Windowscreen

«Windowscreen» takes us on a virtual journey from window to window around the earth during the coronavirus pandemic. Shown are twelve different views, which are each ‘opened’ by the hands of the artist and ‘closed’ again after a minute, using familiar touchscreen gestures. The video begins with a scene of Parisian rooftops which was recorded by the artist during a residency when physical movement was drastically restricted by the COVID-19 lockdown. Following are recordings of a deserted street in Afghanistan, a calm backyard in India, a view over empty Hanoi, and others. The videos were created by photographers who had been commissioned by Timo Ullmann to record the view out of their windows. The everyday settings seem strangely surreal and subtly document the global state of emergency. The artist’s hands act as narrator, whose gestures remind of opening and closing physical windows while simultaneously referring to the digital materiality of the video.