High Achievers  1998
Installation view: “SELECT” at the Camden Arts Centre, London 1998. 

Three channel video-projection installation and Single channel version 2001
Sequence duration 3.50”
Synchronised looped playback
Exhibition format DVD

​Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella for  “SELECT”, a touring exhibition in association with Arnolfini, Bristol and Camden Arts Centre, London. Funded by the Arts Council of England and London Film and Video Development Agency, with additional support from the Goethe-Institut, London

High Achievers and its twin piece High Anxieties is based on a psychoanalytical concept prevalent in group therapy in the 80’s called EST. The analysant voluntarily takes the hot seat with the aim to gain deeper insight into self-knowledge and self-perception through feedback from the group.

“High Achievers​ places us in a scenario of female teenage angst. It feature the classic girls trio, in which two is company and three becomes a crowd of competing voices, a struggle for individuality or identification with the group. Attacked from both sides by her two friends, the central character is simultaneously the victim and the secret heroine. The other girls try to assassinate her character and fill her with self-doubt but in so doing only hint at their intrigue in the mysterious ‘one nightstand ‘ or ‘boyfriend. The viewer, too, becomes simultaneously involved and implicated in the course of events, caught in between awaiting further graphic detail or joining the standpoint of the moralising guard.

High Achievers weaves between fact and fiction, between the fantasy of the cinema and the kind of ‘reality’ increasingly familiar from fly-on-the wall television documentary. The central character’s defence of her story and emotions likewise fluctuates between the believable and the imagined reality of teenage girls. The tension and conflict is built through words and not action, the cerebral rather than corporeal aspect of the piece is further underlined by the ghostly presence of an older girl positioned behind the central character and occasionally seen whispering into her ear.

The work of many contemporary video artists seizes on this tension between the real and the constructed. In Oechsler’s case, these creative ambiguities are manifested in the appearance of the work itself  (with its continual shifts of point-of-view and perspective) and also derive from the distinctive way in which it is made.”


(Extracts quoted from the catalogue SELECT, text by Josephine Lanyon)