Portraits in Motion

Since 2003, Volker Gerling has walked 3,500km across Germany, inviting people to visit his travelling Flipbook “thumb cinema” exhibition and creating flipbook portraits of some of the people he meets along the way. For his project with Multistory he walked the streets of the six towns of Sandwell to meet the wonderful people who live here. After creating his flipbooks, Volker gave an intimate performance locally to tell of his encounters with the people who are in the books who have shared their stories with him.

“At once a photographer and an animator, Gerling uses the flipbook to show us intimacy in motion. Each captured moment is a tale: the beginning and end of a smile, an awkward embrace, glimpses of a long-time love affair. They’re vivid and poignant—large-scale tributes to small-scale beauty. In the end, what the artist gives us is something truly special: instances frozen in time and then brought back to life. It’s a spectacle that invites laughter, bittersweet recognition, sadness and even awe.”

- Push Festival