Before discovering the Super 8 camera as her artistic medium in the mid-80s, Helga Fanderl was fascinated by literature, languages, and above all, poetry. Instead of expressing herself in words, she became a filmmaker. From 1987 to 1993, she attended the art schools Städelschule in Frankfurt/Main and Cooper Union in New York. Since then, she has developed a highly personal film practice and created a rich body of work. A lightweight Super 8 camera is her instrument. She finds her motifs out in the world, or – as she says – they find her. She reacts in situ to serendipitous discoveries, transferring experience and perception, atmosphere, feelings, and thoughts to her camera work, taking up and creating rhythms in correspondence with her motifs. Her short silent films are in-camera edited and, like sketches of drawings and paintings, they display and preserve the chronology and intensity of their creation.

Helga Fanderl creates constantly changing programs, multiple, potentially endless montages. Each of them consists of short pieces that form a ‘film’ for a single screening only, a dense and at the same time loose web of relationships, correspondences, and contrasts between motifs, colors, rhythms, and textures. The individual film, in combination with other films, can be read and understood in a new way.

Super 8 is a fragile medium and not a cinema format. Originally designed for amateur use, it has its own aesthetic qualities and requires a more intimate space. For this reason, the films are projected from a pedestal within the cinema room rather than from a booth. You hear the projector, you see the projection, and the person operating the projector. Every screening becomes a unique live event.

Helga Fanderl also presents her work in site-specific exhibitions and installations. Sometimes she transforms found spaces into ephemeral cinemas, and she also collaborates with other artists, including poets, musicians, and dancers.

Her films are shown worldwide in film museums, museums of fine arts, cinemas, film festivals, exhibition spaces, and galleries. Some of her films are in collections such as the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Auditorium du Louvre, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kinothek Asta Nielsen, Frankfurt; and Archiv für Bundesdeutschen Experimental- und Avantgardefilm von Frauen, Paderborn.

Helga Fanderl has received a number of awards, including the Coutts Contemporary Art Award (1992), the German Film Critics’ Award (1998, for Experimental Film), and the Cultural Award of Hesse (2000). She was also granted a residency from the Cultural Foundation of Hesse in Paris and published “fragil(e),” a book and DVD, Lowave, Paris (2006).

In 2023, the artist book *Helga Fanderl, Konstellationen Super 8 (G, F, E)* was published by Hatje Cantz, Germany. In the same year, Re:Voir in Paris released the DVD *Helga Fanderl, Constellations*.