The first piece I saw at the Prague Biennale was Rosefeldt’s three-screen video installation, Trilogy of Failure (Part 1) The Sound Maker. In the approximately 30-minute loop, Rosefeldt stacks all of the furniture and contents of his studio apartment into a pile in the middle of the living room floor. As this is going on, on another screen we see Rosefeldt, seated in an office chair and surrounded by studio recording equipment and a mess of odds and ends, facing the viewer as he watches himself carrying on in the other room. He loosely mimics his own every move from this vantage point, absentmindedly rearranging the items within arms’ reach to where he is sitting. The arbitrariness of this view underscores the banality of the objects being manipulated in the living room. After all of the contents of his studio have been ordered into a precarious tower, he returns everything to its original place, all the while under his own mimicing observation on the third screen. When he has finished, he opens the door and walks out of the apartment as the camera pulls back to reveal the studio set. As he smokes a cigarette, gaffers and technicians silently go about their work, and the camera slowly pulls up, revealing the tiny studio room with the office chair and a television screen mounted on the wall.

I found this piece to be captivating for the mechanical ambiguity of Rosefeldt’s performance, and disconcerting for the many different perspectives that it presented: Rosefeldt’s private, untranslated purpose in his actions; Rosefeldt’s watching himself (while staring at the camera); the gradually apparent artificiality of the set; and the business-as-usual procedures of the crew.