High Anxieties 1998
Installation view: The Inner State, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 2001.

Three channel video-projection installation
Sequence duration 3.14”
Synchronised looped playback
Exhibition format DVD 

High Anxieties and its twin piece High Achievers (commissioned by the Film and Video Umbrella, London) are based on a psychoanalytical concept, EST, which was prevalent in group therapy in the eighties. The analysant voluntarily takes the ‘hot-seat’ hoping to gain deeper insight into self-knowledge and self-perception through feedback from the group.

“Five girls are gathered around a big table. Intimidated and nervous, one of the group is facing her friends and being subjected to an endless litany of accusations. The other four performer, their expressions contemptuous, take turns at delivering their reproaches in rapid, aggressive staccato.... The viewer follows the action on three projections, whose abruptly shifting fade-ins and fade-outs seemingly accelerate the rhythm of the verbal assaults, and show the scene from constantly changing perspectives. The notion that part of the tale is projecting into the viewing space, a well as the constantly changing camera angles with their suggestion of subjective observation, make us believe that we are directly witnessing the dramatic scene. At second glance, it dawns on us what is actually so grotesque: the words and fears conveyed in acrid, coldly controlled tones are not those of pubescent girls. 

The place chosen for the final reckoning is not a school playground but a plain, apparently public room. We are viewing adult communication patterns, now placed in question and laid bare by being grafted onto the young protagonists. Only the victim, ensnared in resignation and helplessness, reacts to conflict in a way appropriate to her years. In its combination of choreography and improvisation, of feature-film and documentary element, the video work “High Anxieties” goes beyond an investigation of group dynamics, and raises connotations of the popular marketing of personal fears and traumas in the media of the present.”
(Excerpt from the catalogue Video Cult/ures, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 1999, text by Ellen Heider)

High Anxieties was exhibited at EAST International 1998 at the Norwich Gallery, Norwich, UK , Video cult/ures at the ZKM Museum for Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany,1999 The Inner State, Kunstmueum Liechtenstein, 2001 and 101 Gallery, Ottawa, Canada, 2004.