Isabell Heimerdinger
Hana Ikebana (2014)

In the video work “Hana Ikebana”, Isabell Heimerdinger shows a dialogue guessing game between a woman and a man. He names cities and prepares tea in the meantime. She guesses the temperature at the respective location, which he confirms or rejects. While she flips through a catalogue by the Japanese photo artist Nobuyoshi Araki and lays loose, coloured flower photos over Araki’s black-and-white shots, a steadycam is pointed vertically at hands and book pages. Eventually, “Moscow 2 degrees” is confirmed and a cup of tea moves into view. The result is an overlapping of a dense visual layer, a kind of floral still life, with the initially enigmatic dialogue between a woman whose hands literally move the picture and a man preparing tea in the background. In this work the world’s temperature is measured, while beauty and decay move laconically into the picture.