voice.performance.video walli hoefinger

1999 Dream.body/-memory
What does it mean to let something go? Performance and video installation with Walli Höfinger at O.T. Gallery
Diploma project as shadow-boxing: Walli Höfinger’s performance seeks an image for the human condition.
The moment of greatest surrender is simultaneously the moment of greatest reserve: Turning toward others, opening your arms, wanting to embrace the others and at the same time to stay yourself. Upright surrender. In the performance “Dream.body/-memory” last weekend Walli Höfinger executed this balancing act between extreme physical tension and concentration and emotional openness.
At the same time this performance, and the video installation which remains on display in the gallery, represent the diploma project with which the Austrian completed her studies with professor Ulrike Rosenbach in the field of New Artistic Media at the Saarbrücken Academy of Fine Arts. The body as an instrument, as a medium which translates and expresses memories of gestures, stances, emotions like a seismograph – that was the subject of Walli Höfinger’s performance. Two years ago she hung, held by two straps, some meters above the floor of the old Scheidt Water Works, moving as if in slow motion. Stretching, tensing, extending her arms and legs. This was already a forceful image for the state between free floating in space and a tension which makes the smallest gesture a feat of strength. But in “Traum.körper/-erinnerung” this world has grown more confined. Höfinger stood on the floor. Beside her, as a symbol of dreams and memories, a tower made of 5 monitors presents the image of a body lying on a translucent sheet of glass. Like shadow-boxing, arms turned, fingers spread. Slowly the shadow of memory in the monitors encountered the figure in the space. Here she comes up with beautiful, strong images. For example when the shadow stands in space like a big bird and she bends down beside it as if under a heavy weight. But the climax came when she turned, with consummate ease, to face the audience. A stance which illustrated the human condition in this day and age: our tense reserve and our wish to let ourselves go, without ever doing so.

An Impressive Event Accompanies the Saarland Art Exhibition

Under the title “Human Images” the Museum of St. Ingbert is showing the biggest of 6 themed exhibitions accompanying the Saarland Art Exhibition 2000. The large presence of New Media Art proves that art on the threshold of the 21st century is anything but static. That a museum itself can be a very lively place was proved very impressively last Friday...
Several dozen spectators experienced an exceptional premiere: Walli Höfinger‘s performance “Dream.body/-memory”. Remarkable even as a solo work, the video installation of 5 monitors stacked on top of each other developed its full impact through the haunting interaction with its creator. Structured as a nonverbal exchange between a real person - the artist - and a virtual vis-á-vis, a moving figure appearing on the 5 video monitors, the young Austrian artist revealed a time-space connection between the “now” and the non-material but omnipresent potential of human dreams and memories. With incredible, trancelike body control Walli Höfinger impressed the audience in a half-hour dialogue with her “electronic double” and in the same projected her “metaphor for the fact that everything you have ever felt, thought, seen, experienced is engraved in your body-soul” into the audience’s minds. Thus the artist presented her own universal image of what it is to be human in front of this virtual altar....