Finally, the #End just seems to be a gorgeous #Sunset:
Enjoy the Party, Enjoy your Night, Enjoy the Sun, Enjoy your Freedom, Enjoy the Love, Enjoy your Life, Enjoy the Colors, Enjoy your Style
The exhibition ENDJOY presents works by artist and filmmaker Nicolaas Schmidt.
Schmidt studied visual communication (film) and visual arts (mixed media) at HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg and is a founding member of VETO Film, a platform for experimental film and video art. His work deals with various media and concepts, which are based on his interest in time-based phenomena and long-term dramaturgies with repetitive elements of emotion, reduction and incorporate elements of visual poetry or romantic conceptualism.
Schmidt’s films have been presented at numerous international film festivals and exhibitions and have already won various awards.
For the exhibition at PYLON-Lab, Schmidt presents his online video series 36KFRGB (2013-2014, ongoing) and his film FINAL STAGE (2017).
36000 FRAMES RGB is a maximally reduced, minimal dramaturgical video work in 99+1 parts and a running viral collaborative project at the same time.
The self-reflexive conceptual work deals, with a seemingly alternative necessity of (online-) presence as proof of existence. The project attempts to pick up on the discrepancy between the generation of perception of mainstream and niche, of on the one hand large marketing expenditures for optimized risk-free products (mainstream) and on the other hand little or no marketing efforts for unadaptedly difficult products (experiments).
The world is full of colors. Times are hard.
A teenage boy sheds lonely tears in Europe’s largest shopping mile. Brutalism, consumerism, sadness – FINAL STAGE is a contemporary love story.
A boy on a pedestrian bridge, the bus leaves, his friend is gone. Then, a sad parade through a shopping centre, a fragile balancing act between documentary observation and subtle staging.
The film is set in the Hamburg Barmbeck-Süd district and it’s local shopping centre “Hamburger Meile”, a brutalist building consortium. A place where one “doesn’t shop, but buys happiness” (advertising slogan of the shopping centre).
Feelings create realities and false realities create fake feelings.
FINAL STAGE shows how apart from the omnipresent marketing of a commercialized feeling of joy, there is no room for emotions beyond the happy facade. The film reflects the contrast between a fast-moving superficiality in today’s consumer society and the experience of individual struggle and negative emotional states in public. Without dialogue, but with a single-shot attitude that never turns the gaze away from the protagonist and his obvious hopelessness, the film formulates the question of whether and how commercially used public spaces that promise distraction are part of a system that not only profits from loneliness and inner emptiness, but even promotes it. The challenging duration of individual shots of the film holds the potential to grant the viewer a moment of reflection, or to move him to empathy, desperation and his own emotional discovery.
There exist two versions of the end of the film: a “Happy End” (27min) and a five minutes longer tragic ending (32min). Schmidt presents both versions in alternating order in the exhibition.
FINAL STAGE has been awarded as “Best Short Film” several times in its production year 2017 and was – among other screenings and exhibitions – part of the exhibition “I’m not here to make friends” at the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof from November 2017 to February 2018.
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