Over the course of a year, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart showed a monthly rotation of selected films and videos by international artists, both young and established, who work in documentary, experimental, essayistic or narrative form.
Under the title "Silent" Cinema, the museum dedicated a first series to films and videos that consciously concentrate on their images and exclude sound as a possibility. For although art is always determined by technologies of its time, it sometimes intentionally does not employ them or falls back on older modes of production and screening conventions. To manage without language also seems to make films and videos universally comprehensible. The quotation marks in the title indicate that even cinema without sound was often not silent, but accompanied by live music.
What can happen in contemporary time-based art when sound accompaniment is dispensed with? When it is silent around you and the images alone have an effect, touch and challenge you? "Silent" Cinema explores these questions and shows works in which astonishment, moments of other intimacy or counter-worlds emerge from silence.