White Ribbons

Small rivulets of a milk white fluid flow from on high before gradually branching out and spreading a meandering path down into the valley. The branches proliferate as the flow spreads across craggy alpine boulders and meadow pastures, eventually reaching a residential neighborhood. At first, the branching flow has a poetically meditative effect, enhanced by sounds of streaming waters. But a threateningly sinister feeling increasingly takes hold as the film proceeds.

White Ribbons is a video work that was created during an artist residency at Telfs-Buchen/Tyrol in 2024. The title refers to the artificial bands of snow increasingly proliferating the Alps in recent years, simulating ski slopes given the lack of natural snow, and evoking bizarre, actually absurd impressions of nature. Against better judgement, the economic greed and enormous expenditures being made are conspiring against nature and accelerating its destruction. This tension between nature, man and civilization constitutes the thematic thread that runs through all of Michael Heindl's young yet multifaceted body of work. The artist focuses on “the contradictions and paradoxes of human behavior” emerging “from a growing alienation”, as he describes it himself.

Michael Heindl does not work in a strident manner. Instead he proceeds with formal rigor and subtlety on site, addressing his respective themes by developing a mode of proceeding and a way of engaging with the possibilities of his chosen medium. It is a matter of probing and permanent self-reflection in and through his artistic practice. (Carl Aigner)

Translation: Eve Heller