Eva Schlegel is an Austrian artist and was professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (1997-2006). In 2011 she curated the Austrian pavilion for the 54th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. As part of Photobiennale 2014 Eva Schlegel presents her new project ‘No Man’s Heaven’, combining video and photography.
In the magical world created by Eva Schlegel men and women are able to fly. Images of people soaring through the air with the greatest of ease are projected on spinning rotor blades. The artist conducted shoots with professional bodyfliers at a Zurich aerodynamics complex. The video sequence is supplemented by quotes from Russian, European and American astronauts, describing their impressions of weightlessness (fragment from the memoirs of G. Beregovoy recorded in Morse code):
“You suddenly start to recognize you are in deep space, that planets are just that, they´re planets and you´re not connected to anything anymore. You´re floating through this deep black void.” Edgar Mitchell
“There is an unusual lightness in your body and your trained muscles seemed to have no purpose. Your inner ear-the organ responsible for providing you with a sense of position – becomes like a compass whose pointer has suddenly lost the Earth´s poles.” Georgi Beregovoy
“It wash´t just me falling, but everything was falling, which gave (me) even a more unsettling feeling… So, it was like you had to overcome 40 years of whatever life experiences that (you) don´t let go when everything falls. It was a very strong, almost overwhelming sensation that you had to control… The disorientation is pa-ralyzing. There is no up, no down, no side. There is only three-dimensional space.” Jerry Linenger
The title of another video, ‘Sky Kissing’, refers to Jimi Hendrix’s song ‘Purple Haze’, which includes the line: ‘’Scuse me while I kiss the sky’.
A photographic series complementing the video installation is comprised of actual research into lenticular clouds: experienced pilots prefer to fly round these motionless accumulations to avoid entering a high turbulence zone. Due to their unusual form the clouds are often mistaken for UFOs. The artist selected real archive photographs of lenticular clouds for her project and added photographs taken from a sputnik. (All images are taken in nature without any computer enhancement).
