Vienna Suite (1999)

During a stay in Vienna, Hafif was stuck by store window mannequins, which fascinated her with their highly artificial quality. The discovery inspired her to create a series of photographs of the figures. Standing in the street, the artist captured them in their ‘natural habitat,’ which is to say, behind a pane of glass. Folding the surrounding scene into the pictures, the reflections in the windows refract our gaze at the figures. On a semiotic level, urban architecture and the female body blend into each other. To expand this photographic series into the film Vienna Suite, Hafif resorted to a very basic device: she recorded the photographs with a static video camera and edited the footage to produce a sequence of ‘scenes.’