Marcel Odenbach
b. 1953
Since the mid-1970s, Marcel Odenbach has produced an extensive body of tapes, performances, drawings and installations, and has gained recognition as one of Germany's most important artists working in video. His works engage in a provocative discourse on the construction of self in relation to historical and cultural representation. For Odenbach, identity is defined in the elusive realm of vision Ñ seeing and being seen. Positioning himself, and thus the spectator, in the role of observer, witness, or voyeur, he undertakes a highly charged inquiry into subjectivity within the context of personal and cultural memory, individual and collective history, past and present. Probing the construction of the self in relation to the psychological and the cultural, from male identity and sexuality to the trauma of German history, Odenbach creates a symbolic theater of memory that includes autobiographical references and appropriated cinematic, archival and mass media images. In many of his tapes, he employs a signature formal strategy as a metaphorical construct, masking or dividing the screen into horizontal or vertical panels, a distancing device that at once limits and expands the field…
Films