Money (Geld)

Martina Sauter studied with Thomas Ruff at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and she has embraced her teacher’s occasional method of appropriating and transforming existing photographic material for new works. In a series of collages, Sauter combines stills of scenes from classic film noirs with photographs she makes or finds, installing them with a visible gap between the two planes. This work refers to a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt in which we first meet the villain (a serial murderer of rich widows), lying on a bed and smoking, with bills scattered on the rug below. Sauter has reproduced this shot along with a view that shows a similar rug, thus capitalizing on the doubling theme (a classic element of the uncanny) in the film.