Kirschner & Panos
Kirschner & Panos is a creative duo comprising David Panos and Anja Kirschner. Since the mid-2000s, they have collaborated on complex, conceptual projects across various genres.
Kirschner & Panos' Art Style
Created in collaboration from 2006 to 2013, Anja Kirschner and David Panos' long-form films and installations blend popular culture references, historical research, and literary tropes. Their work frequently incorporates amateurs, actors, and specialists from various fields to craft speculative histories and elaborate fantasies, while examining social realities and the relationship between art and class power.
Using computer-generated imagery, video, and installation, the duo explores how different technologies—such as motion capture, currency, and routinization—affect our perceptions of the world, other people, popular culture, history, and literary tropes. They are especially focused on the nature of performance, the use of surrogates and actors, and the overall construction of narrative.
Kirschner & Panos' Famous Works
"Ultimate Substance" (2012) draws on references from archaeology, philosophy, mathematics, and ritual to explore the hypothesis that the introduction of coinage in the ancient Greek world triggered a significant cognitive shift toward abstraction, which was crucial to the development of Western philosophical, scientific, and dramatic traditions. Created during a year in Greece, the work was filmed at the Numismatic Museum in Athens and the nearby mining district of Lavreotiki. The film’s fragmented structure examines how various historical layers have merged over time and considers the influence of this subterranean history on our current understanding of the divide between sensual and abstract forms of knowledge and experience.
"Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances" (2011) is a multi-channel video installation that explores the acting techniques of Sanford Meisner, a pivotal figure in American cinema and drama. The installation merges footage of young actors engaging with Meisner’s exercises with material from the history of theater and cinema. Kirschner & Panos seek to examine the assumptions of postmodern naturalism, particularly its blending of dramatic artifice with apparent 'primal' and 'human' impulses.
The imagined prison interactions between the 18th-century criminal Jack Sheppard and Daniel Defoe inspire the "Last Days of Jack Sheppard" (2009). The film is a critical costume drama created from a blend of historical, literary, and popular sources. It investigates the links between representation, speculation, and the emerging discourses of high and low culture in the early 18th century, which continue to resonate today.
Exhibitions of Kirschner & Panos' Works
Their works have been extensively exhibited and screened internationally, including at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, ICA, Chisenhale Gallery, Vienna Secession, Palais de Tokyo, Artists Space, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Kunsthall Oslo, CCA Glasgow, as well as at the British Art Show 7, the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.