Christoph Girardet, born in 1966, is a German video artist and filmmaker. Girardet makes both the accidentally found and the extensively researched found footage from the archives of film history the subject of his art. Montage, omissions, and repetitions reveal the actual structures and inner mechanism of the depicted cinematic reality. Beyond the analysis of the material and its clichés, his work deals in essence with a melancholic state of absence, thus creating an individual pictorial world.

From 1988 to 1994, Girardet studied Visual Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in the film class of Birgit Hein. Since 1989 he has produced films, videos and video installations, some of them in collaboration with video artist Volker Schreiner (1994 – 2004), and, more frequently, in collaboration with filmmaker Matthias Müller (1999 – ongoing). Girardet has participated in group shows at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, MoMA PS1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, among others. He had solo exhibitions at institutions such as FACT, Liverpool, Kunstverein Hannover and West, The Hague. He has taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Oberhausen and Rotterdam. His work is included in public and private collections. He has received numerous awards, among them a stipend for the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2000) and a scholarship at Villa Massimo in Rome (2004). He lives and works in Hanover, Germany.



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