Out-of-field: On Feminist Temporality in the Work of Cosma Grosser
Franziska Sophie Wildförster
Franziska Sophie Wildförster
Cosma Grosser’s installative practice is located at the intersection of various disciplines, namely film, conceptual art and architecture. As her installations of images converge and upheave temporal and spatial parameters of their making and reception and restitch them into novel premises, experiences and representations themselves become unraveled as imbued with historical, material and psychological frictions and instabilities – and serve to question the possibilities and limitations of (feminist) image-making in our frantic present moment.
With a background in architecture and fine arts and a keen interest in feminist filmmaking and theory, Cosma Grosser’s compositions of heterogenous images, scales, and contexts, seek to unveil the structures that underlie experiences, both in moving images as well as within the spaces that exhibit – or frame – these ambiguous transpositions. Thereby, her works call on an inherently relational perception, structured around absences and presences of viewing and decoding bodies, memories, and virtualities.
Take, for instance, the series film blocks (2025 – ongoing) – minimalist sculptural stacks of photographic paper, which translate a bundle of printed stills of films by the artist into tangible objects. Each block materializes frames of different films, each of which had gone through a series of methodological, technological and discursive steps and filters: the analogue images of close-ups of motives of nature, including a wavy surface of water, crowns of trees or the veneer of stone, captured with an analogue Bolex 16 mm camera, are digitalized, post-produced, cut, converted into printable files, and eventually installed in sculptural assemblages. As we only get to see the first frame of each film on the top of the respective staple, the modalities of experiences of time in and through these works shift from an accustomed linear progression or narration of sequences into a physically rendered superposition of moments. Rather than ossifying and spatializing time in space, however, the superimposed frames compose vertical interpenetrations of past memories, viewing presences, and forward-looking anticipations.
With Gilles Deleuze, drawing strongly on Henri Bergson in his explorations of cinema, this depth of interlocking temporalities, where the future is interpellated by a desire (here, curbed by a wish to know and see something that is not yet available, such as in the obscured sequences) and the past (activated by a process of retrieving and resembling what is not seen with images from memory) in the present moment of sense-formation and a thought-formation (sparked by the single available image on the top of the stack) is where difference, potential, and virtuality reside as moments of friction and hence emancipation from the automatization of consciousness in clock-time. Indeed, it is the out-of-field, that which surpasses the closed frame of Cosma Grosser’s images, that does not allow for a somewhat automated comparison to sets of space, which is fundamental to Deleuze’s ontology of “difference” – a process of continuous creations in time rather than ossified representations in space.
Intriguingly, these blocks recall the geometric shapes of minimalism. The sculptures of this postmodern art movement, which favored serial objects, automated production, and abstracted forms, in hindsight have been said to have advanced an increasing infiltration of the spaces of art with the logic of the late-capitalist spectacle. In minimalism’s focus on the experience of the space as a kind of reified and abstracted entity, its primacy on immediacy, minimalist sculptural objects re-produced the passively consuming subject. Cosma Grosser’s cuboids, whose vertical lengths are marked by white and gray structural sedimentations produced by the layered images, by contrast, appear injected with temporality – with a continued process of differentiation in duration that cannot be captured by representations – within an increasingly treacherous condition of experiences of reality mediated by images: when the instant consumption of signs as constantly deferred fulfillment of desires and identifications created by capitalism demand the erosion of historicity as well as of future potential outside the here and now. What becomes part of the experience of Cosma Grosser’s pieces, instead, is the bespoke out-of-field that refers “to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present” – a kind of immanent and embodied continuity. The image, then, is not conceived as a self-contained entity, but as something that emerges through its material embedding and continuously transforms in the very moment of perception. “In works such as Kinotaph and Concrete Film, I examine the fragility and mutability of images and architectural structures by projecting films onto different carrier materials,” Cosma says about her work. “Whether cast onto a translucent membrane or onto concrete, the materiality of the surface filters the projection, distorts it, and translates it into another form.”
In the way that these blocks interrupt the naturalized expectation of the perpetual and linear development of events across time, the artist’s series of video works titled Matter in Place (2023) thwarts the myth of a subject intentionality that is subsequently realized in the world – a myth that has been reproduced in film as a deliberate activity between the subject behind the camera and the object captured before the camera and that is rendered unstable in Cosma Grosser’s methodology. Each shot taken within different stone pits, in Matter in Place, is predicated on the artist’s ability to steadily hold the camera while holding her breath and navigating the steep terrain. “Through this working method, I seek a connection between body, material, and image,” she explains. At the mercy of the prevailing conditions that the artist encountered, the mediated images are the result of relationality, divergence, and a decentering of an autonomous, universal and mastering point of view.
This is where the feminist dimension of Cosma Grosser’s strategies arguably resides. As film theorist Laura Mulvey posited, it is not visuality, per se, that is masculine, but the historical and linguistic conditions that had molded film and its structuring of the viewing and objectifying subject that carved out and advanced prevailing notions of sexual difference. Grosser’s works may indeed engage the depth of temporality and embodiment as a “generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity,” whose reductive and marketable embrace is not only reproduced in the individualist economies of neoliberalism but within the frameworks and experiences of art that are deeply entangled with these very economies.
2026- Franziska Sophie Wildförster
With a background in architecture and fine arts and a keen interest in feminist filmmaking and theory, Cosma Grosser’s compositions of heterogenous images, scales, and contexts, seek to unveil the structures that underlie experiences, both in moving images as well as within the spaces that exhibit – or frame – these ambiguous transpositions. Thereby, her works call on an inherently relational perception, structured around absences and presences of viewing and decoding bodies, memories, and virtualities.
Take, for instance, the series film blocks (2025 – ongoing) – minimalist sculptural stacks of photographic paper, which translate a bundle of printed stills of films by the artist into tangible objects. Each block materializes frames of different films, each of which had gone through a series of methodological, technological and discursive steps and filters: the analogue images of close-ups of motives of nature, including a wavy surface of water, crowns of trees or the veneer of stone, captured with an analogue Bolex 16 mm camera, are digitalized, post-produced, cut, converted into printable files, and eventually installed in sculptural assemblages. As we only get to see the first frame of each film on the top of the respective staple, the modalities of experiences of time in and through these works shift from an accustomed linear progression or narration of sequences into a physically rendered superposition of moments. Rather than ossifying and spatializing time in space, however, the superimposed frames compose vertical interpenetrations of past memories, viewing presences, and forward-looking anticipations.
With Gilles Deleuze, drawing strongly on Henri Bergson in his explorations of cinema, this depth of interlocking temporalities, where the future is interpellated by a desire (here, curbed by a wish to know and see something that is not yet available, such as in the obscured sequences) and the past (activated by a process of retrieving and resembling what is not seen with images from memory) in the present moment of sense-formation and a thought-formation (sparked by the single available image on the top of the stack) is where difference, potential, and virtuality reside as moments of friction and hence emancipation from the automatization of consciousness in clock-time. Indeed, it is the out-of-field, that which surpasses the closed frame of Cosma Grosser’s images, that does not allow for a somewhat automated comparison to sets of space, which is fundamental to Deleuze’s ontology of “difference” – a process of continuous creations in time rather than ossified representations in space.
Intriguingly, these blocks recall the geometric shapes of minimalism. The sculptures of this postmodern art movement, which favored serial objects, automated production, and abstracted forms, in hindsight have been said to have advanced an increasing infiltration of the spaces of art with the logic of the late-capitalist spectacle. In minimalism’s focus on the experience of the space as a kind of reified and abstracted entity, its primacy on immediacy, minimalist sculptural objects re-produced the passively consuming subject. Cosma Grosser’s cuboids, whose vertical lengths are marked by white and gray structural sedimentations produced by the layered images, by contrast, appear injected with temporality – with a continued process of differentiation in duration that cannot be captured by representations – within an increasingly treacherous condition of experiences of reality mediated by images: when the instant consumption of signs as constantly deferred fulfillment of desires and identifications created by capitalism demand the erosion of historicity as well as of future potential outside the here and now. What becomes part of the experience of Cosma Grosser’s pieces, instead, is the bespoke out-of-field that refers “to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present” – a kind of immanent and embodied continuity. The image, then, is not conceived as a self-contained entity, but as something that emerges through its material embedding and continuously transforms in the very moment of perception. “In works such as Kinotaph and Concrete Film, I examine the fragility and mutability of images and architectural structures by projecting films onto different carrier materials,” Cosma says about her work. “Whether cast onto a translucent membrane or onto concrete, the materiality of the surface filters the projection, distorts it, and translates it into another form.”
In the way that these blocks interrupt the naturalized expectation of the perpetual and linear development of events across time, the artist’s series of video works titled Matter in Place (2023) thwarts the myth of a subject intentionality that is subsequently realized in the world – a myth that has been reproduced in film as a deliberate activity between the subject behind the camera and the object captured before the camera and that is rendered unstable in Cosma Grosser’s methodology. Each shot taken within different stone pits, in Matter in Place, is predicated on the artist’s ability to steadily hold the camera while holding her breath and navigating the steep terrain. “Through this working method, I seek a connection between body, material, and image,” she explains. At the mercy of the prevailing conditions that the artist encountered, the mediated images are the result of relationality, divergence, and a decentering of an autonomous, universal and mastering point of view.
This is where the feminist dimension of Cosma Grosser’s strategies arguably resides. As film theorist Laura Mulvey posited, it is not visuality, per se, that is masculine, but the historical and linguistic conditions that had molded film and its structuring of the viewing and objectifying subject that carved out and advanced prevailing notions of sexual difference. Grosser’s works may indeed engage the depth of temporality and embodiment as a “generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity,” whose reductive and marketable embrace is not only reproduced in the individualist economies of neoliberalism but within the frameworks and experiences of art that are deeply entangled with these very economies.
2026- Franziska Sophie Wildförster