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Street Images

Street Images
/8
    • Street Images
    • Straßenbilder
  • 1979
  • Super 8 film, color
  • 10min, 33sec
The film works of Hans Scheirl revolve around the issues of gender performance in public space and how the individual adapts to the generic structures of everyday environments. The film “Street Images” starts with the gauging of the grid of a sewer grate. Feet slowly move about the edges of the grid but do not identify the sex of the person involved. A little later, a woman walks around in plastic shoes looking like stones tied around the legs. Plastic strips mimic the dashed center line of a street but soon turn into a line winding like a fashion accessory around the body. The protagonist of the video coils up these connected plastic strips on the ground and gets entangled in a mesh of bodily confinements. Here, a referential approach to body art from the 1970s becomes apparent and especially to the “Body Configurations” by VALIE EXPORT from the beginnings of that decade. The explicit application of fashion tools, however, signifies the end of that decade and the influences of punk, which reached its peak at the beginning of the 1980s with a crossover of fashion, sex and gender. W.S.