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It is the expressive face of a young girl that captivates the viewer of the video installation Scream. In slow motion, Carola Schmidt shows the pulsation of a youthful face, whose facial expression oscillates between tremendous strength and innocent gentleness, between tension and relaxation, and between excitement and exhaustion. Like the tides, these emotional expressions occur like ebb and flow as surges in a sea of emotions that have become images, for which this video work serves as a vessel. The viewer takes part in the externalization of the intoxicated emotional states of the teenager presented in larger-than-life images as a human natural event, which repeatedly culminates in phonic eruptions, in screams as a form of powerful energetic discharge: Scream. However, these are ’visual screams’. Because with the theater music by Shaban (Hannes Gwisdek), which accompanies the image material, the artist withdraws the original sound. In this way, she decouples the auditory and visual channels and shifts the weight of the sensory modes that can be used for the reconstruction of reality in favor of seeing (video). This trick, like the stylistic alienation of the image material, which is based on painting in its appearance, creates a degree of abstraction and creates a pleasant distance. Paradoxically, the visible phenomenon and its narrative potential are created and deconstructed at the same time through the poetic presentation in the painterly style and in a reduced temporality. Carola Schmidt sensitively transforms the documentary video material she produced of a psychological portrait into a poetic study. The portrayed is the figure of a female fan of the band Tokio-Hotel in a concert situation. The starting point for the work is the type of fan as an individual. There is an exchange of monstrous energies with cathartic effects typical of these ecstatic states. Of course, well-known symptoms of ’fan culture’ are called up through your work: unfulfilled longings, the desire to be one with the crowd, the merging of the self in the collective, the positive feelings that are shown to the star as a projection surface and the associated desire to function as a a form of self-awareness through self-ingratiation.
