Charim

The episodic film Murderkino (2019–) is a work in progress by American artist Scott Clifford Evans (Layton, Utah, 1979). The project includes the media of film, installation, photography, and performance, as well as a remarkable production technique: it is based on literally no budget and the colossal commitment of numerous artists who bring together talent, know-how, and passion to create the ultimate brute-comic saturnalia. This grotesque trash-horror-splatter revue tells a Viennese morality of sin, excess and murder. Evans’ direction uses everything possible from professional method-acting to light gymnastics, from at least four camerapersons to Austria’s coolest musician and composer, from memorable set design by an artist’s hand to props from teenage dormitories and the Viennese treasury to shrill costumes, hair-raising wigs, body painting and insane masks. Scott Clifford Evans plays with the horror film genre in direction, screenplay and cinematography. Murderkino deals with the evolution of artistic trash: film as a Gesamtkunstwerk par grotesque. In addition, the artist negotiates the sensitivity of camp, as Susan Sontag explained it in her programmatic essay ‘Notes on Camp’ in 1964. Through stylization, staging and secret codes, an attitude emerges that gives aesthetic form to our existence. ‘Camp is the consistent aesthetic experience of the world. It represents the victory of style over content, of the aesthetic over the moral, of irony over tragedy.’

Scott Clifford Evans (b.1979) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and performer from Salt Lake City, Utah, USA who currently lives and works in Vienna. His ongoing, episodic, art-trash-horror installation/film project, Murderkino (2019–) was the basis of Evans‘ exhibition „Murderkino“ at Galerie Charim, Vienna, curated by Brigitte Huck in the frame of the curated_by gallery festival in 2020. The first four episodes of Murderkino were also previewed at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin in 2020. Evans is currently filming his first feature-length film, The Demoniacs, to be released in 2022. His video 20 out of 19,733 Killing Fields (2017) is a documentation of twenty “killing fields” in Cambodia left by the Khmer Rouge regime. Evans‘ video Manipulating Currency (2016) premiered at the One Work Gallery in Vienna and has shown in exhibitions in London, Berlin, Graz, and Ukraine. In 2019, Evans participated as script consultant and actor in a collaboration of Liam Gillick and Gelatin for the Kunsthalle Wien exhibition/film Stinking Dawn. He also starred in Christian Kosmas Mayer’s video Memory Palace (2016) and performed with Gelatin in Karaoke Machine at the 2016 Donaufestival in Krems, Austria. In addition, he assists Anna Jermolaewa on many of her video and documentary projects, including: The Pit (2019), Ecce Multitudo (2017), Political Extras (2015), and LENINOPAD (2015). Evans co-taught a workshop on mudwrestling as art performance, Schlammgrübe 3000, at Impulstanz in Vienna in 2019 and is a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Charim Galerie Wien was founded 1998 by Miryam Charim. Since the beginning Miryam Charim puts the focus of her gallery program on well known international artist in exchange with young emerging artist. The gallery represents participants of documenta and other various high profiled art events. Namely: Dorit Margreiter, Olga Neuwirth, Andreij Monastyrskij, Lisl Ponger, Dorothee Golz and Milica Tomic. The gallery also puts a spotlight on young emerging artists, showing works of them at various art fairs, establishing contacts to curators and collections, and introducing them to the wider art public. Artists from a younger generation are Markus Krottendorfer, Robert Muntean, Daniel Pitin, Alfons Pressnitz, Roberta Lima and Tamuna Sirbiladze. Along with solo shows the gallery also focuses on thematic group shows dealing with issues of society, which are located within the political discourse of our time.