Tea is part of an ongoing series of analogue film portraits. Art collector Erika Hoffmann-Koenige (Sammlung Hoffmann) is recorded brewing tea and drinking it. Filmed in 35mm b/w, over two days, actions are repeated-one day blends into the next, process becomes ritual. In Robert Fenz’s work the image always holds center stage. His films, almost always shot in black-and-white 16 or 35mm, can be seen as an elegy for a kind of imagemaking that is in the process of disappearing. They are personal and poetic portraits of people and places. The sublime beauty of his peripatetic filmmaking comprises aspects of jazz improvisation, still photography, landscape films, as well as documentary and ethnographic cinema.
Robert Fenz, born in 1969 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is an artist working with analogue film and photography, currently based in Berlin. His films were featured in the Whitney Biennials of 2002 and 2008 and have been the subject of solo screenings at New York‘s Museum of Modern Art; the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain; the Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Cinema Arsenal, Berlin; Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge; the Rotterdam and Locarno International Film Festivals; and worldwide at many other recognized venues. He has been the recipient of several prestigious grants and awards, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1999); a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004); and a LEF Foundation Production Grant (2008). In 2006 he was an artist in residence of the DAAD in Berlin. His first solo gallery exhibition, The Sole of the Foot, was presented in 2011 at the DAAD Gallery, Berlin.
35mm, b/w, silent, loop, 9 minutes.
