The screen is black. The only sound you hear is birdsong, and then the film begins. The 16 mm camera focuses on a young woman holding a pair of binoculars. The background is out of focus, so the leaves appear as a blurry green area. The image trembles and echoes the hand movements of the cameraman. For just over two minutes, the camera follows men and women as they watch birds. But the object of observation, the brown thrasher, which lives in the central and eastern regions of the United States, never appears.

It is these almost banal moments that fascinate Kevin Jerome Everson (1965, Mansfield, OH, lives in Charlottesville, VA), one of the most renowned experimental filmmakers of our time. Rather than pursuing conventional realism, Everson transforms everyday expressions into theatrical gestures and choreographs poetic compositions that resist a classical narrative form. By exclusively using the 16 mm format, rendered in digitized form, Everson recalls the original conception of film, which was intended to be an extension of photography.

This large-scale solo presentation, curated by Cathrin Mayer, is the artist’s first institutional show in Austria and extends over the entire first floor.