Lenard Giller is developing a practice which explores and collapses the life-spans of time-based technologies and their two-way translations into language, memory and perception. Adaptations (2023) follows recent video-works made by the artist over the course of the past year. These previous works are characterised by static recordings and precise assemblage of found and recorded material—drawn from popular culture or the everyday languages of mass-media—along predefined timelines. The works and their technical realization mirror one another: digital or analogue footage is displayed according to their historical containers or material necessities.

Analog B&W film records a studio environment which is later processed by the developer, stop bath, and fixer. Similarly, the adaptation of the eye to the changing levels of exposure in the video is performed by three of its key structures: the iris, retina, and pupil. The video plays a morphing sequence of images of a place stripped of any identifying features other than the tools that constitute the twentieth century studio setting, from modernism to the dawn of the digital age. Adaptation and change involve loss and gain, both of which are difficult to register in the blink of an eye.

Lenard Giller (born 1997, Munich) lives and works between Berlin and Rome. Upcoming and recent exhibitions include Akwa Ibom, Athens (2023); The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); ERMES ERMES, Rome (2023); Chess Club, Hamburg; Petrine, Paris (2022); and Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin (2022; 2020).