Peter Weibel's performances differentiate themselves from other actions performed in the 1960s, for instance in Vienna and California, firstly, through their relation to media and secondly, through their relation to politics. His body politics is body critique that is simultaneously a critique of traditional forms of representation as well as identity politics. Unlike classical body artists Weibel did not only search fort he emancipation of the body, for instance through the sexual revolution but liberation from the body in the age of its constructability via media and gene technology. (Peter Weibel)

Part essay, part film poem, Magic Mirror translates the startling force of French surrealist Claude Cahun’s photographs into a choreographed series of tableaux vivants. Re-staging Cahun’s black and white images with selected extracts from her book Aveux Non Avenus (Confessions Untold), the film explores the links between Cahun’s photographs and writings. Cahun’s multi-subjectivity, as expressed in both her photographs and book, set the scene for the film, where she dresses and makes her face up in many different ways, swapping identities between gender, age and the inanimate. The splitting of identity appears as a double which persists throughout in image and voice; as literal double through super imposition, as shadow, imprints in sand, reflections in water, mirror or distorting glass. The kaleidoscope aesthetic that runs through the film serves not only to weave between image and word but also between the work of Cahun and the films of Sarah Pucill, creating a dialogue between two artists who share similar iconography and concerns.

Since the late 1970s, James Benning's films have been a regular fixture at festivals in Germany and Austria, while frequent television broadcasts have helped expose his work to an even larger audience here than perhaps at home. This 2-disc set presents the products of this intercontinental relationship: Ruhr, Benning's first foray into digital filmmaking, is a modern-day "city symphony" dedicated to Germany's industrial Ruhr district. His latest work, natural history, is an audiovisual portrait commissioned by Vienna's Natural History Museum. Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary James Benning: Circling the Image, produced for German television, rounds off the set.