Isabell Spengler: Two Days at the Falls

Two Days at the Falls
Isabell Spengler, Germany, 2015
2 channel installation, 22 min. loop

In Isabell Spengler's installation we are presented with two panoramic video depictions of the iconic Niagara Falls - one that was created onsite and the other, filmed in a three-dimensional model, constructed by the artist in her Berlin studio having never visited the Falls. This second model is an embodiment of the artist's preconceived notions of the place - a distillation of ideas based on a multitude of images, films, texts and digital replicas depicting the famous site.
Alongside these fictional falls, we are confronted with the same 360-degree pan over the actual cataract and surrounding landscape, shot on location in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in March 2015 when the falls happened to be partially frozen. The adjacent screens play with concepts of anticipation, imagination, time and place.

Isabell Spengler's Two Days at the Falls explores the intersection between the real and the imagined, popular culture and private perception, the monumental and the ordinary against the backdrop of contemporary, "immersive" media technologies.

Created as part of the European Media Art Network Exchange with Australia and Canada 2014 & 2015, with the support of the Culture Program of the European Commission and the Goethe-Institut.

Isabell Spengler, born in 1972, is a Berlin-based filmmaker focusing primarily on the areas of film and performance. She studied with Valie Export and Heinz Eminghilz at the University of the Arts in Belin as well as with James Benning at the California Institute of the Arts. Since 2004 Isabell Spengler has been teaching at the Berlin University of the Arts. She has received numerous grants and awards for her work, which has been presented internationally, including at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Images Festival in Toronto and the Pleasure Dome in Toronto.