Silke Schönfeld: You Can‘t Make This Up

Image: Silke Schönfeld, No More Butter Scenes, 2024, Videostill. Design: Ten Ten Team.

You Can‘t Make This Up is a fitting title for Silke Schönfeld’s solo exhibition at HMKV. Her films are political reflections that often take place in unexpected spatial and temporal contexts, seamlessly moving between documentary and fiction. As filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, the difference between objective documentary film and art is a matter of involvement: ‘As soon as you are interested, fiction is in play.’ And the fact that Schönfeld is interested becomes immediately clear when watching her films. They are about humanity – including our own.

Schönfeld‘s works interweave personal stories with historical and social contexts. For her, the appeal of the documentary form is that it allows her to reveal the general or common within the specific. A participant observer, she focuses on people, be they individuals or social groups. As she follows her protagonists, she documents memories, rituals, ideologies and processes of identity formation. Her films do not claim to be all-encompassing, but rather focus on subtle social phenomena and on structures shaped by communities.

The exhibition You Can’t Make This Up comprises five large-format video installations from the last five years, one of which is a new production that was created specifically for this occasion and is shown here for the first time.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication (German/English).

Silke Schönfeld, b. 1988 in Idar-Oberstein, lives and works in Dortmund.

Curated by Inke Arns