Gernot Wieland’s exhibition You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts (7 Sep – 3 Nov 2024, Künstler:innenhaus Bremen) immerses us in a disquieting space – in more ways than one. First, there is his intervention in the architecture: a wall, installed slantwise in the room, transforms the white cube into a windowless, narrowing corridor. The back wall, usually so present when entering, is reduced to a mere niche: only a few centimetres wide, with no way out other than to turn around and leave the way you came in. The inserted wall reveals itself as a makeshift, with the outlines of individual, white-painted cardboard boxes creating an uneven pattern. Small holes in its surface allow glimpses of artworks by Carla Åhlander, Jeroen Jacobs and Maxwell Stephens on the other side. These are works, says Wieland, that have “haunted” his thoughts for a long time. Looking through these small openings feels surreptitious, as if you’re not supposed to see what is there. The artworks reappear in various forms – as images, quotations, allusions – woven into his video work You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts. Another source of inspiration, an excerpt from A Record (2006) by Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, is written in pencil on one of the walls of the exhibition space.

The video itself screens at the front of the room, vis-à-vis the niche. And it is here that Wieland conjures up a second oppressive space – one that unfolds within. As we watch the 15-minute film, a sense of unease gradually sets in.

Gernot Wieland "You do not leave traces of your acts, just of your presence" (2024), Exhibition view KH Künslter:innenhaus Bremen 2024. Photo: Fredd Dott

You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts is Wieland’s latest work to explore the personal and collective traumas of his Austrian background. He does this in a way that is unmistakably his own: melancholic music, a narrator voice tinged with an Austrian accent, the distinctive hues of Super 8 film sequences and a collage-like layering of different materials. The story itself meanders – it is sometimes poetic, sometimes absurd. It often makes you smile, laugh in places, only to leave you reeling, gripped by a deep apprehension, moments later. Emotions ebb and flow, leaving you with a lingering sense of foreboding. Are the human abysses that Wieland describes in his cinematic narratives really so deep? Are his stories true, exaggerated or completely invented? One hopes for the latter.

The protagonists in You do not leave traces… – the first-person narrator, Maria, Daniel, and Jackpot – gradually take shape as their shared past unfolds. Their memories weave through moments of togetherness, first stirrings of desire, shame and violence, speechlessness and the longing to overcome it. As the film draws to a close, the narrative sharpens into a chilling realisation: “Any attempt to tell a story means to answer the question: How did it come to this?” After all, by the end, two of the four are dead – killed in different ways by the society around them. Maria, a victim of femicide. Daniel, lost to drugs that were never meant to take his life, only his memories of a violent father. The third, Jackpot, loses his mind, “hanging naked from a fence”.

A distinctive aesthetic runs through the artist’s work: drawings, clay figures and handwritten notes are combined with photographs and Super 8 footage, creating a visual layer that often forms an absurd yet compelling connection with the spoken text.

Born in 1968 in Horn, Austria, and based in Berlin for the past 30 years, Wieland’s practice is rooted in a deep-seated need: even as a child, he once said in an interview, he wanted to see what was hidden beyond the surface. At that time too, he recalled in a conversation with the author, he sensed a certain anger in adults and was always eager to know where it came from. But instead of giving him answers, the adults met him with silence. This silent repression, says Wieland, had a profound effect on his childhood. “Why talk, we have the perfect culture of silence” observes Jackpot during a dreamed therapy session, after which he and his physically and emotionally wounded friends fall off their chairs with laughter. The idea of a joint therapy session eventually involving the whole country is both comical and serious – utopian, especially in these times. But how wonderful it would be if our society could muster the will to speak together just once... What began as a childhood curiosity has developed into a body of work that is deeply connected to his Austrian roots – a country marked by intergenerational trauma, the silence of which has only gradually been broken in recent decades. Wieland’s oeuvre analyses social norms, repressive structures and ingrained mechanisms of violence and control. Despite – or perhaps because of – the gravity of the subject matter, his films are characterised by a humour that is at times desperate, at others defiant. Wieland’s humour has several different layers: on the one hand there are the oddly amusing drawings and clay figures, not to mention the images conjured up by his unique use of language (an “anaemic pottery class”!?). Often surreal moments arise from the divergence between text and image, or from the associative, erratic nature of the narrative – moments that can provoke loud laughter. And again and again there are absurd descriptions of everyday observations – or are they descriptions of absurd everyday events?

Wieland uses humour as a means of distancing and as a space for mourning, for processing the hardships of life. The accompanying melancholy that unites his works stems from a felt longing. For less anger, less violence, less speechlessness.

A compulsive sketcher as a child, Wieland discovers his own language through his drawings, a compensation for the silence imposed on children (a process he details in his 2021 work Bird in Italian is Uccello). As the artist notes in You do not leave traces… “Having a conversation in my childhood is like reading a book in which almost all the words have been crossed out, and only individual words wander around on the pages, and you have to read a whole life out of it.”

Wieland’s childhood drawings have stood the test of time and, decades later, found their way into his current work. Now complemented by new sketches and diagrams, they reflect his continuing efforts to make sense of experiences and memories, to piece them together into a meaningful narrative – to give answers to his younger self, even all these years later.

Certain images appear again and again in Wieland’s artistic responses to unanswered questions. There is, for example, the sky. You do not leave traces… begins with Jackpot’s perspective. Exhilarated by a sudden insight into certain connections in his life, he gives his next-door neighbour a hug. A fence stands between them, separating Jackpot from this neighbour – a person who is as conformed to society’s rigid norms as his meticulously trimmed lawn. It is from this fence that Jackpot ends up hanging upside down, peering up at the “neoclassical sky”. In the video work Turtleneck Phantasies (2022), the first-person narrator recounts an episode from his childhood: left alone by his grandfather, he sits on a chair for hours as if tied to it. Eyes fixed on the heavens, he waits for things to lose their physical presence. We also meet a man who, during the Second World War, built a wall around his house to shut out the world – except for the sky. Elsewhere, the narrator reveals that looking at the sky from his bed eases the emotional pain of his existence: “As long as I stay in it, I am free from all the situations that I carry in my body as a memory (…).”

While Wieland’s characters often find themselves trapped in seemingly inescapable, Kafkaesque situations, the sky becomes their mental escape hatch. It is, to them, an Elsewhere: a place of freedom where these “prisoners” can let their imaginations soar.

Linked to the idea of the sky as a refuge is yet another motif, another way out of unbearable circumstances: the recurring image of bodilessness or the invisible body. Jackpot, tormented by the question “Why am I so unhappy, why are we all?”, looks forward to a life without a body. In Thievery and Songs (2016) the narrator must first leave his body and enter a new world in order to understand his own. In Turtleneck Phantasies, the narrator recalls his childhood self plastering his body with tattoos. He wants to become invisible, partly to escape the fear instilled in him by Catholicism. Another episode focuses on an outsider, a poet whose verses resonate with the narrator’s younger self. Despite his poetic talent, most adults despise the man for his difference. “How do you make your body invisible when you are trapped in such structures?”, asks the narrator. The poet chooses death by freezing.

The desire to disappear is also linked to the motif of form, itself a reference to a repressive society. This, in turn, is linked to moments of violence and indifference. The form that must be preserved appears as a compulsion to conform, as imitation and repetition, to which society has committed itself and which it calls “home” (Bird in Italian is Uccello). Ink in Milk shows a different scenario. Here, the narrator’s uncle begins to form crystals with his body in order to alleviate his nephew’s sadness. Gradually, all the villagers begin to form crystals with their bodies, causing a collapse of the existing order. A period of joyful disorder sets in. Nature, usually dominated by humans (for example, the neighbour who mows his lawn every day), reclaims its space. It ends with the death of the uncle and a return to familiar form: “No crystals, no longings anymore”. While the crystal forms here symbolise the power of the subject to create their own narrative and break free from social conventions, the motif of form in You do not leave traces… is primarily one of violence: Daniel is beaten daily by his father “to make him look like a shape”. Maria is so badly abused by her husband that she succumbs to her injuries.

Indifference, another aspect, surfaces frequently in the context of violence. Referring to Maria’s death, Jackpot says: “Everyone must have heard it, everyone.” The narrator continues: “He looks for prey like a wild animal, but all he sees are closed doors.” This emotional coldness is also explored in Bird in Italian is Uccello. There is a painting in the story of a child flying too close to the sun and falling, burning, into the water – likely a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” No one around seems to care: “No one is capable of developing a feeling,” says the narrator, drawing attention to a “sheep’s ass” at the centre of the painting and the bored shepherd beside it. “This Flemish painter described my upbringing and my country in one single painting.” 

Another recurring theme in Wieland’s work is that of space. In his films, space is often something that society confines you to, with little chance of escape. There is, for example, the fear-filled space created by the Catholic faith: the inevitable hell, or predestined paths that cannot be avoided. But even in this world, society dictates certain spaces “which carry the hidden structures of the society in them and do not allow one to enter another room.” In Bird in Italian is Uccello the (inaccessible) landscape represents a place free from society and its constraints: “this outside is like a room I cannot enter”. In contrast to these spaces of coercion and conformity, You do not leave traces… presents one of freedom: the teenage Daniel and the desire the narrator feels for him create a space that makes existence possible.

Finally, there is the space that Wieland creates for us, the viewers of his films. It is a space filled with dismay at human nature, but also brimming with humour. This humour makes everything accessible to us, even things that are deeply wrong. It allows us to reflect on the hurt, the unspoken, the repressed and, most importantly, to talk about it. Circling back to the physical space of his exhibition at Künstler:innenhaus Bremen, one could say that Wieland’s work carries a message at its core: There’s no way back other than the path we’ve taken to get here. But depending on how we think and talk about this journey, we can change the path ahead. And what better way to do that than with a smile.

Ferial Nadja Karrasch  is a freelance writer based in Berlin.

This contribution is part of Gernot Wieland: You do not leave traces of your presence, just of your acts