Milena Gierke

Milena Gierke, born 1968 in Frankfurt am Main. 1989 – 94 Studies at the Frankfurt Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, in Peter Kubelka’s class “Film + Kochen” (film + cooking). In 1994 she studied sculpture at the Cooper Union in New York City with Hans Haacke and film history with James Hoberman. Other teachers have been representatives of the US film avant-garde such as Ken Jacobs or Robert Breer.

Jonas Mekas has greatly inspired Milena Gierke in her diary films. In 1995 he screened a three-hour retrospective of her work at Anthology Film Archive. Since 2001 she has been a member of the curatorial group “Filmsamstag” at the Filmkunsthaus Babylon, Berlin. Milena Gierke projects her films inside the screening room itself. The sound of the running projector becomes its own rhythm, becomes the musical accompaniment.

Each of the programs that she puts together takes into account the architectonic occurrences of the place, which are created by the space and the audience. She shows her work not only in cinemas, but also in galleries and other places of interest to her, for example: 2001 “Vorgestellt” Earport (young composers were presented to and put in relation to visual artists), “Mittagspause”, the closing event in the old Staatsbank, in which Roland Ketschmer gave a reading of Robert Musil’s Buch “The Man without Qualities” and showed Milena Gierke’s film ZEIT in connection with it, “Filme ohne Ton” (“Films without Sound”) in the Berlin Center for the Deaf, including a discussion with an interpreter.

The artist has been living in Berlin since 1998.