VIENNA.- Wiener Secession, Association of Visual Artists presents the exhibit Midori Mitamura: Green on the Mountain through January 21, 2007. Midori Mitamura’s artistic works occupy a position between photography and installation. They quote elements from the past, either her own or that of strangers, taking this as the point of departure from which to reveal modes of remembering and the reiterating memory of private biography. In a subtle and ironic way, Mitamura sounds out the tensions between individual experience and retrospectively lived history, without losing sight of the volatility and slipperiness of personal experience.

Her installation Green On The Mountain in the Grafisches Kabinett at the Secession is based on a found photograph of a family outing to the mountains. Around this photograph, which has no personal significance for her and which shows people she does not know, Mitamura constructs a space within which she places staged photographs, music, and private memorabilia alongside the found material. The result is a space of the private present, of the here and now, which pushes into the background any thought of the photo archive from which the found photo may have come. Instead, the pictures turn into objects that suggest presence: the spines of books are printed with family snapshots and the hands of a clock tick against a dial made of an old black and white photograph.

Midori Mitamura attempts not only to install pictures in three-dimensions, but also to create three-dimensional images. In this way, she makes the transition from photography to other media. But in spite of this, photography cannot fulfill the wish to pluck the fixed moment out of the flow of time. The clock hands continue to move across the photo, and even a rotating mirror can only capture the picture on the wall as a still image, but not make it turn. Photography is not film is not life.