Konrad Welz

Both the video and audio components of L21ST are improvisations – created in one take without edits or revisions. In this formal purity, I discovered a simplicity I had been yearning for, for years, and a possible solution to the conclusion I had reached in the museum, months before…

The result of a visit to the Copenhagen aquarium and a freestyle analogue synth improvisation – channeling the Jesus & Mary Chain, 808 State, and the euphoria of early nineties rave culture.

Filmed at the massive Verdun war cemetery just after a total solar eclipse on the 11th of August, 1999. All is definitely not what it seems.

A punny title for a video which addresses a few of my interests.

A recording of the Taj Mahal in the early morning on the 21st of May 1996 in Agra, India. One take – no effects or overdubs.

Part of my ‘Curing Concrete‘ series towards a New Realism. References to, and resonances with, Duchamp, Dürer and Wyeth are acknowledged. Memories of summer camping trips are encouraged.

On the 24th of October 2003, I ended up at Kimmeridge bay on the Dorset coast. I took these photos during the last half hour before sunset. With this video I tried to recreate the incredible solemnity of sunsets, and the enormity of being in this world. This video is part of a larger work…

Inspired by the 13th-century masterpiece Six Persimmons by the Ch’an artist monk Muqi (牧谿) – also known as Fachang (法常).

A meditative, observational video from the banks of the mighty Ganges river at Varanasi, India. Recorded in June, 1996. Because one sequence features a floating, wrapped, corpse; this video is recommended for mature viewers only. I have made many videos of this genre because it is my total conviction that quiet, observation of the world…

Recorded on 5 December 1999, Kinabatangan, Sabah, Borneo.This is a chapter from my long-form video The Bodies of Nobodies

Four minutes in the Louvre, observing the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace – and everything that happens around it. Recorded on 19 May 1996. Ars longa, Vita brevis.

Driving along a nondescript road along the Hawkesbury river, I noticed an electrical box with Lot 22 painted on it. In my youth I had read Thomas Pynchon’s classic – The Crying of Lot 49 – and felt compelled to stop. With the car engine switched off, it takes a while for the droning numbness…

Giant grids of television beam God’s exile The surgeon of the nightsky restores dead things by the power of sound From the Whole Megillah by Ira Cohen It was after 2 a.m on a windy night in January 1997 that I stepped onto a 15th-floor balcony in Braamfontein, Johannesburg and started recording the deserted city…

Flying kites from rooftops at sunset. Agra, India, 21 May 1996

Please turn on the closed caption transcription or English translation.

Also includes the sky and various types of cloud, frogs, pinkish flowers, the shadow of an ice-cream seller, the hum of the camcorder mechanism, a few static shots, a tropical house, three barking dogs, rusty cars and a caterpillar, a dirt road, banana plants, telephone lines, a catchy tune, an inquisitive van driver, numerous trees,…

Let’s say you dream of going to Rome. You know, those four letters R-O-M-E and the dot, halfway up the boot of Italy. You know, the Colosseum, Romulus and Remus, the Vatican, La Dolce Vita, the Trevi Fountain… And then you actually go there… During June, 1995; my wife Angelika and I went on an…

For a week around the Northern winter solstice 2010, I trawled the web for webcam feeds. Webcams typically have low frame-rates – resulting in very ‘staccato’ image sequences. By dissolving between the successive frames, I tried to re-create the lost continuity or ‘flow’. The resulting sequences, actually reveal interesting visual aspects of the entire process…

Recording the world with the detachment of a meditating monk – with a so-called Mirror Mind – viewing things as they are, with no personal emotions or desires projected onto them. This video explores the complex relationships between looking and listening – the seen, and the heard. It tries to record Being – or even…

Recorded in Darjeeling on the 3rd of June, 1996. Inspired by Ch’an Buddhist paintings and the plenitude of emptiness.

During March and April 2000, I travelled around the south of Thailand. I spent many hours trying to record the Being of my tranquil surroundings. As with most of my recordings, I would lock the camera on a tripod, and then record between two and five minutes of whatever happens in front of the lens…

WARNING: Viewer discretion advised. Quoting Ronald Reagan and Francisco Goya; based on readily available internet video footage of US Predator drones and Apache gunships in action; this video aims to confront the viewer with the inherently dehumanising and misanthropic nature of technology and modern visual media. This video has been remastered in UHD from the…

Welcome to the empire where the death-ray of vision and its image-making machines are always on. Where seeing is believing. Collected over four years and two continents, the footage used for empire was filmed entirely from television. With watching television now making up for almost a third (1) of the average person’s waking life, those…

Part of my work – February: A Quartet of Videos – first exhibited at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, Johannesburg, 2004. Original master format: PAL SD 576i Remastered with slight graphic changes to UHD in 2023.

Imagine looking over someone’s shoulder as they use a brush with ink on paper – or spray paint on concrete. Whether it’s for calligraphy, graffiti, delineating a mist-shrouded pine bough, or a Twomblyesque doodle. Now imagine being at the tip of the brush – or nozzle of a can of spray paint – as it…

Using a flashlight in a darkened room and a video feedback loop; I set out to create a synaesthetic, electric stream of calligraphy – some sort of ‘direct expression’. The title was inspired by the trance-induced, bleeding noses of shamans and dying animals in Khoisan rock paintings. Direct, corporeal expression and communication.

For about a decade centred around the millennium, I was extremely interested in the idea of using my video camera as ’seeing paintbrush’. For a long time I’ve been interested in Buddhism in general, and Ch’an or Zen brushwork in particular. In this spirit, I was interested in the expressive, gestural, direct interaction with the…

“Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.” – “Here I stand, I can’t do anything else.” – are reportedly the words of Martin Luther as he refused to retract his statements in front of the Diet of Worms on that fateful day in April 1521. For various reasons, this video is very close to my…

Over the second half of the 1990’s, I became interested in making angular, visceral, ‘short-circuiting’ videos. As part of this process, I sampled diverse music genres to create raw, polyrhythmic music tracks which I rehearsed, and then played and recorded straight onto DAT.

Shot in the dead of night in a Malaysian village, this video is an exploration of perception and consciousness. While the people sleep, their village is owned and roamed by the creatures of the night – existing on the edges of (and beyond) human perception. By slowing down the footage, the ultrasonic sounds of some…