HAARLEM.- This autumn De Hallen Haarlem is realizing two notable solo exhibitions by renowned filmmaker Michel Auder and versatile artist Christian Friedrich. Both artists are known for stretching the boundaries of the medium of video and film to the limit. Auder is a tireless chronicler, who since the 60s has been capturing events in his direct environment and in the lives of his artist friends on camera, be it Super 8 or iPhone. Originally influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague, he developed his own genre that ping-pongs between diary-like home video and experimental film. Friedrich, whose work includes both conceptual sculpture as well as audio works and installations, develops exceptional editing techniques and a completely original film language in which elements of stylized music videos, DIY porn and granular performance recordings are combined.

Michel Auder
After the Charles Atlas exhibition in De Hallen Haarlem in 2012, Michel Auder’s (1945, FR / USA) exhibition presents a new large overview of an influential older artist who has for a long time remained under the radar of a large audience. The scene surrounding Andy Warhol’s Factory with whom he came in contact through his wife Viva, one of Warhol’s favourite Superstars, defined Auder’s early New York career. After that he devoted himself to travel accounts, portraits of artists, TV- collages and experimental feature films. In all of these he shows a remarkable sense for the small details in everyday life; his films elevate the mundane to the extraordinary.

The exhibition in De Hallen Haarlem concentrates on different periods in Auder’s career, from early experimental films such as Keeping Busy (1969) and Cleopatra (1970) to ​​recent work made with an iPhone. The downstairs area of the Vleeshal will be devoted to video works; the top floor of the Vleeshal will offer visitors a cinematic experience. This exhibition follows last year’s presentations of Auder’s work at the Kunsthalle Basel, Culturgest in Lisbon and Portikus Frankfurt, which brought a renewed interest in his work. De Hallen Haarlem recently acquired five of Auder’s film works: Chronicles (Morocco) (1971-72), Polaroid Cocaine (1993), Endless Column (2011), Untitled (I Was Looking Back To See If You Were Looking Back At Me To See Me Looking Back At You) (2012) and The Town (1999).

Christian Friedrich
With Christian Friedrich’s (1977, DE) first solo exhibition, De Hallen Haarlem offers the stage to a high-profile young talent. Friedrich studied theology and philology before going to art school and is difficult to pin down to one specific artistic method. He produces sculpture, staged video work and monologues, which are usually part of an architectural intervention in the exhibition space. A striking aspect of Friedrich's practice is the big contrast between individual works: in the series Types, for example, he refers explicitly to the sleek sculptures of the Minimalists, while a video installation such as The Stone That The Builder Rejected evokes a baroque world that is pushing the limits of kitsch.

A common thread in Friedrich's art is the subjugation of the human body. He regularly presents the body as an object of desire; at the same time it is the use of sadomasochist symbolic power games that can lead to a sublime experience.

For the video work The Stone That The Builder Rejected, for example, the artist had to submit to the will of an unknown person. He invited a boy from a personal advertisement in his studio, where this boy encountered a theatrical setting with the artist himself in the centre. The innocent, angelic visitor was subsequently free to respond to this absurd encounter. In this work Friedrich is employing a perverse game of power relations (between artist and muse, between artist and audience, between people in general). This unrehearsed meeting between two strangers is a good example of how the artist is trying, within a predetermined framework, to leave as much as possible to chance.

In another work, created especially for the exhibition, Friedrich developed an algorithm to 'edit' information on the basis of the stuttering pattern of a severe stutterer. The work has an unethical tinge to it, while at the same producing unexpected beauty.