Isabell Heimerdinger
The space between us fills my heart with intolerable grief and impossible joy

Germany, 2002, video, 30 min
Courtesy: Medhi Chouakri, Berlin

Isabell Heimerdinger was born in Stuttgart and lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions internationally, including: Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin (2007); Galerie Krobath Wimmer, Wien (2007); Western Front, Vancouver (2007); Atelier Cardenas Bellanger, Paris (2006); and Los Angeles Projects, California (2004). www.mehdi-chouakri.com

The space between us fills my heart with intolerable grief and impossible joy was made with Martin Glade, a young actor from Berlin. The title of the work refers to a notebook entry by Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, whose work included emotional communications with friends and family.

For the production, Glade was asked to portray the extreme emotions that make up an artist’s repertoire, crying before the running camera for half an hour and, in conclusion, laughing for half an hour. The two videos are shown side by side, the viewer placed in the middle of the action. Glade found it hard sustaining such intense emotions for so long. Sometimes his laughter was almost crying, or the reverse. At one point, the acted emotion could no longer be distinguished from the genuine emotion: the emotions became confused.

Heimerdinger has created a body of works in which it is rarely clear whether the camera has captured a real or prepared act, raising the question of where acting begins and ends, in the eyes of both the audience and the actors, when a camera is present.