Nin Brudermann tells stories. She begins her artistic investigations by bringing absurd realities and unexpected personal encounters into her practice. These bizarre, but accurate events allow Brudermann to compose fantastic tales that blur the line between fact and fiction, as she fills these often overlooked, in-between moments with her own imaginative interpretation of the occurrence. She acts as a seismograph for minor coincidences that seem to erupt into semi-fictitious plots, challenging common patterns of how we construct reality. Indeed, each of Brudermann’s stories requires its specific narrative and visual ingredients – video, sound, drawing, photography, and more – often vacillating between documentary, performance, and fantasy. In the mixed media-installation “Panspermia” (2005) Brudermann combines such disparate elements as an engraved silver lighter, a voice-over (triggered by motion sensors), ink hand-writing, and a faux asparagus in a plastic pot. She does so in order to lure the viewer into an astonishing world of intergalactic dissemination. Panspermians believe in the necessity to create life in extraterrestrial planetary systems by launching minuscule solar space ships that transport microbes. Diehard Panspermians, it should be said, think that life on earth was in turn seeded from space. Brudermann dissects this “scientific” hypothesis and supplements it with her own made-up theorems. This keeps the viewer guessing about the relevance and truth-value of the presented. Her role as storyteller allows her to control the information flow in a brilliantly orchestrated seduction, where she directs what aspects to reveal and what to conceal. With playful irony, Brudermann touches on the highly politicized battle between Darwinism and Intelligent Design. This tension is amplified when her disembodied voice, reciting the (totalitarian) Panspermian commandments in a seductive tone, emerges whenever the viewer steps away from the piece, thus pulling him or her back into the story. These visual and acoustic subversions, point to one of Brudermann’s key artistic strategies: her adaptation of the Brechtian alienation effect. For Bertolt Brecht, to alienate a character or an event is to undermine whatever is assumed in order to elicit elements of surprise and novelty. With this twist, the viewer is put on edge, ready to look closely and not to accept the given as the given. In fact, Brudermann plays with belief and its lazy assumptions. Her apparently fantastic insertions not only further estrange the narrative but also function like unknown variables. In “NASD Projekt Fledermaus” (2004) Brudermann mingles with a group of scientists on their expedition to research bats colonizing abandoned U.S. Naval Ammunition Support Detachment bunkers. Like an embedded alien, Brudermann infiltrates the system of the bat scientists and plays with their rules. She mixes footage from five different cameras (each attached either to her or the scientists’ helmets) into a two-channel video of peculiar nocturnal activities such as bat inspection, plant examination, and seed collection. Furthermore, she expands the absurdity of the situation into the actual gallery space, for a row of white pedestals hold a number of plants carefully cultivated in Brudermann’s New York studio from seeds dropped by the bats. While these plants are irrefutable evidence of the expedition, they also allow the story to literally live on in front of the viewer’s eyes. Entering one of her installations is a sensual experience. Similar to the work of Ilya Kabakov, Brudermann creates a parallel universe which possesses its own artistic logic. With blackened windows, walls, and minimized lighting, she creates a scurrile atmosphere of suspense in which the viewer has to puzzle together the factual or imaginative components, denying, once again, Aristotelian cathartic relief. Brudermann thinks of her work as an ‘epistemic speculation’, a place where knowledge can never be completely assured but is always at risk. Speculation opens us up to the possibility of failure. It also means we must confront ourselves with things we do not understand. Brudermann’s art ventures between the familiar and alien, the expected and the surprise in order to expose what she likes to call, ‘niche-worlds.’ These marginal worlds work within a bigger system, but are at the same time always slightly off. From this camouflaged position, Brudermann is able to sensitize the viewer to the possibilities of seeing various realities. (…) from: ‘Nin Brudermann, Adventurous entanglements’, Simone Subal, Eikon Januray 2006