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OLAF STÜBER (*1962) lives and works in Berlin. He is
a curator for contemporary art with a focus on time-based media. The Galerie Olaf Stüber (2001–2011) focused on the moving image as
early as 2003 and was at the time one of few galleries that helped establish
artist film and video art on the German art market. In 2008 he founded Videoart
at Midnight together with Ivo Wessel and has been the editor of Videoart
at Midnight Edition since 2012. Olaf Stüber lectures internationally on
artist film and video art in the context of the art market, curates programs
and exhibitions for institutions, fairs and festivals, is a consultant for
institutional and private collections, and has been a member of numerous
juries.
I spent most of my free time as a child and later as a teenager in a swimming pool. Not in a private pool but not in a public one, either. It was a club pool. A sheltered world. In swimwear we were all the same (well, more or less), whether we were the offspring of labourers, white-collar workers or children from well-off families. Although there were not many of the latter—they were probably busy boring themselves in the swimming pools of their parents’ villas. There were no children with migratory backgrounds. Save for the owner of the Italian ice cream parlour’s daughter. She was lovely. What mattered was your performance in the pool: either you were a good swimmer, maybe a good water polo player, or you weren’t. Many of our “firsts” happened in this pool: the first kiss, the first experience of drunkenness after winning a tournament, the first cigarette, the first shared nude shower.
Outside, the world kept spinning. Next door, for example, behind the boiler house, separated by a fence and barbed wire, was the municipal outdoor pool. There, families of all nationalities crowded together on the grass beside the snack bar and in the water. It was louder, more turbulent and more aggressive. The police did not have to come in those days, but often it was a close-run thing. The barracks of the “guest workers” were located on the way to the swimming club. You never saw them. Only their laundry, which was always hanging outside the windows in summer. They remained strangers.
Many years have passed, many experiences and encounters have broadened my horizons, much has been learned. The world has changed since then. However, there is much that stays strange, and despite my curiosity, many things still remain on the “other side of the fence”. My love of swimming pools has stayed with me. And so I have put together a programme lining up pool after pool into a river that doesn’t take me back to where I came from, but carries me forward.
Monira Al Qadiri, Diver Welt, die durch den Zusammenprall von , 2018, video, 4:00 min, film still. Courtesy: Monira Al Qadiri
In Monira A Qadiri’s film Diver, synchronised swimmers glide weightlessly and elegantly through a swimming pool or perhaps open water, displaying their delightfully varied choreographies like patterns in a kaleidoscope. The water is dark blue, almost as black as oil, and a diffuse, cold light source makes the swimmers’ bathing suits shimmer in iridescent colours reminiscent of gasoline streaks on water surfaces. The soundtrack comprises a male voice singing in Arabic. A strangely harsh contrast, if you don’t know the story behind it. It is a recording from the 60s of the fijiri singer from a pearl diving boat. Before Kuwait’s independence and before the country became the world’s largest oil exporter, pearls were serious business. Al Qadiri’s grandfather still worked as this type of singer. His songs were to keep the crew happy throughout their long trips. Diver is a very personal film, building a bridge between the artist and the fairytale-like family stories from her childhood of an ancient civilisation before the oil and the contemporary Arab world—a world which has been thrown into huge social turmoil by the clash of dizzying prosperity and globalisation on the one hand and ancient traditions and conservative religious influences on the other.
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Corinna Schnitt, Living a beautiful life, 2003, 4:3 mini DV video, 13:00 min, film still. Courtesy: Corinna Schnitt, Phillip von Rosen Galerie
Corinna Schnitt’s work Living a beautiful life could also be entitled “Boredom by your pool”. Because compared to the colourful activity in a public swimming pool, the single-family pool is either decadent or boring, and generally reserved for a small, mostly white upper class. Boredom and the white upper class are also the themes of Schnitt’s film: A good-looking couple drape themselves separately around a villa above Los Angeles: in the classy designer kitchen, in the walk-in wardrobe, or beside the swimming pool with a view of city. They tell us how wonderful their life is, how successful they are, how wealthy, how fit and how well their children have turned out. The longer you listen to them, the stranger the scene becomes. Their stories of bliss become more and more dull, lonely and empty. But the frightening thing is: Corinna Schnitt has put the fancies and future hopes of the youth of Los Angeles into the mouths of the two protagonists. Perhaps they have been cut and reassembled, but they reflect the fiction of a perfect, ideal world that is as unrealistic as the prologue scene, taken from one of those emblematic East German fairy tale films (DEFA) in which naked children play with baby animals in the clearing of a forest.
The gardens of the luxurious private villas in the Hamptons, the summer retreat of New York’s high society, are equally exclusive. In the two-channel installation Forever (configuratie) by Julika Rudelius, five obviously privileged, well-dressed ladies around sixty or older, pose alternately beside their lonely, quietly rippling pools on deck chairs or on the diving board. They stroll through the garden and shoot self-portraits with a Polaroid and self-timer. They muse on the question of their beauty and the happiness associated with it—despite their insistence that inner beauty matters most, their conversation invariably revolves around outward appearance. They talk about the importance of being beautiful, not so much for oneself, but for the sake of professional and social success. They claim to feel good and to be aware of their attractiveness and, in contrast to many others, they have not had surgical operations to remain beautiful. They talk of the time they devote to preserving their beauty—and implicitly of the fear, that their beauty and the associated self-esteem are merely transient. When the women thoughtfully gaze at their Polaroid selfies, they probably see themselves as they wish to be seen. They see the illusion they have created for themselves: forever young, forever attractive.
Hanna Arvela, Asylum, 2016, video, 1:28 min, film still.
Courtesy: Hanna Arvela, AV-Arkki
In Hanna Arvela’s Asylum, two ladies paddle up and down their respective lanes in an indoor pool, supported by swim rings, while talking about the dating app Tinder. One of them has just set up a profile to get to know men. She says that she has received plenty of matches, but that many of them are foreigners—but that’s of no concern, since one needn’t respond to them. If a Tinder user likes a person, he swipes the image to the right, if not, then to the left. If both users have swiped their pictures to the right, a match is made, and they may communicate via chat.
While the two ladies are working their way down the pool, they swim around human bodies floating in the water, pushing them aside as they go. How these floaters got into the pool and why, remains unanswered. But they seem to be taken for granted, perhaps like those that drowned in the Mediterranean, who were looking for asylum and made to vanish as quickly as they appeared by switching the TV channel, just like the “foreigners” on Tinder are made to disappear by swiping left. Everything considered, one wouldn’t really want to bother oneself with all that.
Rä di Martino, Controfigura (Stand In), 2017, video, 76:00 min, film still. Courtesy: Rä di Martino
The pools of Marrakech are given their own programme. A countless number of pools have been built in and around the desert city in recent years to keep international jet setters happy and to insulate them from the coarse Moroccan reality behind high walls. In Controfigura (Stand In) Rä di Martino tells us about the making-of a remake, the process of making a film in which another film is re-enacted or translated. It is about the film drama The Swimmer from 1968, based on the short story of the same name (1964) by John Cheever. In this, the protagonist in his swimming trunks, Ned Merril, played by Burt Lancaster, decides to swim home by crossing all the pools that line up like a river along the way back to his family, his wife, his two daughters and his perfect life. During which he meets friends and acquaintances from the past, whose conversations sketch a picture of his past and his personality.
Rä di Martino’s Ned, played by an Italian actor (Filippo Timi), is supposed to be swimming through the pools of Marrakech on his way home. Most of the time, however, we see his double (Corrado Sassi). A small film team joins him on the search for suitable pools, rehearsing the scenes to work out the camera angles in which the main actor will later play his role. Repeatedly these scenes are cut with the Italian leading actors or with Moroccan actors in between. The fiction of the actual film flashes up. Again we see the double, as he makes his way to the next pool under the blazing sun, through barren desert landscapes, along the dusty streets of the city, along the rough wall of the medina; surreal, barefoot, dressed only in swimming trunks, vulnerable.
It is a film within a film and one about filmmaking, about encounters between crew, foreigners and locals. Again and again, the question arises of the real, the absurd and the remake, as well as the role of the actor.
The Paris Commune was a revolutionary Parisian city council formed spontaneously in the spring of 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War. With the help of the National Guard and the workers, it made an attempt to run Paris according to socialist ideals, against the will of the central conservative government. France was to be transformed into a federation of sovereign communes, popular armament was to be introduced, equal rights for women were to be enforced, and further political and social regulations were to be made in the interests of the proletariat, which was living in abject poverty. The Paris Commune is considered the prime example of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat.
After a few weeks however, government troops supported by Chancellor Bismarck and tolerated by the German besieging troops of Paris managed to crush the Communards in a number of bloody battles and put an end to the experiment. It was in the interest of both the German and French governments to eradicate this looming threat of democracy with members of the working class in France as quickly as possible. Alice Creischer’s Für Camille B. recalls the Parisian Communards who, with the help of the Germans, were shot by their thousands or sent into exile to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Creischer’s own children reenact the shooting scenes in mime—repeatedly, playfully, innocently, silently. They are chained together and wear fragments of clothes and uniforms reminiscent of those of the Parisian revolutionaries. In between beachgoers, they sink into the sand of a fake South Sea paradise of “Tropical Islands, Europe’s largest tropical vacation world”. The scenes sometimes run forwards, sometimes backwards. The majority of the bathing visitors pay no attention to the shootings. Only a few children and some curious individuals throw furtive looks. Most of them do not notice anything or look away and continue to enjoy the atmosphere of their paradise.
And so we could steadily gather a little insight, as we swim from pool to pool.
Swimming to Insights
by Olaf StüberI spent most of my free time as a child and later as a teenager in a swimming pool. Not in a private pool but not in a public one, either. It was a club pool. A sheltered world. In swimwear we were all the same (well, more or less), whether we were the offspring of labourers, white-collar workers or children from well-off families. Although there were not many of the latter—they were probably busy boring themselves in the swimming pools of their parents’ villas. There were no children with migratory backgrounds. Save for the owner of the Italian ice cream parlour’s daughter. She was lovely. What mattered was your performance in the pool: either you were a good swimmer, maybe a good water polo player, or you weren’t. Many of our “firsts” happened in this pool: the first kiss, the first experience of drunkenness after winning a tournament, the first cigarette, the first shared nude shower.
Outside, the world kept spinning. Next door, for example, behind the boiler house, separated by a fence and barbed wire, was the municipal outdoor pool. There, families of all nationalities crowded together on the grass beside the snack bar and in the water. It was louder, more turbulent and more aggressive. The police did not have to come in those days, but often it was a close-run thing. The barracks of the “guest workers” were located on the way to the swimming club. You never saw them. Only their laundry, which was always hanging outside the windows in summer. They remained strangers.
Many years have passed, many experiences and encounters have broadened my horizons, much has been learned. The world has changed since then. However, there is much that stays strange, and despite my curiosity, many things still remain on the “other side of the fence”. My love of swimming pools has stayed with me. And so I have put together a programme lining up pool after pool into a river that doesn’t take me back to where I came from, but carries me forward.

In Monira A Qadiri’s film Diver, synchronised swimmers glide weightlessly and elegantly through a swimming pool or perhaps open water, displaying their delightfully varied choreographies like patterns in a kaleidoscope. The water is dark blue, almost as black as oil, and a diffuse, cold light source makes the swimmers’ bathing suits shimmer in iridescent colours reminiscent of gasoline streaks on water surfaces. The soundtrack comprises a male voice singing in Arabic. A strangely harsh contrast, if you don’t know the story behind it. It is a recording from the 60s of the fijiri singer from a pearl diving boat. Before Kuwait’s independence and before the country became the world’s largest oil exporter, pearls were serious business. Al Qadiri’s grandfather still worked as this type of singer. His songs were to keep the crew happy throughout their long trips. Diver is a very personal film, building a bridge between the artist and the fairytale-like family stories from her childhood of an ancient civilisation before the oil and the contemporary Arab world—a world which has been thrown into huge social turmoil by the clash of dizzying prosperity and globalisation on the one hand and ancient traditions and conservative religious influences on the other.

Corinna Schnitt, Living a beautiful life, 2003, 4:3 mini DV video, 13:00 min, film still. Courtesy: Corinna Schnitt, Phillip von Rosen Galerie
Corinna Schnitt’s work Living a beautiful life could also be entitled “Boredom by your pool”. Because compared to the colourful activity in a public swimming pool, the single-family pool is either decadent or boring, and generally reserved for a small, mostly white upper class. Boredom and the white upper class are also the themes of Schnitt’s film: A good-looking couple drape themselves separately around a villa above Los Angeles: in the classy designer kitchen, in the walk-in wardrobe, or beside the swimming pool with a view of city. They tell us how wonderful their life is, how successful they are, how wealthy, how fit and how well their children have turned out. The longer you listen to them, the stranger the scene becomes. Their stories of bliss become more and more dull, lonely and empty. But the frightening thing is: Corinna Schnitt has put the fancies and future hopes of the youth of Los Angeles into the mouths of the two protagonists. Perhaps they have been cut and reassembled, but they reflect the fiction of a perfect, ideal world that is as unrealistic as the prologue scene, taken from one of those emblematic East German fairy tale films (DEFA) in which naked children play with baby animals in the clearing of a forest.
The gardens of the luxurious private villas in the Hamptons, the summer retreat of New York’s high society, are equally exclusive. In the two-channel installation Forever (configuratie) by Julika Rudelius, five obviously privileged, well-dressed ladies around sixty or older, pose alternately beside their lonely, quietly rippling pools on deck chairs or on the diving board. They stroll through the garden and shoot self-portraits with a Polaroid and self-timer. They muse on the question of their beauty and the happiness associated with it—despite their insistence that inner beauty matters most, their conversation invariably revolves around outward appearance. They talk about the importance of being beautiful, not so much for oneself, but for the sake of professional and social success. They claim to feel good and to be aware of their attractiveness and, in contrast to many others, they have not had surgical operations to remain beautiful. They talk of the time they devote to preserving their beauty—and implicitly of the fear, that their beauty and the associated self-esteem are merely transient. When the women thoughtfully gaze at their Polaroid selfies, they probably see themselves as they wish to be seen. They see the illusion they have created for themselves: forever young, forever attractive.

In Hanna Arvela’s Asylum, two ladies paddle up and down their respective lanes in an indoor pool, supported by swim rings, while talking about the dating app Tinder. One of them has just set up a profile to get to know men. She says that she has received plenty of matches, but that many of them are foreigners—but that’s of no concern, since one needn’t respond to them. If a Tinder user likes a person, he swipes the image to the right, if not, then to the left. If both users have swiped their pictures to the right, a match is made, and they may communicate via chat.
While the two ladies are working their way down the pool, they swim around human bodies floating in the water, pushing them aside as they go. How these floaters got into the pool and why, remains unanswered. But they seem to be taken for granted, perhaps like those that drowned in the Mediterranean, who were looking for asylum and made to vanish as quickly as they appeared by switching the TV channel, just like the “foreigners” on Tinder are made to disappear by swiping left. Everything considered, one wouldn’t really want to bother oneself with all that.

The pools of Marrakech are given their own programme. A countless number of pools have been built in and around the desert city in recent years to keep international jet setters happy and to insulate them from the coarse Moroccan reality behind high walls. In Controfigura (Stand In) Rä di Martino tells us about the making-of a remake, the process of making a film in which another film is re-enacted or translated. It is about the film drama The Swimmer from 1968, based on the short story of the same name (1964) by John Cheever. In this, the protagonist in his swimming trunks, Ned Merril, played by Burt Lancaster, decides to swim home by crossing all the pools that line up like a river along the way back to his family, his wife, his two daughters and his perfect life. During which he meets friends and acquaintances from the past, whose conversations sketch a picture of his past and his personality.
Rä di Martino’s Ned, played by an Italian actor (Filippo Timi), is supposed to be swimming through the pools of Marrakech on his way home. Most of the time, however, we see his double (Corrado Sassi). A small film team joins him on the search for suitable pools, rehearsing the scenes to work out the camera angles in which the main actor will later play his role. Repeatedly these scenes are cut with the Italian leading actors or with Moroccan actors in between. The fiction of the actual film flashes up. Again we see the double, as he makes his way to the next pool under the blazing sun, through barren desert landscapes, along the dusty streets of the city, along the rough wall of the medina; surreal, barefoot, dressed only in swimming trunks, vulnerable.
It is a film within a film and one about filmmaking, about encounters between crew, foreigners and locals. Again and again, the question arises of the real, the absurd and the remake, as well as the role of the actor.
The Paris Commune was a revolutionary Parisian city council formed spontaneously in the spring of 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War. With the help of the National Guard and the workers, it made an attempt to run Paris according to socialist ideals, against the will of the central conservative government. France was to be transformed into a federation of sovereign communes, popular armament was to be introduced, equal rights for women were to be enforced, and further political and social regulations were to be made in the interests of the proletariat, which was living in abject poverty. The Paris Commune is considered the prime example of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat.
After a few weeks however, government troops supported by Chancellor Bismarck and tolerated by the German besieging troops of Paris managed to crush the Communards in a number of bloody battles and put an end to the experiment. It was in the interest of both the German and French governments to eradicate this looming threat of democracy with members of the working class in France as quickly as possible. Alice Creischer’s Für Camille B. recalls the Parisian Communards who, with the help of the Germans, were shot by their thousands or sent into exile to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Creischer’s own children reenact the shooting scenes in mime—repeatedly, playfully, innocently, silently. They are chained together and wear fragments of clothes and uniforms reminiscent of those of the Parisian revolutionaries. In between beachgoers, they sink into the sand of a fake South Sea paradise of “Tropical Islands, Europe’s largest tropical vacation world”. The scenes sometimes run forwards, sometimes backwards. The majority of the bathing visitors pay no attention to the shootings. Only a few children and some curious individuals throw furtive looks. Most of them do not notice anything or look away and continue to enjoy the atmosphere of their paradise.
And so we could steadily gather a little insight, as we swim from pool to pool.