19 Sept 2026 | Light, colour, time – the films of Viktoria Schmid


Avantgarde Now! and Then! sixpackfilm from Vienna

Viktoria Schmid’s films operate at the intersection of experimental film, installation and media reflection. At the heart of her works lie the fundamental elements of the cinematic apparatus – camera, editing, lighting, film material and screen – which Schmid treats not merely as technical prerequisites, but as independent aesthetic factors creating meaning in their own right. Thus, her films engage with the cinematic dispositif by making visible the interplay between perception and projection, pictorial space and materiality.
Street canyons, skyscrapers and water towers: The iconography of New York’s urban landscape is well known. In NYC RGB however, Schmid shows us New York City as we have never seen it before. She has triple-exposed the analogue film stock using different colour filters – first red, then green, and finally blue – thereby fusing colours, architecture and time into a completely new form of perception. NYC RGB and ROJO ZALJA BLAU are part of a series of works in which Schmid explores early filming techniques, historical colouring processes in analogue film and 16mm footage “cut” in-camera.

In W O W (KODAK), she compiles and manipulates amateur footage of the partial demolition of Eastman Business Park in Rochester, New York. Once a global centre for analogue photography, the site’s redundant film production facilities were reduced to rubble and ashes. On the one hand, the demolition shown here is a radical expression of media shift towards the digital. At the same time, the reverse playback of the footage – one of the earliest special effects techniques in film history—articulates a longing for the continuation of analogue media.
For A PROPOSAL TO PROJECT IN SCOPE, Schmid set up a screen in Cinemascope – the widest aspect ratio, which was increasingly used in the Western genre – on a barren dune on the Lithuanian coast. The film simultaneously portrays the landscape while documenting the intervention in the natural environment. Schmidt filmed this site-specific installation at various times of the day, turning the screen into a projection surface for the shadows of the surrounding trees and bushes. A cinema without film.