Andrea Winkler and Stefan Panhans will give a reading from Panhans' first novel "We Just Left Shore": His alter ego is looking for a job and roams through a cityscape that seems to him like a single open-plan casting office. He continues to move about unemployed, overtired, hungry, and with his smartphone blocked because of unpaid bills, always on the verge of powerlessness, entangled in a breathless odyssey of crazy scenes that take place in a world in which everyday reality, computer games, memories, film, TV shows, advertising, and dreams are inextricably interwoven, and an escape from this nerve-racking state seems to be a distant prospect. While Edgar Allen Poes needed Arthur Gordon Pym a ship for his adventure journey, Panhans' nameless narrator travels in a contemporary, almost dizzying way in the stream of events of an "expanded reality" that, as if directly connected to its network, makes itself felt directly in his body and his "hard drive", driving him on and on and on and on. Only his companion, a mysterious, not particularly talkative female figure with several names, seems to know what to do, because the grand jury is in session, the clock is ticking and zombies don't sleep ... Like many of Panhan's video works, the book (which was born out of the idea to write a "film in words" one day) is provided with a matching soundtrack, which the two Swiss composers Jannik Giger and Lukas Huber have produced for it and which will be available via a link in the book.
"We Just Left Shore", text, 2017, http://www.textem.de/2759.html
Andrea Winkler studied Media Art at the Slade School of Fine Art (London, UK) and Visual Communication at the University of Fine Arts (Hamburg, Germany). She is currently living and working at the "Akademie für Theater und Digitalität" in Dortmund with a research grant until the end of June. In her work she combines fragments, sculptural elements and spatial settings to create scenic arrangements. She pays special attention to the role of the material subconscious.
Stefan Panhans, who lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin, is currently living and working in Dortmund with the same scholarship. He studied at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He works mainly with video, film and photographic media, but sometimes also creates illustrations, collages and installations. The interrelation of text and image is a defining characteristic of many of his works. His artistic research undertakes a kind of mental archaeology of contemporary hypermediatization and digitalization and their effects on our mind and body and their power relations. In addition, he deals with phenomena such as increasing everyday racism, the veneration of celebrities, stereotypes and questions of post-colonial diversity.
Her two works have been shown and awarded many prizes nationally and internationally. CV's and more can be found here: andreawinkler.org; stefanpanhans.com
Besides their own projects, Andrea Winkler and Stefan Panhans have increasingly worked together, mostly on film projects. They presented their latest projects at the Videonale.17, 2019 and the Videonale.16, 2017 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn as well as in 2018 at the Transmediale in Berlin, the 35th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival and the 31st European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück). European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück). In 2019 they were selected for the Innogy VISIT Award with their project "Defender", which will be realized this year and presented in a solo exhibition at HMKV-Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund.
