Résurrection des mannequins (2014)

‘Résurrection des Mannequins’ (2014) was filmed on location in Datça, Turkey. This single screen work features an encounter with a site where mannequins are positioned outdoors around a roadside shop that sells household textile goods. They are all dressed and fixed in various animated positions and thus given functionality to greet prospective customers and other passers by. The film presents a visit to the shop by a protagonist, indicating a ‘road-movie’ type of a story, which never develops. Instead there are a number of voyeuristic PoV shots from the perspective of the mannequins that follow the character and other visitors to the shop. The film references an exhibition organised in 1938 by the writer, surrealists' brain and theorist André Breton and the poet Paul Éluard in Paris at the Galerie Beaux-Arts, called ‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme’. Man Ray who was also a participant in the show and “a head lighting technician”, produced a book with 15 black and white plates under the name of ‘Résurrection des Mannequins’. This was a seminal exhibition that marks a breaking point in the development of all visual arts of the time. “The exhibition was staged in three sections, showing paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms and mannequins which had been redesigned in various ways. With this holistic presentation of surrealist art work the movement wrote exhibition history.” (Uwe M. Schneede; 2001; Die Geschichte der Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Von den Avantgarden bis zur Gegenwart. C. H. Beck, Munich)