Alisa Berger

Installation

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RAPTURE II - PORTAL is a VR-installation that revolves around the Ukrainian Vogue dancer Marko, his abandoned and inaccessible apartment in the region of Donbas, where the war is going on for ten years. This virtual space, rendered through a 3D scan of original photographs, serves as a digital reconquest of territory and fusing the idea of a physical lost home and the body of a dancer as an infinite eternal home. The VR film is contextualised and augmented by the self-commented tour of Marko’s apartment, structured as a hypnosis session into a world of memory, the gaps of which the viewer can fill in themselves. This space merges with real 3D scans of currently destroyed Ukrainian architectures, while the virtual elements of the Vogue dance itself become a weapon that juxtaposes the power of the body in dance and the weakness of the body in the face of war technology. The concept of rapture is considered here in its expanded sense. In theology, rapture represents a change of location. Figuratively, it also describes a state of “mental distance”, found in intoxication, dreams, meditation, or trance. In the case of this artistic work, raptures occur on different levels; just as the protagonist Marko was torn from his home, he also experiences the brief moment of a digital visit to his home in VR, similarly, the viewer also experiences a temporary rapture through the VR experience and the hypnotic text of the protagonist. Through the scenographic conception of the installation, in which the viewer is projected as a shadow on a screen while watching the VR film, the visitor despite being mentally transported into the digital space, becomes more present than ever in the exhibition space, becomes himself a reminder of the physical world and a part of the installation.

RAPTURE II: PORTAL is the second part of the diptych "RAPTURE”. The first part RAPTURE I: VISIT was presented for the first time at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum in June 2024.

Alisa Berger

Alisa Berger was born 1987 in Makhachkala (Republic of Dagestan, Russia) and raised in Lviv (Ukraine) and Essen (Germany). She studied film and fine arts at the Academy of Media Art Cologne (KHM) and at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Bogotá. With her 2017 KHM diploma film, she was nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize and for the FIRST STEPS Award of the Deutsche Filmakademie. She was also the recipient of the Best Film Award for New Directors at Int. Film Festival Uruguay and the Screenplay Award of H.W. Geißendörfer. 2018 - 2022 she lived in Tokyo and studied Butoh. Since 2022 she enrolled in the program of Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, where she realized her new film INVISIBLE PEOPLE and received the Studio Collector Prize at Jeu de Paume, awarded by Isabelle & Jean-Conrad Lemaître and Haro Cumbusyan and the Analix Forever Prize, awarded by Barbara Polla (Galerie Analix Forever, Geneve/Paris) and Marta Ponsa (Jeu de Paume, Paris) for Invisible People.

Her work often deals with a search for the spiritual, non-rational drive in our world, cultures whose practices of knowledge acquisition are related to religious ideologies, mortuary cults or futuristic concepts of these believes.

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