Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier, 1985 & 1982
Art
Jury report
The viewer enters the physical space of artist duo Rico Scagliola & Michael Meier’s installation Characters with Unknown Power through a rather narrow passageway. At its centre, a video projection takes up the wall and shows images of children in traditional or popular dress at two folk festivals. Unusually passive, these children wait to either fulfil or forget their chosen or imposed roles. The artists deftly interweave and play with the processes of documentation and staging in their installation of melancholic images, emphasised by music from the Romantic period and the lyrics of a punk song emblazoned across one wall, the latter appearing both out of place and out of time. Itself almost over-staged, the installation manages to show the fragile mechanisms of projection and representation at play in an unwitting section of society.