Edmund Kuppel: On a le droit de rêver (One Has the Right to Dream)

The artist Edmund Kuppel (born 1947), who lives in Paris and Karlsruhe, is among the most important pioneers of media art in Germany. Since the early 1970s, Kuppel explores in his photographs, films, and videos the credibility of images and the relationship between reproduction and reality. The initial analytical phase of his work gradually gave way to a more synthetic approach in the early 1990s: his films and videos increasingly became autonomous media and less the components of objects and installations. The issue of what in our perception is true and how we reconstruct reality as truth is more relevant than ever before in our digital world. Kuppel's media-critical work uses the self-representation of the means of expression to show truth as illusion and as fiction, yet without dispensing with narrative forms. With this presentation of his two most recent works, »Gezeiten« (Tides) (2023/25) and »SCHNITT/STELLEN« (Inter/Faces) (2025), Kuppel continues his tradition of premiering his film works at the ZKM.

»Gezeiten«, a short film created entirely from unused footage from an earlier film, shows two women and a man sitting on a pebble beach in front of the steep cliffs in Normandy, who do not know whether the tide is coming in or going out. While the man goes off to look for a way out, accompanied by the camera, the two women left behind on the beach talk about him. The soundtrack of their conversation and the images of the man’s search were recorded in separate locations but are put together in the film. The rhythm and narrative of the dialogue seem as though they are captions for the images of the man’s search, the original soundtrack of which is mixed with that of the dialogue. The synchronicity of image and sound suggests a unity when looking at the film, because in it parallel worlds merge in spite of the fact that contradictory content is conveyed.

Kuppel's latest film, »SCHNITT/STELLEN«, was shot on the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. The two swing bridges over the canal become film interfaces when viewed from above. Kuppel utilises the opening and closing of a swing bridge as an editing technique, like a slow-motion wipe transition in which one image is superimposed on another. When closed, the bridge becomes a stage set in which people passing by stream over it in both directions to the opposite bank. Upstream, a vertical lift bridge rises and falls like a curtain. When closed, the bridge is a stage over which the traffic crowds. When the bridge is raised, it opens up a view of the canal with its passing boats. The sequences of the bridge’s movements are edited together with various definitions of the now inflationary used term “interface” with hard cuts, as utilized in silent films. »SCHNITT/STELLEN« is thus a film about images and concepts and the diversity of their cross-references.

Films

Edmund Kuppel
»Gezeiten«, 2023/25
Video, color, sound, 12 min.

Edmund Kuppel
»SCHNITT/STELLEN«, 2025
Video, color, sound, 22 min.

Moderated by Philipp Ziegler.