Issues With my Other Half

synopsis

In Issues With my Other Half, deep-seated fears are visualized as surreal nightmares. Things get really creepy when the upper and lower torso of a woman move separately on two swings, one behind the other. Or when her head mutates into a cellphone on which she scrolls while bent over. Any laughs die down when an arm becomes a baguette that a knife cuts open, or when a hair dryer not only dries the woman’s wet hair, but melts the entire face into a gelatinous surface. At the end, only the upper half of the artist jumps into the water from a wooden boat – she then turns around to look for the lower part of her body. The circle closes both humorously and eerily at the same time: at the beginning, the head in the hourglass symbolizes the irrevocable finitude of physical life; at the end, a modest earthly pleasure leads to symbolic death. Nothing works the way it should or even the way one wants it to – except for the cinematic animation. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)