360° 16mm Moving Picture Panorama is a visionary construction with 16 film projectors that project a film in a circle onto a projection screen set up around them. Linked to a central motor, the 16mm projectors project a film circularly, in a loop with no beginning and no end, like an installation. The film runs from one projector to the next, looping in and out of each of them successively. Film technician Nico Komen worked on this machine until his death in 2022. Artists and technicians from the Rotterdam-based, artist-run lab Filmwerkplaats then took charge of the installation, perfecting the first eight projectors and turning a working 180° panorama into a reality. During this process, several film artists were invited to develop a work and shed light on the machine’s possibilities. 

Els van Riel’s work reveals the basic elements of the medium of film: 16mm film material, time and light. In her encounters with the panorama, she gradually developed her own understanding of its possibilities and limitations: eight different moments of the film appear simultaneously and continuously. Like a standing wave, the film remains visibly present at the beginning, middle and end as long as the machine continues to run. This unique form of projection views time as a circle rather than as a line, with an arrow pointing in a direction. It questions the time that once began, or didn’t, and the time that will end, or won’t. It examines a space that explores boundaries affected by time. A film with a single camera movement across mirrors in a landscape closes the circle.