Shelly
Silver

The New York-based filmmaker Shelly Silver (b. 1957 in Brooklyn, NY) studied intellectual history and mixed-media arts at Cornell University, New York. She was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) from 1992 to 1993.

During her period of residency in Berlin, Silver made the 62-minute documentary Former East/Former West (1994), which addressed issues of national identity in the reunified city of Berlin. Silver interviewed hundreds of people on the street, asking them about topics such as democracy, freedom, nation, home, socialism, capitalism, and history. These street interviews, in which people talk—at times very candidly and personally—about their lives and their city, combine to create a collage of history and time. Former East/Former West is a complex, sensitive portrait of a divided city; it reflects the wishes, hopes, and desires, but also the existential fears, prejudices, and disappointments—even the feelings of (xenophobic) hatred experienced by people in Berlin, three years after the Wall came down. Silver’s film was screened at Berlin’s Arsenal cinema in 1997 as part of the DAAD film series “Filme aus USA.” It was also shown in 1999 in “Berlin oder das Auge des Wirbelsturms,” another film series organized by the BKP.

In her experimental films, features, and documentaries, Shelly Silver focuses on aspects of the public and the private, on pleasure and desire, as well as on authenticity and fiction. In doing so, she explores questions of personal, cultural, and political identity. For Silver, identity is constructed, not innate. In her award-winning, cinema verité-style video Meet the People (1986), for example, she investigates what distinguishes the individual from the stereotype, and how we judge particular characters and sociological types on the basis of physiognomy, clothing, or accent. Fourteen people, facing the camera in ‘talking head’ close-ups, appear to represent contemporary New York types, from a cab driver to a stripper. The end credits, however, reveal that these people are in fact professional actors who were reading from a script written by Silver.

In 2006, Silver’s video What I’m Looking For (2004) was included in the exhibition High Definition at the nGbK in Berlin. This work addresses how perception is modified by new media technologies. Silver’s imaginative and adventurous documentary oscillates between virtual and actual public space, intimacy and distance, and desire and control. What I’m Looking For was also shown in the International Forum of New Cinema section of the Berlinale in 2005.

Silver’s works have been exhibited around the world, at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Yokohama Museum, Yokohama; Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; Kunstverein in Hamburg and the London, Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin Film Festivals.

Text: Laura Windisch
Translation: Jacqueline Todd