Saskia Olde Wolbers: A Shot in the Dark – Exploring Fictional Documentaries and Video Art

This exhibition showcases video artist Saskia Olde Wolbers' fictional documentaries, which blend meticulously crafted miniature worlds filmed underwater with evocative voice-over narration. The works explore themes of subjective truth, translation, and the nature of perception, using illusion and subtle visual storytelling.

The exhibition "A Shot in the Dark" at the Secession features video artist Saskia Olde Wolbers, presenting her distinctive fictional documentaries for the first time in Austria, including the new work "Pareidolia" (2011). Since the mid-1990s, Olde Wolbers has developed complex videos that combine miniature, meticulously handcrafted model worlds, often filmed underwater in colored liquids, with an introspective voice-over narration that creates an auditory-visual fusion. These films are characterized by an abstract visual language that illustrates the narrator's thought processes. The exhibition highlights three key works: "Pareidolia" (2011), "Trailer" (2005), and "Placebo" (2002). "Pareidolia" is inspired by Eugen Herrigel's "Zen in the Art of Archery," told from the fictional perspective of a translator and a bird, questioning subjectivity, translation, and belief through the lens of "pareidolia"—the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in random stimuli. The film's visuals were shot inside models of a university lecture hall, an archery range, and traditional Japanese interiors, alternating with animated sequences. "Placebo" (2002) draws from the life of Jean-Claude Romand, a man who feigned a medical career for years. The video explores themes of marital infidelity and pseudologia phantastica, with visuals dissolving as the narrator's fabricated reality unravels. "Trailer" (2005) tells the story of a man realizing he is the illegitimate child of forgotten film stars, leading to fragmented memories of his parents' disappearance in the jungle. Across these works, Olde Wolbers' underwater-filmed, color-infused memory spaces reveal the inherently contradictory, fluid, and ambivalent nature of truth and fiction, demonstrating how moving images can dissolve such distinctions.

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