Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet
In the IBB Video Space
30 Apr - 07 Jul 2025
Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Sonne Unter Tage, 2022, film still
© pong film
© pong film
Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Tiefenschärfe, 2017, film still
© pong film
© pong film
Sonne Unter Tage (2022)
“Sonne Unter Tage” (Sun Under Ground, 2022 , 39 min.) is an essayistic film in which Mareike Bernien and Alex Gerbaulet address uranium mining in Saxony and Thuringia during the GDR era. The starting point was their interest in industrial history, questions of memory politics, and a political understanding of landscape. It was important to them to focus on practices of self-empowerment, such as those of the GDR environmental movement. The filmmakers follow the element uranium through conversations with activists, residents, and former miners. It happens in mining museums, in archive materials, below ground, and in today’s landscapes. The impossibility of making a clean cut with the nuclear age becomes clear in the ways uranium keeps reappearing: as cancer in the lungs of workers, in the form of the cloud wafting out of Chernobyl in 1986 , or under the cover layers of waste dumps now covered with grass.
Tiefenschärfe (2017)
In “Tiefenschärfe” (Depth of Field, 2017, 14:30 min.), Bernien and Gerbaulet examine places in Nuremberg where the so-called National Socialist Underground ( NSU) committed three murders between 2000 and 2005 . In a blatant reversal of victim and perpetrator, the racist police investigations were exclusively directed against the murder victims and their families until the NSU ’s self-disclosure in 2011. In their film, the artists employ a principle of observational encirclement—that is, they contextualize the crime scenes through their surroundings and show how they’ve been repurposed or are currently used. As a formal aesthetic reference to the serious failure of social structures and institutions, the horizontal visual axis repeatedly goes out of kilter.
The artists
Mareike Bernien is an artist, filmmaker, and lecturer. She currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Alex Gerbaulet works as an artist in film and teaching, as well as on selection juries for film festivals. She is also a producer. Bernien and Gerbaulet are part of the production platform pong film and make films both collaboratively and individually.
“Sonne Unter Tage” (Sun Under Ground, 2022 , 39 min.) is an essayistic film in which Mareike Bernien and Alex Gerbaulet address uranium mining in Saxony and Thuringia during the GDR era. The starting point was their interest in industrial history, questions of memory politics, and a political understanding of landscape. It was important to them to focus on practices of self-empowerment, such as those of the GDR environmental movement. The filmmakers follow the element uranium through conversations with activists, residents, and former miners. It happens in mining museums, in archive materials, below ground, and in today’s landscapes. The impossibility of making a clean cut with the nuclear age becomes clear in the ways uranium keeps reappearing: as cancer in the lungs of workers, in the form of the cloud wafting out of Chernobyl in 1986 , or under the cover layers of waste dumps now covered with grass.
Tiefenschärfe (2017)
In “Tiefenschärfe” (Depth of Field, 2017, 14:30 min.), Bernien and Gerbaulet examine places in Nuremberg where the so-called National Socialist Underground ( NSU) committed three murders between 2000 and 2005 . In a blatant reversal of victim and perpetrator, the racist police investigations were exclusively directed against the murder victims and their families until the NSU ’s self-disclosure in 2011. In their film, the artists employ a principle of observational encirclement—that is, they contextualize the crime scenes through their surroundings and show how they’ve been repurposed or are currently used. As a formal aesthetic reference to the serious failure of social structures and institutions, the horizontal visual axis repeatedly goes out of kilter.
The artists
Mareike Bernien is an artist, filmmaker, and lecturer. She currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Alex Gerbaulet works as an artist in film and teaching, as well as on selection juries for film festivals. She is also a producer. Bernien and Gerbaulet are part of the production platform pong film and make films both collaboratively and individually.