Kopfkino - film (2012)
Exhibition room: Hvelfing
The title of Lene Berg’s film Kopfkino (2012) literally means head film, or film in the brain. Kopfkino was filmed over the course of two days in Berlin with a set of exceptional characters. The basic concept is simple: eight women exchange stories about their line of work, which is to fulfil their clients’ sexual fantasies. Seated behind a long table, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (c.1498), they are dressed as the various female clichés that they impersonate: a schoolgirl, a circus director, a general or a princess. The scripted conversation evolves in front of the camera without any direct intervention by the director. The women use their own words and experiences but the situation in which we observe them is staged. We are on a film set. Real experiences and actual stories come together in a universe of illusions, fictions and fantasies.
BIO
Lene Berg is a Norwegian artist and filmmaker, originally trained as a film director at Stockholm's Dramatiska Institutet. Her work includes installations, performance, film, photography, and text-based works, and she often draws her inspiration from documentary material. She has produced a number of projects in public spaces and directed three independently produced feature films: En Kvinnas Huvud (A Woman’s Head), Kopfkino (mindfuck) and GOMP: Tales of Surveillance in Norway 1948-89 (Gompen og andre beretninger om overvåking i Norge 1948-89). Working without preconceived concepts or established norms, her projects are incisive, humorous and often outside the cultural consensus. Berg uses moving image, installation, text, and photography – her projects often include all of these media. Lene Berg's production may be said to invest in reforming and reshaping storytelling. In her moving-image works, Berg investigates questions about truth and falsehood, reflecting political issues in personal stories from our recent cultural history. By merging fact and fiction, her moving-image work scrutinises contradictions and how history and storytelling is made and narrated.