The exhibition Moving Portraits documents a dialogue between Gudrun Kemsa and Salzburg. Here she developed the idea to react in a project of her own to cultural institutions that are so characteristic of the city. Kemsa immersed herself wholeheartedly into these cultural spheres. She observed, did research and let the spaces take effect on her. Afterwards, in her role as an artist, she formed contacts with the heads of the respective institutions in order to portray them in the form that is characteristic of her work. In practice this involved requesting the people to position themselves within a certain space and keep still. Then Kemsa filmed the setting with a slowly rotating camera. This project has produced a total of ten videos in recent years, giving us fascinating and in-depth views of Salzburg’s cultural work. As an expression of Kemsa’s conceptional self-understanding and her media-based approach, the Moving Portraits show portraits of people in special spatial and temporal settings.

Gudrun Kemsa was born in Datteln in Germany in 1961. She lives and works today in Düsseldorf. From 1980 to 1990 she studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art with Karl Bobek and David Rabinowitch. Since 2001 Kemsa has been professor of moving pictures and photography at the Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld.