Hi8 homevideos, handdrawn SNES Mario Paint animation, drawings, HD Video
2019/21
Hand-drawn animations created on Nintendo game consoles from the 90s show partly surreal memories from the artist’s childhood in a Berlin apartment that many years later became a gallery due to gentrification. Another video work shows the artist installing his animations in the very gallery that was once the apartment in which he grew up.
The video installation HOME NOME consists of a film that shows the making of an exhibition as well as the exhibition pieces that can be seen in this video. Lars Preisser deals thematically with the apartment in which he grew up in Berlin in the 90s and which became a gallery for contemporary art in the course of gentrification. In minimalist animations painstakingly created on old Super Nintendo consoles from that time, the artist recalls various incidents from that period. Old home videos serve him as a template for the interiors of that time, which he now traces on the antiquated 16-bit game console and the game Mario Paint. In one scene, a rat peeks out of the toilet that the parents had to tape up at night so that the rats could not get into the apartment, in another scene, the stroller is burning in the hallway of the building . The artist’s parents had moved to Berlin in the late 80s, at a time when gentrification had already become a problem of which they were now part. In 2021, some 30 years later, Preisser then enters his former home, he has since become an artist and his former home, appropriately enough, a gallery called NOME. In the rooms of NOME, in which hardly anything of the former apartment is recognizable, he now installs televisions and SNES consoles that show the animated rooms of that time at the corresponding locations in the gallery. One TV, for example, is located in the office area of the gallery where there used to be a living room and where the artist played Super Nintendo as a child. Another TV stands in the gallery’s storage room, the former children’s room. Preisser filmed this installative intervention in the former apartment to capture the brief moment in which he was able to artistically juxtapose the old spaces with the new. In essence, the work points to complex gentrification processes and changes in urban space, but most striking are the characteristic animations that give an insight into the time, into the almost surreal occurrences from the perspective of a child in a Berlin apartment. The fact that this living space ultimately became a commercial art space is on the one hand regrettable, but on the other hand it was precisely this that made this artistic work possible.
The project is supported by the Recherestipendium (research stipend) from Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa
Stills from old homevideos showing the rooms and windows of the old apartment, other stills from outside are showing the gallery today, animations done on a Super Nintendo show memories from the 90s in the gallery, one night someone burnt the Kinderwagen in the entryway of the house, I installed a TV with a SNES animation showing this exact scene.
Here was a toilet and next to it my room,
later it became one room, the storage space of the gallery.
The old facade of the house on 1st march, policemen were walking past as me and my siblings watched them through the windows.
Me and my siblings playing in our former home.
