THIEVERY AND SONGS

In Thievery and Songs Gernot Wieland has made an exceptionally beautiful, tragicomic and humerous work, framed by the story of a dancer, Hilde Holger, who had to flee from Austria into exile in Bombay in 1938 because she was jewish.
 This collage of moving images is composed of Super 8 film, video, watercolours, drawings, Claymation and his father´s photos. Each frame carries the distinctive atmosphere of its medium. The work includes stories of animals and psychotherapists, memories of Wieland's catholic education, the religious-like indoctrination of the Viennese actionists in Austrian culture, a transformation into a snail, which by the turns of narrative, bears a relationship to landscapes, the notion of memory and hierarchy and a therapeutic session.

In the therapist’s office, Wieland narrates a dream about the ‘Bremer Stadtmusikanten’ or the ‘Town Musicians of Bremen’, a Brothers Grimm fairytale, of outcast animals who leave for Bremen to become musicians. In drawing on this story, and the motif of the four animals, Wieland adds to its long cultural legacy. In the story the animals chase away robbers, and are able to occupy a house. In Wieland’s work it appears the revolution fails. This work present a critique of capitalism, hierarchical sturctures and the ghosts of WW2. 
"I tell the story about my grand-aunt, the ugly part so to speak, about that she was sold, poverty, a family who was imprisoned and killed by Nazis and how my grand-aunt narrated and what I imagined to see in her images. We filmed dance movements in a government building, which was important to me. You can tell it is a government building, in German it is called ‘Rathaus’, where you apply for a new passport, you can get married, there is a tax office, the official life, so to speak. I wanted that setting, as a ‘quote’ for Austria’s past, since there were so many people who were responsible, who decided." (Zasha Colah, 2016)

Thievery and Songs was awarded with the MOSTYN Open 20 Award.