M+M 7 Days

In an installation created especially for the Fürstensaal room of the Museum für Fotografie, the Munich-based artist-duo M+M are featuring a film cycle entitled 7 Days. The seven-part work is shown in its entirety, each part having been developed successively by M+M within a timeframe just short of seven years. The installation is akin to a multi-perspective cinema, in which the language of film expands to include the surrounding spatial structures and incorporate new narrative styles. Each film of the cycle tells its own story, though split in two and projected as separate, parallel variants. The protagonist – played by the actor Christoph Luser – finds himself subjected within the “seven days" to a variety of seemingly mundane, yet also entirely contradictory, situations. All seven films relate in some way to key scenes from different movies, in which the psychological dimension of interpersonal relationships plays a particularly significant role . By presenting them in dual format, M+M create new interpretations of the scenes while developing a cinematic language that explores the mutability of contemporary identity.

This approach characterizes M+M's re-imaginings of scenes from a number of films, including Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963), John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), with each film dedicated to a particular day of the week. There are certain themes that crop up to some degree throughout the different films, such as the relationships between father, mother, and child, and the forces of erotic attraction (or alienation) between a man and a woman, or between men. Each film comprises a precisely synchronized dual projection, with identical dialogue, camera work, and editing, in the midst of which one character is replaced by another. Consequently dialogues and storylines are subject to change both in terms of their mood and meaning, be it on a subliminal level or more substantially, which in turn brings an unsettlingly diverse range of different facets to the fore. An integral aspect of7 Days is the arrangement of the projection screens in the room, the fragmentation of the homogeneous film space and its narrative structure into a multi-perspective cinema, from which an engaged observer is able to derive interconnections between the projections, multiple images, and stories. By exploring the possibilities and peculiarities of synchronized storytelling, a form with which the 7 Days film installation actively experiments, M+M give expression to their interest in the increasingly complex experiences of space, identity, and time, that have come to characterize our society.

M+M frequently combine different media in their conceptual-oriented work, from photography, video, and film, through sculpture, to architecture and projections in public spaces. Their activities have in recent years focused on multimedia installations.