Hello Hollow

A black screen, illuminated by points of light moving across it like snow flurries, sets the stage for the appearance of a creature that cannot be clearly identified as human or animal, which immediately begins a wild dance. Thus begins Julia Oschatz' video Hello Hollow, the formal design of which is, like almost all of the artist's works, characterized by a world of colour, mood and action drawn in tones of black-white-grey. The animation catapults the viewer into a prodigious spectrum of associations, each of which becomes concrete only for a few moments - such as when the points of light form themselves into the work's title - or at least seems to become concrete - when the viewer believes he has discerned human traits in the 'creature'. Nevertheless, it is a structural principle of this video-clip-like work that what is concrete about a situation in life or the environment is neutralized and transformed into a more generalized texture. The 'creature', in its abstraction oscillating between man and donkey, wolf or rabbit, can be understood as a symbol of all of these. Hello Hollow tells the archaic condition, of this 'creature' being thrown into the world and left at its mercy, as a clownesque, externally controlled actor on a stage that obeys barely rationally comprehensible laws and in the background of which the projections of this world rapidly pass by. (Wolfgang A. Döllerer)