MELANCHOLIA
2013
Full HD video | 16:9 | 6.24 min. | color | sound



Reposing and monumental, a dark geometric object sits in a picture of a wide, sandy landscape. After a while, a brass band dressed in colorful costumes appears and forms a line behind the object, breaking the present silence with a song. The sounds of the instruments blend into an initially odd song to which the musicians contribute on different cues. They play the saddest song of their repertoire. After a few minutes, the performance ends. The band leaves the scene, without a sound, and the resurging silence seals the solitude of the object, which seems to have been left behind forever.


Melancholia is an homage to the Western cultural history of thinking and its social phenomenon of melancholia. The central element of a polyhedron, taken from Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 master engraving Melancholia I, is transferred to and repositioned in modern India. The beholder himself becomes the audience of a scene, whose initial seriousness, expressed in its perfect composition and its seemingly everlasting duration, is about to be broken by the emerging sounds.



Concept / Directed / Camera: Kay Walkowiak
Music Performance: The Munna Band
Postproduction: Manuel Hartmann, Uli Kühn
Production Assistants: Rajkumar Singh, Katarina Weslien
Special Thanks: Austrian Cultural Forum New Delhi, Kriti Gallery Varanasi
Supported by: Federal State of Salzburg