Becoming 10

(2007–2010)

Photo Installation of 27 C-Prints

In the photo installation Becoming 10 Kerstin Honeit performs her “un-met” 9 half siblings from the former East and West of Berlin. She stages herself in their real environments and apartment blocks in imagined poses using the gesture of drag.

In Becoming 10, Honeit has become an anthropologist in search of the nine siblings she has never met. Her research into their backgrounds and above all, their locations, has led her to nine different places in East and West Berlin. The artist is the last child in an unusual family constellation that only exists in the form of genealogy. In order to simulate the non-existent, she represents her potential siblings in their original locations and embodies the absentees through her own imagination and the use of poses. The absence of her real relatives leads her to an enactment of that which was never there. Her attempts to create a symbiosis with the absent family members succeed through this mimetic process.

Almost like a detective, Honeit comes closer to her nine half-siblings as she extrapolates about each of them in their own contexts. She places herself in the scene of a variety of everyday situations and these are captured photographically. Her nine half-siblings have become the equivalent of the average Berlin street scene. However, the generality the artist brings to the people she expresses through her masquerade lives in a kind of differentiation between her and the absentees. It is precisely the masquerade that momentarily disturbs the social order in the embodiment of wishes and the search for new identity. These settings appear like stills from a film, a silent film where there is no space for the lines of the performer. Perhaps it underscores the lines in the singer Nico’s cover version of a Bob Dylan’s song (“I’ll Keep It With Mine”): I’m not loving you for what you are, but for what you are not.

Text: Susanne Weiß
Translation: Francesca Bondy, Emma Cattell

On & Off

(2010)

Video Installation
Dur. 09 min, HD, sound

Four women of different ages and cultural backgrounds lend their personal memories of their fathers’ funerals to Kerstin Honeit. These sound-recorded stories are then lip-synched, embodied and staged in a miniature box, reminiscent of a theatre model. The piece continues the Honeit’s intervention in the field of the disembodied voice in relation to moving images via the technique of lip-synching.

It is only noticeable if you watch, or rather listen, very carefully that it is not Kerstin Honeit who is speaking. Four women have lent their voices to the artist; they are telling some stories about how they experienced their fathers’ funerals. Four women – four plays.

It is a simple stage (a green screen box) that Kerstin Honeit has built. There is a white space (a white cube); in it, only her dressed in a black suit. There is nothing to draw the viewer’s attention away from her performance. Her “white cube” suggests neutrality; her black suit, integrity / seriousness.

There is however a third element that lives in that space – the emptiness.
The empty space that, according to Kant, is an omnipresent space that conveys the “presence of emptiness”. The suppressed omnipresence of death in our society is regulated by a few rituals that help to facilitate dealing with the event “death”. The artist plays with quoting the recognisable demeanour of someone giving a eulogy. In doing so, dressed in her black suit, she transforms borrowed memories, using her lips and body, through the valedictions of others.

“On and off” shows Honeit as the protagonist, substitute and performer simultaneously. Through these multiple voices, she pursues questions of the performative role of significant social initiations.

Text: Susanne Weiß
Translation: Francesca Bondy, Emma Cattell

Read my Lips

(2009)

Interactive Video Installation
Dur. 07 min, DV, bw, sound

Read my Lips is a literal invitation to the viewer to participate in an interactive video installation. The public are invited to re-dub, a collection of Hitchcockesque scenes in which the original German film dubbing was used as a method of censorship.

The work includes film scenes from Spellbound (USA 1945) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Notorious (USA 1946) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock and Homicidal (USA 1961), William Castle.

Act 2: Not Me

“Starting to talk about the 'I', the confusion of terms became especially noticeable. The only way I could manage was by establishing the terms ‘the big I’ and ‘the small i’. In my use of the term ‘the small i’, I mean the condition of a conscience that has awareness of its own incompleteness, that is to say that my definition of ‘conscience’ means: an 'i' who is aware of its mortality and gender. Whereas ‘the big I’ is abstract and conforms to the fantasy of ‘completeness’. This ‘big I’ is omnipotent and offers unlimited possibilities; it is simultaneously male and female and therefore gender free. In contrast to ‘the small i’, it is a creation of the mind and requires the downfall of the 'small i' to be able to materialize.”

The omnipotent ‘big I’ arises in all of Kerstin Honeit’s work. In her interactive video installation Read My Lips (2009), ‘the big I’ has transformed itself into a black box. A black and white video within this black box shows four scenes from Hitchcockesque films. Opposite the screen is a lectern with a microphone and a teleprompter, which the viewer is invited to use. The viewer becomes the dubbing voice and without the use of their own voice the film remains silent.

Occasionally, the subtitles in the teleprompter light up. It is here that Christina on Braun's ‘the small i’ comes into play; the ‘i’ that embodies incompleteness. How can ‘the big I’ be formed through the many manipulation possibilities of the dubbing process? Honeit demands the viewer to look carefully. If the viewer is able to master the art of lip-reading, they have the advantage of understanding more. From a cultural historical standpoint, Honeit’s chosen film sequences are the antithesis of a distorted post-war history. The Hollywood protests against Germany’s Nazi past on the one hand, and the revised German version on the other; a manipulation that the falsified dubbing brings to the surface, and the simultaneous confrontation of the gender stereotyping of the 1940s. Kerstin Honeit plays with these roles on the screen and asks ‘the small i’ to perform the story.

Text: Susanne Weiß
Translation: Francesca Bondy, Emma Cattell

Position #1–5

(2008–)

Multi-Channel Video Installation
Dur. 10 min, HD colour, sound

Performer
Sophia New, Berlin (2008)
Helen Maurene Cooper, Chicago (2010)
Lesley Guy, Sheffield (2012)
Romy Rüegger, Zurich (2013)
Vicky Sabourin, Montreal (2015)

Credits

Many thanks to
Katja Anzelewsky, Berlin
Tom Draws, Chicago
Alison J Carr, Sheffield
Riikka Tauriainen, Zurich
Eric Tschaeppeler, Montreal

Postproduction
Emma Cattell

In Kerstin Honeit’s piece Position #1 (work in progress – so far performed in Berlin, Chicago and Sheffield) – we find three women in different but somehow similar places, in a silent “experiential space”. The women, in their early to mid-thirties, stand in front of a closed garage each in their respective cities. Not only do the environments appear strangely similar, but so do the three women themselves. Through the constructed scene, there is also something of a convergence of the women’s identities, transmitted to the viewer through the act of observation. We, the viewers, stand in front of the projection screen and wait, thereby almost replaying the actual scene before us, set in the street, where the video was filmed. What we see reminds me of an anthropological experiment. Honeit uses her three protagonists for observational purposes; she places them in the street and their inactivity is the performance. In this way she subtly examines the similarities and potential differences of the subjects “women in the street” in Berlin-Schöneberg and an industrial area in Chicago and Sheffield.

How do the gestures change over time? What is real and what is contrived? What effect does the context have? Are the systems different and do they then generate other codes?

Text: Susanne Weiß
Translation: Francesca Bondy, Emma Cattell

Junost Bang

(2007)

Video Installation
Dur. 10 min, DV, sound

For the video installation Junost Bang Kerstin Honeit asked four older women from a senior club in former East Berlin – which was based close to the famous DEFA GDR dubbing studios – to re-dub the male characters of a Don Johnson b-movie called Dead Bang. To synchronise the speaking tempo of the women with the moving images of the chosen scenes the film had to be extremely slowed down. Besides the general media representation of gender clichés this piece deals especially with cultural-political changes after the reunification in East Germany.

The stimulus for Kerstin Honeit´s installation Junost Bang (2007) was finding a dumped Soviet era TV in the street. On the television was a faded sticker advertising the action thriller B-movie Dead Bang – one of the first Hollywood films which heralded the newly enforced cultural conformity of the freshly reunited Germany by being screened in cinemas in both the former East and West.

The juxtaposition of the Cyrillic text used by the manufacturers of the television set alongside the typography used in the title of the stereotypically American film functions a catalyst, offering us a document of time which exposes the clash of the declared “past” of East Germany with the undeniable present tense of the West. Honeit continues to work with these ideas of shifts in time and perspective through her choice of particular scenes from Dead Bang (starring Miami Vice´s Don Johnson in the lead role), that she then re-works and re-dubs referencing Adlershof and its history. Adlershof, on the outskirts of Berlin, was once the main production centre of East German television and film dubbing (from 1949 until 1990) and was the site of the first presentation of Junost Bang.

Instead of using people with voices one might expect in an American action movie, the artist asked four older women from the local Senior Citizens Club in Adlershof to re-dub the male characters of the film. Honeit then matched the film tempo to the older women´s speaking patterns, rather than the other way round as is normal in the film industry. The nature of dubbing – the “performance” of the screen actors´ bodies to extraneous voices is in this way laid bare. Instead of synchronicity, Honeit exposes the fissures between speech and voice, image and sound, as well as between fictional and real space and warps the assigned and perpetuated gender codes of conduct whilst introducing an unfamiliar way of looking at the clichéd action film genre.

Text: Maja Wismer
Translation: Mat Hand