Friedl Kubelka: One Is Not Enough. Photography & Film (INDEX 049)

At the moon´s gloaming I like to lookAt the grey metropolis, crumbling ruinsWhich serve as a measure of its greatnessOn which humans learn to measure themselves.–Christian Friedrich Hebbel There are artists who continually reinvent themselves in pursuit of freedom. Friedl Kubelka, who in moving pictures assumes the name Friedl vom Gröller, has instead devoted her life to the opposite challenge: remaining within the same existential setting long enough for its hidden cracks to show. Across more than five decades, she has returned obsessively to faces, apartments, lovers, strangers, aging skin, mirrors, city corners, and windows clouded by rain or breath. Her work unfolds through a deepening sort of recurrence. The same mysteries persist from decade to decade, altered only by time’s pressure upon flesh and memory. Looking through One Is Not Enough becomes less an encounter with an oeuvre than an immersion into a trembling human continuum where identity never settles into certainty.…