German Nicolas Humbert (1958) and Werner Penzel (1950) founded together the film production company Ciné
Nomad in 1987. Films together: Step across the Border (1990) and Middle of the Moment (1995). Videoinstallation, Germany 1999. Nicolas Humbert & Werner Penzel 18.2. to 2.4.2000 Kontti. Curated by: Perttu Rastas. In co-opertion with the Goethe Institut.
Nicolas Humbert has studied painting and filmmaking and has worked since as a freelance writer and film director.
Films: Wolfsgrub (1986), Vagabonding Images (1998) in collaboration with Simone Fürbringer.
Werner Penzel played music before he began to study at film school. He has worked with a Brazilian theatre
company and travelled through South America, North Africa, India and Japan. Films: Vagabunden Karawane (1980)
and Adios Al Odio (1986).
This year, the American poet Robert Lax - one of the last grand old men of the generation of classical modern
poets - celebrates his 84th birthday. His name is associated with the group of New York artists that included the
Minimal painter Ad Reinhardt and the religious philosopher Thomas Merton, a group that exerted a strong
influence on the poets of the beat generation centred around Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
At the beginning of the 1960s, after leading a nomadic life for decades, moving between America and Europe,
working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, as a film critic in New York and as a clown in an Italian itinerant circus,
Robert Lax found the place where he belongs - on the Greek island of Patmos. He has lived there for more than
25 years now, withdrawn, but at the same time conducting a lively exchange with the world. In his poetry, Robert
Lax pursues a maximum compression of language - to the point where only individual words and syllables remain
which represent the essence of language. His artistic concept of reduction, in which a pause becomes as important
as the things said, makes Lax a kindred spirit of the American composer John Cage. It is no coincidence,
therefore, that they shared a strong affinity to Oriental art and philosophy.
The video installation Three Windows is the outcome of a longstanding friendship and collaboration between the
two filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel and the poet Robert Lax. Following the films Step across the
Border and Middle of the Moment, which were made for the cinema, Three Windows represents the two artists' first
video project, a work that combines the narrative forms of film with the characteristics of a spatial installation.
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