LOLOLOL

(Kurdwin Ayub, Austria, 2020)

I discovered the work of Kurdwin Ayub in the program of the 2020 Viennale. She had already been making widely-screened films and videos for a decade. Judging from the 1-minute special Pretty-Pretty – a vignette (commissioned as a trailer for the horror-oriented Slash film festival) that carries a short, nasty, feminist shock in a Cronenbergian vein – I assumed her art mainly derived from a performance art tradition.

Then LOLOLOL came along, in the same year, to complicate that initial assumption.

LOLOLOL is an intriguingly authentic portrait of the milieu of art – especially of art schools and their emerging artists. Shot on iPhone X (by Caroline Bobek) and semi-improvised, Ayub’s 20-minute film is a naturalistic, seemingly off-the-cuff portrait of two young women, Anthea Schranz and Ada Karlbauer, who live and breathe this world.

Hooking up with a few pals, they cruise through the vast exhibition space of Parallel Vienna, a sprawling group show art fair that occurs in a different, officially unused venue each year.

Moving from room to room – many decked out in “relational art” assemblages – Ada and Anthea roll their eyeballs, make bitchy remarks about the artists (most of whom they probably know), and dive whenever possible for the free food and drink.

It is a typical scene from the art world of many countries, communicated with striking, intimate realism. I have seen the film billed as a documentary, but it could just as easily be labelled a fiction.

What strikes me most about LOLOLOL, however, is its prologue. For several minutes, we observe Anthea in the small apartment that doubles as her art studio. We see the meticulous preparation and execution of her latest work in progress, which derives from the use of stencils that she herself cuts out and assembles. Naturally, the stencils make us think of graffiti street art, and of the industrial techniques of spray-painting; these more-or-less Pop Art inspired references are no doubt somewhere in the artist’s mind.

But, as the camera picks up details from the unfussy stacks and piles of Anthea’s other works in the same vein, we see that she experiments in many ways with these stencils: not just painting “through” them, but also assembling their pieces as mobile sculptures. Anthea’s stencil “tools” are simultaneously scraps to be discarded, and materials in their own right.

Most artist biopics tend to be about the unbearable tension or contradiction between art and life, and they frequently end in death; LOLOLOL, in its breezier way, explores their everyday fusion.

Ayub has since gone on to make a first fiction feature, Sonne (Sun, 2022), produced by Veronika Franz and Ulrich Seidl.

© Adrian Martin October 2020 / April 2023