Statement
Commissioned by the Film and Video Umbrella for “SELECT”, a touring exhibition with financial assistance from The Arts Council of Great Britain.
High Achievers and it’s twin piece High Anxieties was developed from a psycho-analytical concept prevalent in group therapy in the 80’s called EST. A person voluntarily takes the hot-seat with the aim to gain a deeper inside into self and change her self perception through feedback from the group.
“High Achievers place us in a scenario of female teenage angst. It feature the classic girls trio, in which two is company and three becomes a crowd of competing voices, a struggle for individuality or identification with the group. Attacked from both sides by her two friends, the central character is simultaneously the victim and the secret heroine. The viewer, too, becomes simultaneously involved and implicated in the course of events, caught in between awaiting further graphic detail or joining the stand-point of the moralising guard. High Achievers weaves between fact and fiction, between the fantasy of the cinema and the kind of ‘reality’ increasingly familiar from fly-on-the wall television documentary. The central character’s defence of her story and emotions likewise fluctuates between the believable and the imagined reality of teenage girls. The tension and conflict is built through words and not action.
The work of many contemporary video artists seizes on this tension between the real and the constructed. In Oechsler’s case, these creative ambiguities are manifested in the appearance of the work itself (with its continual shifts of point-of-view and perspective) and also derive from the distinctive way in which it is made.”
(Edited extracts from the catalogue ‘SELECT’, text by Josephine Lanyon)

Biography
Monika Oechsler was born in Germany and works and lives in London. She studied at the Goldsmiths College University of London and received the BA Hon’s Fine Art in 1990 and the MA Fine Art in 1996. She has been teaching at Goldsmith College University of London and other art colleges in the UK. She has received various commissions and awards and from 2002-2003 was artist in residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
Monika Oechsler has exhibited widely internationally and works in video installation, sound installation and photography.
Two recent solo exhibitions included commissions for new video and sound installation works and were accompanied by solo publications:
Parallel Worlds, November 2004 – February 2005
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria
At The Far and Farthest Point, April-May 2004
Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany.