Međunarodni festival videa/filma koji će se moći pratiti online, od 6. do 29. rujna. Više od 200 sati programa, oko 150 umjetnika.
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Ikono On Air Festival Opening Event at .chb
To celebrate this, we have an amazing evening planned on September 6 at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. The evening takes off with the launch of the official public screening of the festival program, projected on the Panoramic windows of the .CHB.
For this event, Ikono has partnered with Connecting Cities and Public Art Lab to bring to Berlin the Binoculars interactive installation by artists Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva. Binoculars invites you to glance at a number of simultanieous and connected events taking place across Europe. Among them will be the Bauhaus in Dessau Festival, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and Riga, the European Capital of Culture 2014.
Joining us for this event will be live DJ act Miguel Toro, feat. guest Aerea Negrot!
* The ikono On Air Festival will be broadcast from 6 September to 29 September in over 30 countries and will also be available online via the ikono livestream. You can be a part of the festival from home, from one of our festival touch points, or one of our broadcasting partners.
Program
Official Opening and Public Screening of the ikono On Air FestivalFriday 6 September:
20:00 – Public screening of the festival program on the panoramic windows of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 12 · 10117 Berlin · Free admission
21:00 – Presentation of Binoculars, an interactive installation by Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva, in collaboration with Public Art Lab and Connecting Cities.
22:30 – After party with live act Miguel Toro, feat. Guest Aerea Negrot
* The public screening and Binoculars will be repeated 7 September, same place, same time.
Just a few days left to ikono’s very first on air and online art festival. Get ready to celebrate this pioneering moment in TV history: from the 6th to the 29th of September you can watch more than 200 hours of video art. The daily program will feature artworks from established and emerging artists from all over the world. The festival will present contemporary perspectives on film, video art, and other time-based art forms, exclusively broadcasted on TV and on live stream. Wherever you are, you can now become part of a global community of art lovers.
Stop by the festival blog and sign up to the newsletter to receive the latest news about when the live stream will be available.
Festival program
The ikono On Air Festival presents a three weeks program with art films and videos as well as other time-based art forms thank to the participation of more than 100 artists from over 30 countries. A retrospective of ikono’s video clips will complete the festival program organized under the following themes:Time
Time presents a program dedicated to artists who respond to, reference and explore the complex and enigmatic element of time. -> More info and list of artists in this section
(Un)Boxed
This section is exclusively dedicated to works originally created for the medium of TV. Starting in the 1960’s and marked by the artistic debate around the square format of the TV, (Un)Boxed moves to the present. -> More info and list of artists in this section
(Re)Animate
(Re)Animate focuses on artists working with existing, found and archival material as well as popular visual languages and clichés to create independent new artworks. -> More info and list of artists in this section
Sublime
These works awaken a personal and emotional reaction, encouraging the viewer to read the works as sub-lime poetry and experience an aesthetic and impulsive seduction through slow, non-narrative structures. -> More info and list of artists in this section
Image: Anthony McCall
Landscape for Fire, 1972
16mm film, 6’55’’ (still)
© Anthony McCall
Courtesy of Galerie Sprüth Magers Berlin London
Time
Time and its presence in video, media and performance work can be both literal and abstract however it will always exist as a definitive element in these unique artforms.Alaskan born artist Reynold Reynolds use of time is direct. His work, often revolving around characters or physical matter trapped and subject to the processes of metamorphosis (Solid / Liquid, Fire / Water, Life / Death) and decay by time, expertly uses stop motion animation to create dark worlds set to a constant heartbeat rhythm.
Alexander Ponomarev’s use of illusion in Maya: A Lost Island (2000) addresses the coexistence of mythology and technology in the world around us. The work begins with the artist himself scratching out an island from a nautical map, while the 5 t fleet of the Russian navy, for a moment in time, “physically” erases an island from the world with a “smoke screen”. A video artwork as a report of an event or a moment in passing can disassociate itself with any truth and still be believed. One of the powers of the moving image is that it is romantically connected to trust, even in moments of complete disbelief.
Documentation of an event is equally the basis of a work by Austrian artist Hans Schabus. In the 78 minute video work Laßnitz (2012) a bridge is sent on a 1000 mile long journey from Austria to the village Ohne, in Germany, where Schabus declared it to be a sculpture from then on. The cathartic and beautifully shot videowork is more about the effort and struggle to place this object in a seemingly obscure field; providing a reflection on the act of art making itself.
Alexander Schellow premiering a new work for the ikono on air festival directs his interest to memory and the physical loss of environments and objects over time. In this work Schellow explores a river lost to urbanization, climate change and other situational factors through the use of animated drawings. The artist spent days walking in Athens Greece talking with residents located around the repurposed riverbed. Intentionally not recording any of these conversations he waits until night recalling from his memory and transcribing these thoughts into pictorial form. Time will move beyond the obvious connections to the ticking clock, dedicating instead a program to artworks exploring the perceptive and philosophical experience of time, place and existence”.
Selected Artists:
Alexander Schellow (Germany) – Catherine Gfeller (Switzerland/France) – Eija-Liisa Ahtila (Finland) – Elisabetta di Sopra (Italy) – Hans Schabus (Austria) – Henning Lohner (Germany) – Orit Raff (Israel) - Sæmundur fiór Helgason (Island) – Alexander Ponomarev (Russia) - Reynold Reynolds (USA) – More to be announced
Image by Orit Raff
(UN)boxed
During the (UN)Boxed programmed sections we will discover the changing aesthetics and progressive nature of video and media art, focusing on how and where it is seen, as well as what it looks like, and how this has evolved. Beginning at an important moment in video arts short history, the introduction of the Sony Portapak, we will see how technology has influenced the way artists create and exhibit their work. The introduction of the Portapak was significant as it created the opportunity for individuals, as opposed to production teams, to work with the moving image.
Through Deserts (1994) one of many works by Bill Viola screening during the ikono on air festival we get a sense for Viola’s connection to the technology he uses. The way that he masses content into selective motifs and repetition of imagery from different times and places shows a radical shift in production style from film to video. In his early videoworks this shifting nature of what the moving image can look like is perhaps characterized by the artist making the choice what not to record rather then what to record. More recently there have been numerous groundbreaking revelations in both media capture and video presentation. What media and video art can be and look like has changed radically. The screen has left the boxed television display of the 90’s and is increasingly hard to define.
The screen has become enigmatic and omnipresent, In Finnbogi Peturssons installation works he often uses light projection onto water that is being disturbed by sound waves. The resulting image is reflected and projected onto the gallery walls around it, creating a constantly evolving, all encompassing artwork. Art has also left traditional brock and mortar institutions, artist are using new social tools around them to connect with wider audiences.
Joe Hamilton’s Hyper Geography (2011) was first exhibited online and uses a style and aesthetic found on image blogs and argumentation websites. He easily creates fantastic imagined landscapes that are repeatedly opening up to expose new worlds within themselves.
(UN)Boxed will take you through the arc of historical technical developments, screening artworks that respond directly to the technology available to them at the time or using technology to speak of a specific period or place.
Selected Artists:
Bill Viola (USA) - Anthony McCall (USA) – Joe Hamilton (Australia) – Hans Schabus (Austria) – Kite & Laslett (UK) – Finbogi Peterson - More to be announced
Image by Joe Hamilton
(Re)Animate
Artists giving new life to existing, found and archival material as well as popular visual languages and clichés to create independent new artworks will be featured in this program dedicated to the reanimation of the world around us.
In Marcel Odenbachs Life as a dead rabbit on the ice sandbank (1980) the use of television sounds and visuals as well as scenes from the student opposition movement (APO) intercut with his own surroundings and images of his eyes, create a reflective construct of truth, fiction, public and private.
As well as the inclusion of artist social constructs and important events in their work (Re)Animate will explore (he productions of artists who look inwards towards the artistic materials and technologies themselves as a starting point for their artistic output.
Robert Breer’s work Blazes (1961), a representative work of the american avant-garde, is an experimental abstract film where the artist created marks and colour sequences by directly applying paint and chemicals to the surface of celluloid film. The process applied to the medium is a direct way of creating images without the use of the camera.
Emerging Italian artist Giulia Giannola will screen her visually stunning videowork Tinker tailor soldier sailor (2012) taking the name from a rhyme born between 1475 and 1695 in Great Britain before the Industrial Revolution. As children counted seeds, rocks and petals they would recite the ryhme one word at a time: the word spoken on the last object would guess their future job. In Giannolas film an assembly line of workers perform repetitive tasks extracting seeds from watermelons. Every character in the videowork has a task amounting to one single action however the factory seamingly produces nothing.
During (Re)Animate programs an important focus will be placed on artists exploring political and social responsibiltites through their visual mediums.
Selected Artists:
Pilar Mata Dupont (Australia) – Larissa Sansour (France) – Ma Qiusha (China) - Ori Gersht (Israel) – Sæmundur fiór Helgason (Island) – Tracy Valcarcel (Peru/Canada) – Marcel Odenbach (Germany) - Giulia Giannola (Italy) – More to be announced
Image by Giulia Giannola
Sublime
Video, media, sound and performance works that captivate audiences with aesthetic seduction will be screened during the Sublime program. Ideas behind the works in this section are portrayed through generating personal emotional responses and often appear as visceral poetic journeys.
Dutch artist Misha De Ridder creates slowly changing epic landscapes borrowing the aesthetic qualities from nature photography. Portraying simple natural phenomena curiously estranged, they appear as unreal realities.
Two 50 years old males having emotions (2013) by Ivan Argote presents a bizarre long-playing scene of two 50-year-old men hugging each other with deep passion. The work, a construction of the human condition, is simply and beautifully produced, creating a meditative response to masculinity and domination.
Iraqi born artist Jananne Al-Ani’ highly accomplished videoworks Shadow Sites I (2011) Shadow Sites II (2011) is created by capturing Middle Eastern landscape from above with 16mm film. She states ”Part of the appeal of using the dual technologies of flight and photography in this project lay in the possibility of the landscape itself exposing signs of survival and loss and becoming the bearer of particularly resilient and recurring memories.” The piece is characteristic of artworks in this section, that present important political or social issues in a slow, contemplative and most importantly in a aesthetically sublime way.
Selected Artists:
Adad Hannah (Canada) - Ange Leccia (France) – Brian Eno (UK) - Misha De Ridder (the Netherlands) – Pekka Sassi (Finland) – More to be announced
Image by Misha De Ridder
Joe Hamilton – Hyper Geography
Posted August 1st, 2013 under FestivalAustralian artist Joe Hamilton uses technology, the Internet and found material to create intricate and complex compositions online, offline and somewhere inbetween. He is best known for Hyper Geography, a short film and a tumblr collage blog with 100 posts in a loop which are linked horizontally and vertically. The ikono On Air Festival will show two of his films, “Hyper Geography” and “Survey”, but the work goes beyond the screens and expands on the Internet where it can be easily shared and spread around.
Joe told Rhizome: “I started in April of this year and, in a way, finished in August. I am working on a script that will once a day take the last post in the loop and reblog it. Then I will leave it. Or not. I’m not sure. In selecting the images I was looking at our notion of environment and the changing and overlapping definitions of natural, built and networked environments. I gathered images that speak of these definitions and blended them together in to new compositions. An attempt to create a feeling of some type of hybrid environment, a hyper geography.”
Joe Hamilton describes his Tumblr with a quote: “What in the history of thought may be seen as a confusion or an overlapping is often the precise moment of the dramatic impulse.” — Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture. (London: Verso, 1980).
In an interview with Hyperallergic, Hamilton said he “chose Tumblr primarily because it was where I discovered the online art work that initially inspired me. I stumbled across blogs like ‘Visual-Aids’ and other tumblelogs in the R-U-In?S network, and they instantly got my attention.”
“The idea that content could and should move easily from blog to blog is the most appealing part of the platform for me,” he told Complex.com.
In an interview with Creators Project Joe Hamilton said: “A primary aim when making my work is to assemble a composition that feels right visually. I look at things like value, color, texture, pattern, unity, etc. and just keep working until I’m happy with how it looks. The content is obviously very important too, but I tend to think about that less when I’m composing the work. I have a tendency to make my working process overly complex, which is often frustrating, but in the long term this has taught me to deal with complexity well.
Hyper Geography
The film accompanying the hyper geography blog is only one minute long and it only provides a glimpse of what Hamilton is doing with his virtual environment puzzles.
Frieze Magazine described Joe Hamilton’s video Hyper Geography (2011) as “a slow-motion flight over mountains, polar seas and deserts whose contours dissolve again and again, overlaid with still images, accompanied by the sounds of wind, water and birdsong. There are surface structures and indefinable patterns or grids, superimposed on mountain ranges and ice, desert sand and canyons, merging with them to form a semi-synthetic and sublime landscape.
The landscape becomes a dense, inextricable jungle of fractal patterns, visual noise, images of hands, faces, eyeballs, robots, cameras, all manner of digital gadgets, contorted architecture and, again and again, plants, leaves, grass, sky, mountains and minerals. In terms of perspective, the whole thing is so complex, so fraught with tensions, that there is no longer any outside, no beginning or end, and no horizon. The images all stand out on the surface of the screen, their various visual axes adding up to a strange mixture of smooth, all-encompassing and ornamental depth – as if Arcimboldo’s nature compositional portraits were mixed with M.C. Escher’s tessellations and Thomas Bayrle’s infinite patterns. Central perspective is displaced by a bewildering but inclusive multi-perspectivity which favours, not overview, but immersion. The only way to ‘look behind’ is by clicking on the images, only to discover others.
Joe Hamilton – Trouble in Utopia
Go to joehamilton.info/trouble-in-utopia/ for more Trouble in Utopia.
Online Projects
An Illusion of Democratic Experience – for Lunch Bytes, Washington, USALaser Simulation – for Parallelograms
Urinal Screens – for Polar, Melbourne, Australia
Div/Contour – for Appendix Project Space, Portland, USA
2011
Hyper GeographyOngoing
Sales, Billing and Product InformationJoe Hamilton on the Internet
- Joe Hamilton – Homepage
- Joe Hamilton on Tumblr
- Joe Hamilton on Facebook
- Joe Hamilton on Twitter
- How to Make It: 15 Rules for Success From Artists on Tumblr
(Image above from complex.com)
Artist of the Month: Misha De Ridder
Posted July 9th, 2013 under Featured, FestivalAs the ikono On Air Festival is moving closer it’s about time to have a closer look at some of the more than 100 artists participating and one of them is obviously Misha De Ridder, our artist of the month August. We are quite happy to be able to show you some films by this incredible Dutch photographer, who has taken pictures all across Alaska, Norway, and Switzerland, which capture the last few untouched environments left on this planet and the natural rythmn of the landscapes.
Sometimes natural phenomena can become so estranged and mysterious, that we are inclined to describe them as unreal realities. It might be the extraordinary shape of a tree, a mountain, a shadow, a cloud or the mirroring reflection of nature in a lake, but it is foremost the unfamiliarity of the natural aesthetics of reality. Misha de Ridder’s works can be seen as attempts to capture these temporary phenomena and atmospheres of nature within the still medium of photography. By seeking for the absence of human intervention, by waiting for the climax of the temporal aesthetic and by pushing the camera to its technical limits De Ridder’s photographs become both exotic reports as autonomous artificial worlds.
“To search, to disclose and to write with light is what Misha de Ridder does in his landscape photos and videos. He does not seek the comfort zone of the beautiful and picturesque, but the sublime. It is a quest for entering into a confrontation with nature as a given larger than ourselves, to re-visualize a greatness that is both realistic but also inconceivable. Landscape is a paradox: how can we hold as an image what perhaps can’t be photographed, the change of light for example, or the tactility of the landscape. The greatness lifts us beyond borders we are not always able to comprehend, not mentally, nor in feeling. Landscape is not only seen, but is a multi-sensory experience with knowledge and craft.”
- Professor Erik A. de Jong, opening speech ‘Solstice’ FOAM, 2011
“As an artist, De Ridder makes images that could easily become saccharine calendar art or empty exercises in sublime kitsch. Arctic sunsets, verdant dunes and dense forests have all been De Ridder’s subjects, but he has always succeeded in pushing them to a new level and forced us to look again – either through inventive design in the case of Wilderness or editorial restraint and focus, as in the case of Dune. In some ways, De Ridder’s works are so forcefully anachronistic that they are contemporary. It takes a brave and talented soul to tackle the sublime landscape and succeed like De Ridder.”
- Adam Bell, PhotoEye Magazine, 2011
On Air: Misha De Ridder
The ikono On Air Festival will present four films by Misha De Ridder:Golden (10:47 min)
During sunset the changing of the light becomes tangible.
Asgard (8:29 min.)
Storm clouds shadow play.
White Silence (8.01 min.)
After the snow, mountains slowly reveal.
Raftsundet (4.55 min.)
Dissociation from the wild.
Misha De Ridder said in an interview for Dazed Digital that he “was influenced by the German Düsseldorfer school: Andreas Gurski, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Ruff, etc. Later I moved away from them because I think they have too much distance to their subject. I want people to have the feeling that they are in the landscape when they look at my work, it has to be about experience, that somehow you connect. Also American photographer William Eggleston was an early inspiration – Hiroshi Sugimoto is great, especially the seascapes from 7 days / 7 nights. Mostly I like painters, seventeenth century Jacob van Ruysdael is fantastic, but also Gerhard Richter or Soll Lewitt and lots and lots more. There is so much great painting. Part of me is also rooted in land art, take for example James Turell’s project Roden Crater, the idea of modifying a volcano only to sculpt how the light falls in the interior, the sheer scale of that. Regarding film, Werner Herzog is a favourite, not to forget David Claerbout.”
Misha de Ridder (1971, Alkmaar, The Netherlands) lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
De Ridder exhibited at Juliètte Jongma Gallery, Layr Wuestenhagen Contemporary, PhotoEspaña, the Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Noorderlicht Photofestival, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Foam photography museum Amsterdam, The Museum of the City of New York. -> Homepage of the artist
Books
Photobooks by Misha de Ridder: Sightseeing (2000, De Balie), Wilderness (2003, Artimo),Dune (2011, Lay Flat), Abendsonne (2011, Schaden.com), Solstice (2012, Native Publications).
Videos
DUNELay Flat partners with Paper Tactics to bring you this video interview with Misha de Ridder about his limited edition artist book entitled DUNE (Lay Flat, 2011).
ABENDSONNE
Publisher Schaden.com, 2011
Design Mevis & Van Deursen , ISBN 978-3-932187-88-9
A
Misha de Ridder’s photobook “A” was shown at Workflow Studio in Brighton in December 2011.
I Love Alaska – The heartbreaking search history of AOL user #711391
This is a sweet and rather unknown film Misha de Ridder worked on as a camera man.
August 4, 2006, the personal search queries of 650,000 AOL (America Online) users accidentally ended up on the Internet, for all to see. These search queries were entered in AOL’s search engine over a three-month period. After three days AOL realized their blunder and removed the data from their site, but the sensitive private data had already leaked to several other sites.
I love Alaska tells the story of one of those AOL users. We get to know a religious middle-aged woman from Houston, Texas, who spends her days at home behind her TV and computer. Her unique style of phrasing combined with her putting her ideas, convictions and obsessions into AOL’s search engine, turn her personal story into a disconcerting novel of sorts.
Over a period of three months, a portrait of a woman emerges who is diligently searching for likeminded souls. The list of her search queries read aloud by a voice-over reads like a revealing character study of a somewhat obese middle-aged lady in her menopause, who is looking for a way to rejuvenate her sex life. In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction and dreams of a new life in Alaska.
Directors: Lernert Engelberts , Sander Plug
Camera: Misha de Ridder
Second Editor: Sander Cijsouw
Image on top of page by Misha de Ridder, Solstice, 2011
Taken from Foam Press, Courtesy Galerie Juliette Jongma Amsterdam
© Misha de Ridder
Orit Raff – Palindrome
Posted August 7th, 2013 under FestivalUtilizing both photography and video, Orit Raff has investigated objects of domestic life—soap, bathroom floors, drains—in a search for traces of the bodies that come into contact with them. This highly self-reflexive practice often results in what appear to be vast, austere landscapes. In her looped video/performance Palindrome (2001), a female protagonist obsessively stacks felt within the domestic structure of an igloo in a fraught allu-sion to the attempt to keep warm. This futile gesture is made all the more absurd by its juxtaposition with foot-age of a coyote comfortably navigating a frigid landscape.
Bio
Orit Raff attended Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem, graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and participated in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1998-1999. In 2003, she completed an MFA at Bard College.Raff’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, Israel, and the United States. In 2011 she participated in the exhibition “Videosphere: A New Generation” at the Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY and in 2008 participated in the ex-hibition “True North” at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
Her work is part of major collections such as: CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder, Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel In November 2014 Raff will have a solo exhibition at the Tel-Aviv Museum.
On Air: Orit Raff
The ikono On Air Festival will be showing:Palindrome (2001, 16 mm color film transferred to video with sound)
The Film “Palindrome”portrays two repetitive images that in the end converge into one: the artist performing a Sisyphean task- trying to warm herself, and a coyote running in a snowy landscape. Meaning is deliberately kept ambiguous and multifaceted.
Links:
- Orit Raff at Julie Saul Gallery- Orit Raff at Noga Gallery
- Orit Raff at Deutsche Guggeneheim
Books:
- “Insatiable” monography published in 2005- “Shangri-La” monograph published in 2011
- Orit Raff – Photographs
Videos:
Orit Raff, Sweating Sweet, 2008Abdominal Syndrome – Thoughts on Orit Raff’s Sweating Sweet by Yair Barak
Raff’s Character in Sweating Sweet is hardly one of us. Her appeal is one of a stranger.
Barefoot she is walking, wearing a dress, (more likely an apron) with sort of a pocket – an additional abdomen.
As an unknown marsupial she delivers an endless supply of white powder. As a metabolic by-product the powder is being thrown away and constantly (so it seems) – reproduced.
Salt or Sugar? The piece does not offer a definite answer. The title though, implies for the sugar. If that is so, the contemporary sower is spreading seeds of sweetness into the ever salty water of the ever non-sweet sea. A one man desalination plant, made of cloth and sugar, no pumps, no engines, activated by an urge for compensation, for correction and contradiction.
The action/labor is a repeating ritual, a Sisyphean task, trying to transform the salty sea water to sweet water i.e. in Hebrew drinking water. This action has no purpose but the object of the act. The urge to change the destiny, to take over, to interrupt the established order is an act of rebellion and obedience at the same time. Raff’s character is obsessed with shifting the rules in order to create a balanced reality in which there is less gap and contradiction. This is of course, the beginning of the end; the unavoidable recipe of failure.
We are led to the corrective system: Be good, correct, straighten things, stay in the lines, do not freeze, and don’t let the sea be too salty.
This is a mechanism of two layers: seduction and risk, naivety and awareness, attraction and restraint, rupture and repair.
Orit Raff, Hunt-the-Slipper, 2002
Copyright Photography: Orit Raff and Ynon Goren
Catherine Gfeller – A Still Life Pulse
Posted August 7th, 2013 under Festival“I feel more like a composer who likes to work in images, in associations, repetitions, superimpositions, rather than a photographer who isolates a single image. This enables me to include in the composition some suggestion of how our visual-emotional-affective perceptions work: with layers, flash-backs and disappearances.” (CATHERINE GFELLER)
On Air: Catherine Gfeller
Catherine Gfeller combines still images and moving images to capture her version of urban life, which penetrates public and intimate spaces with its incessant pulsating. Silhouettes pioneer their way through the beating, fragmented reality. The oscillating beat opens up a world of deep thought. The soundtracks are speaking, whispering, breathing, overlapping so as to create a mental state rather than delivering information.The ikono On Air festival is showing the following three of her films.
Commotions II (2008)
The urban pulsations extend their impact in intimate spaces and seem to invade our protagonists. Their gestures, their body, their quest are intensified by the oscillating beat of the city. See an excerpt here.
Vas à venir (2006)
While some people continuously pass by, covering others’ faces, bouncing from spot to spot, others stay still to gather all theses movements on one single reflecting surface. See an excerpt here.
Listing (2007)
Perceptions of rishes become tactile and echoing
See an excerpt here.
Pulses (2003)
Colored buses run through the city from on point to the other. From one city to the other, the citiscape goes through buses and swallows passengers.
See a preview here.
Image on top of page from We find Wilderness: Les Dérangeuses #7. 70 x 94 cm
Bio
Catherine Gfeller was born in 1966 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She currently lives and works in Paris and Southern France after having lived in New York from 1995 to 1999. After her Master in Fine Arts in 1991 at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Lausanne, she devotes herself to photography. She travels to many different continents (Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, North America) to create large triptychs on landscape (“A Matter of Landscape”). In 1995, she receives a grant for a one-year residency in New York. There, she develops a printing technique which combines paper, monoprint and photography on the theme of urban landscape (“Urban Friezes”). In 1999 she is invited for a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and receives the Photography Award from the HSBC Foundation. Paris inspires a new work (“Multi-Compositions”), focused on metaphorical urban subjects using various media: video, sound, the written word and radio productions. Recently, intimate spaces and daily gestures create new multi-layered compositions where urban rhythms still resonate, but in a more subdued tone (“The Insiders”, “Chimeras”, “Domestic Pieces”, “Spells”). Catherine Gfeller has exhibited extensively in Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Holland, Germany, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, Canada and the United States. Her work has been added to private and public collections in Switzerland, France, England, Italy, Germany, Japan, Belgium and the United States. She regularly takes part in art fairs, such as ArtBasel, Kunst Zurich, Armory Show, la Fiac, Ljubjana Biennale and Art Bruxelles.Links
Homepage: www.catherinegfeller.com- Catherine Gfeller at Stephen Haller Gallery
- Catherine Gfeller at Galerie Springer
- Catherine Gfeller at Wikipedia
Videos
Catherine Gfeller – Written in WhiteCatherine Gfeller at KunstMuseum Luzern KKL, “PULSATIONS” 2011
Catherine Gfeller at Museum Fine Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 2010
Eija-Liisa Ahtila – Fishermen (étude n.1)
Posted August 20th, 2013 under FestivalEija-Liisa Ahtila is a video artist and photographer from Helsinki. Most of Ahtila’s works are focused on women going through a traumatic experience, and most display multiple screens and vantage points of the story, simultaneously. This mode of presentation intentionally floods or overwhelms the viewer’s senses, sometimes confusing one’s ability to follow and understand the narrative thread intellectually, in order to produce a strong emotional impact. In her recent films she focuses more deeply into individual identity and the limit of the self and body in relation to the other.
On Air: Eija-Liisa Ahtila
The ikono On Air Festival is showing Eija-Liisa Ahtila ‘s film “Fishermen (étude n.1)”, the first film from a series of studies or etudes. Shot in West Africa it observes local fishermen attempting to overcome the strong winds and big waves to launch their boats.Bio
In 1998 Eija-Liisa Ahtila participated in the second edition of Manifesta. She was the winner of the inaugural Vincent Award in 2000. In 2002 she had a solo show at Tate Modern, and in 2006 her multi-screen video piece The Wind (2006) was exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In the same year she won the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize in Cardiff, Wales.Her work is held in the collection of the Tate. She is a former professor at the Department of Time and Space-based Art at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Finland).
Image: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where? (still), 2008, HD installation for 6 projections with sound. Photo: Marja-Leena Hukkanen. All images are courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. © 2008 Crystal Eye – Kristallisilmä Oy.
Writing in the journal PAJ, Jane Philbrick describes Ahtila’s films as “Smart, emotionally arresting, engaging, affective.” Philbrick continues, saying, “A self-described ‘teller of human dramas’, she approaches narrative equipped with a rigorous arsenal of postmodern strategies … One of her most potent tools, however, is a two-centuries old dramatic genre of proven emotional reach and punch, melodrama.” Although done in a more sophisticated way than conventional melodramas, Ahtila’s work likewise exaggerates plots and characters to affect the viewer’s emotions, with less appeal to immediate intellectual comprehension.
Links
- Eija-Liisa Ahtila on Wikipedia- Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Internet Movie Database
- Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Marian Goodman Gallery
- FILM: EIJA-LIISA AHTILA. Love is a Treasure
- Artpulse: Breaking the Rules of Storytelling. A Conversation with Eija-Liisa Ahtila
- The Guardian (2002) – With no beginning or end, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s tales of ordinary suffering are as wilfully complex as real life
Videos
Eija Liisa Ahtila – Visual ArtistEija-Liisa Ahtila is one of the leading contemporary video artists working with video, photography, sculpture and drawing. Most important to her is story telling and the variation and combination of time, narration and space.
We met her at her great retrospective exhibition at the K21 Kunstsammlung NRW where her newest work “where is where” had been shown.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila at Moderna Museet 2012
Panel Discussion: The Work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Eija-Liisa Ahtila. If 6 Was 9 (1995)
Image on top of page: Still from Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s “Fishermen (étude n.1)”
Elisabetta Di Sopra
Posted August 8th, 2013 under FestivalElisabetta Di Sopra is an Italian video artist working and living in Venice. Her videos and installations intend to investigate the most sensitive dynamics of the daily dimensions of life, expressing the hidden narratives within everyday life. Elisabetta Di Sopra was ikono’s artist of the month in November 2012. She also curated Domestic Visions for the ikono On Air Festival.
Bio
After completing her first degree in painting she began her Masters in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Her videos and installations intend to investigate the most sensitive dynamics of the daily dimensions of life, expressing the hidden narratives within everyday life. Behind the clean and minimal style of Elisabetta’s videos, lays a hidden density of thought and a unique approach to research. Most of them are focused on the female body viewed as an embodiment of memory. The theme of motherhood plays a crucial role in Elisabetta’s videos. As a digression from this topic, all of her works speak to ideas of humanity, commenting on the cyclical movement of everything that exists on a scale greater than the individual, continuously renewing itself. The imagery is tied to the repeated sense of being reabsorbed into the cycle of life and death.On Air: Elisabetta Di Sopra
The ikono On Air Festival is showing the following films by Elisabetta Di Sopra:Temporary, 2013
In a house disappear one after the other and the furniture is emptied of everything, including the owner of the house. Home and human figure are both naked, losing all traces of the memory of himself and his own identity.
Impermanenze, 2013
The body as mimesis of space. And if the postures are precise and elegant, the place is timeless.
Reaction, 2013
Performer: Laura Vio, Stefano Rota
It comes from a reflection on the human condition: the constant search for balance. We do not just have to continually come up with new strategies for survival not to “fall.”
Aquameter, 2012
A young girl who, by pouring some water – image of life – from her mouth into her mother’s symbolically restores the life she has received. The gesture embraces the essentiality and meaningfulness of ordinary events and encapsulates a broad range of interpretationsel with each other, where the family should be a reassuring nest becomes a cage that imprisons.
Still from Aquameter, 2012
Family, 2012
Within the family dynamics one becomes the hostage of the other. A quarr
Con Tatto, 2012
When love is complicity involvement is complete
Still from Con Tatto, 2012
Somnium Coleopterae, 2012
It’s a kind of game. A kaleidoscope, where a small figure (Elisabetta Di Sopra) floats together with its copies. Suddenly a bug breaks this synchrony, causing a series of metamorphoses that will lead the protagonist to become herself a bug. That bug will be then ready to fly in a new kaleidoscope.
In Visibili, 2011
Essential things are often invisible. The aim is to consider the presence / absence of women in the Italian history of the 19th century.
Funny Show, 2009
The children are looking at us… and laugh.
Light Water, 2009
A little girl swimming in water as dark as it was amniotic fluid, playing with a ball of light.
Skipping, 2009
Rope jumping, a childish game that seems to have been forgotten by the body… As in old age, when a person’s body is not a tool, but an obstacle for existance.
Sugar Dead, 2009
The body nourishes itself. It nourishes offering the first breakfast of the world to the newborn child, to the loved giving himself, to the mother coming back. Sugar dead is a work born from a reflection on death, on the meaning of gift and offer. It’s a ephemeral sculpture realized completely with sugar and thought to be consumed by and in the Nature. Body that has finished to wish and to be wished and that now is contemplated on his last offer. There is no drama but kindness in this gesture: the whiteness of the sugar with its crystals suggests the idea of dissolving, making reference to the concept of Nature that by dying creates the beginning for a rebirth.
Still, 2008
Still is a pause, a suspension condition that can endure forever… Like the waves of the sea, the future and the past run after each other, wrap themselves up, recur infinitely.
Aria, 2008
A lightness deafening.
The Crossing, 2008
A crossing ship, pictures that appear from the background and that appear inanimate. Then a flash…
Links
- Homepage of Elisabetta Di Sopra- Elisabetta Di Sopra at Arthub Italia
- 100×100=900 (100 videoartists to tell a century)
- Arts against Violence
ikono On Air Festival presents Hans Schabus
Posted July 10th, 2013 under FestivalThe ikono On Air Festival presents a choice of films by Hans Schabus, an outstanding artist from Austria, who was our artist of the month not too long ago and already represented his home country at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Schabus works with spaces and their perception, transforming them to his own liking in a very precise way: He flooded a gallery, transported a bridge from Austria to Germany, and his seemingly pointless film journeys and mind-boggling tunneling works have received praise and attention from all over the world.
Bio
Born in Watschig/Kaernten in 1970, Hans Schabus studied under sculptor Bruno Gironcoli at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he is still living and working. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout Europe as well as in the USA, Mexiko and Sri Lanka. For his films he often works together with his brother, the filmmaker Robert Schabus.On Air: Hans Schabus
The films of Hans Schabus selected by ikono cover the artist’s highlights from 2000 until today, representing three of his main artistic aspects:The artist’s sedulous effort and failure is addressed in Atelier (2010) and Echo (2009). In Atelier Hans Schabus works with his own studio space, which played a role in his earlier works already, restaging the finale of Sam Peckinpah’s western classic The Wild Bunch (1969). Echo is observing a man on the run through the mucky wetlands of the Danube. The protagonist keeps falling into the mud, but continues trying to escape from something or someone the viewer never gets to see.
Phantasmagoric journeys through the secret places of everyday life are the themes of Passagier (2000), Western (2002) and Astronaut (2003). For Passagier Schabus built an elaborate railway for a toy train with a camera being led through the hidden spaces behind the walls of the studio. In Western Schabus is rowing a sailing boat through the same dirty Viennese sewer seen in the film classic The Third Man (1949), while in Astronaut he is digging a shaft in the floor of his studio, filling up the room with soil before exploring the dark world he has created with his own hands.
Videos
HANS SCHABUS. LASSNITZ (Excerpt)Laßnitz (2012), with 78 minutes the longest of Schabus’ films to be on view on ikono, deals with the aesthetic transformation of a certain object by decontextualizing and displacing it. The original proposal simply read: »The work’s title is the name of the river, which was originally crossed by the railway bridge.«This abandoned bridge is sent on a 1000 miles long journey from Austria to the village Ohne in Germany, where Schabus declared it to be a sculpture from now on. (There is a video with photos from behind the scenes over here by the way)
-> Hans Schabus at Kerstin Engholm Gallery
Videos
Hans Schabus, “Nichts geht mehr”, à l’Institut d’art contemporain (2011)(English audio with french subs)
EXPOSITION DU 25 FEVRIER AU 24 AVRIL 2011
Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
Montage de l’exposition Hans Schabus,”NICHTS GEHT MEHR”
Belvedere Podcast “Hans Schabus”
(English subtitles)
Hans Schabus – Portscapes (2009)
Hans Schabus project was the next chapter in his ongoing series of arrival photographs featuring the sailing boat Forlorn. The artist produced a new photograph, titled ‘Europahaven, Rotterdam, 17 juni 2009′ which can be seen on a 5 by 9m roadside billboard on the way to Maasvlakte, and was also distributed as a postcard, which was available during a small exhibition of Schabus’ work at Futureland. In the new image the sailor navigates towards the huge container terminals of the Port of Rotterdam and a vast cargo ship. Sailing at a point which will become the new entrance to Maasvlakte 2, the simplest of water vehicles and a single man appear in stark contrast to an overwhelmingly modern manifestation of seafaring trade. Despite the speed, scale and efficiency of the port, the image seems to indicate that on a human scale the vastness of maritime space nevertheless remains a vulnerable and mythologically rich territory.
Hans Schabus, Next Time I’m Here, I’ll Be There (2008)
Hans Schabus’ installation in the curve gallery at the Barbican, up until 1 June. Schabus took chairs from various parts of the Barbican and arranged in the configuration of an aeroplane – a cuvred one, on its side…
Big Art: Hans Schabus – Flight of Stairs (2012)
An ‘Art for Buildings’ project by Hans Schabus on the Korneuburg Centre of Justice, Landesgerichtsplatz 1, 2100 Korneuburg, commissioned by BIG Bundesimmobiliengesellschaft (the Austrian Federal Real Estate Company).
Sæmundur Þór Helgason – Iceland Hard-Core
Posted August 6th, 2013 under FestivalSæmundur Þór Helgason is an Icelandic artist based in Reykjavik, Amsterdam and London. Within his practice, Helgason investigates the spatial and sculptural qualities of recording and presentation. His work consists of place-dependent video installations where the architectural- and the momentary context is depicted independently from, yet in relation to what takes place. He designs and builds his own recording devices in order to free the camera from the operator, giving the camera its own path of depiction with its independent gaze and interest.
He is a member of ‘hard-core‘, an Amsterdam and London based artist-magnet that operates as a non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian organization which aim is to attract critical thought and facilitate discourse relating to artistic practices and the surrounding philosophical- and socio-political matters. The group develops curatorial methods that objectify preferential aspects of exhibition-making that challenge the role of the art institution and the economic pressure of the art market.
Helgason graduated form the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2012 where he was nominated for the Rietveld Fine Arts Award 2012.
On Air: Sæmundur Þór Helgason
We’re showing three films by Sæmundur Þór Helgason:90°CCW/CCWR (1)
A camera travels sideways at a counter clock wise 90 degree angle along the walls of the exhibition space in a counter clock wise circular movement. What is depicted is the final state of the exhibition space including other works that the camera passes by. The recording is presented on a 9 inch lcd screen placed on the floor facing upwards.
Sweeping, Installing, Mopping (1)
While a camera hovers above the floor of an exhibition space and travels simultaneously in a clockwise- and counter clockwise manner, the artist sweeps the floor, builds up a screen on which the recording will be played and at last mops the floor.
Tourist (india)
A tourist video shot in Chennai, India. Some of the scenes are directed by the artist while others are recordings of everyday life encounters.
A direct link to Sæmundur Þór Helgason
-> Homepage of Sæmundur Þór HelgasonOther Videos by Sæmundur Þór Helgason
PIVOT POINT (2)2012, HD video, 120 min continuous loop, without sound ( excerpt).
The work consists of a slow circular camera-movement where the camera orbits and focuses on the point that it pivots. What is depicted is the building-up process of an exhibition. The recording device is electrically powered to maintain a constant speed. The tool that is used for the recording is transformed and reassembled on the spot to facilitate the presentation of the recording.
The work was recorded a week prior to the Gerrit Rietveld Academie graduation show on the same days as the show was open. With a random number generator the time of the recordings was chosen between the opening hours of the show. Each day a 25 minute recording was made in the center of a corridor of the fine art section of the show. On that same spot the recordings were shown one after the other on a 7 inch LCD monitor.
FOREST
2012, HD video, 3’06” with sound.
Location: Aspnäs, Härnösand, Sweden
Beemster
Hard-core session
HARD-CORE started in 2011 as an attempt to create an exhibition with six individual artists. While seeking common ground, conversations about each others work became the most important factor in these meetings. Soon the decision came that the search towards core-elements of the work was more important than rushing into a single moment of exhibiting. These meetings where gradually baptized into hardcore, hard.core or hard-core meetings.
The general rule of a hard-core meeting is that a certain amount of time is spent on each work. Mostly a conversation takes about two hours for every person. In this time it is up to the artist self what and how much of the work is shown. Most of the times the works are still in a pre- and rough state. These talks are not necessarily there to discuss finished works. But, rather to dive into the artist’s intentions and conceptual thoughts.
Question stayed how these different works would function altogether in one space. Would it be possible and necessary to find conceptual links. And if so, would it be needed to highlight these.
To trigger and inquire these questions HARD-CORE started to develop curatorial systems. These methods challenges the notion of authorship by leaving decisions to an objectified system.
While these meetings where overall rather private, throughout time public moments became something to feed the discussion and a necessary ingredient towards an artist practise. With having a public moment, such as an exhibition, HARD-CORE wants to function as an Artist-Magnet. It aims at creating polars of attraction for several fields in the realm of art.
More at the-hard-core.eu
Hard-core session with Sæmundur Þór Helgason 7th of March 2013
Hard-core session with Hrafnhildur Helgadóttir 9th of March 2013
Hard-core session with Daniel Dressel 9th of March 2013
Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont
Posted August 6th, 2013 under FestivalPilar Mata Dupont is an interdisciplinary artist from Australia working in film, photography, and performance. Her recent work explores aspects of identity and nationalism (especially in militarised societies) through the appropriation of memory, mythology, and history.
Pilar Mata Dupont about her work
In my solo practice I am interested in re-creating or re-imagining memories or histories based on fragments of texts, photographs or people’s stories; exploring how memory/history can be disfigured or glorified. At present I am experimenting with creating narratives, through film and photography, as hybrids of various mythologies and the memories relayed to me by people I meet while traveling. I am doing this in order to create a sort of new world mythology, stripped of the grandeur of the original myth, but bestowing a heightened reality and meaning to ordinary memory. These experiments further my interest in engaging with and subverting storytelling tropes, and resume my investigations into the genre of magic realism as a device to explore the effects of colonialism, nationalism, and militarised societies.
At this time I am on a two year-long research trip during which I am developing projects around the world, including stays in the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, United Kingdom, Argentina, China, and North and South Korea.
On Air – Pilar Mata Dupont
The ikono On Air Festival will be showing two films by Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont:Gymnasium
Ideas of the fascist aesthetic, it’s use in propaganda and the cult of the heroic sportsperson in Australia permeate Gymnasium. “Fascism is theatre,” said Jean Genet, so we have portrayed 20 athletes ‘performing’ various indoor gymnastic-like routines. Their movements are repetitive, drone-like, made with the poise and perfection of an ancient statue of Diana, and their smiles are like Ziegfeld’s girls in his 1920′s follies. Indeed, the Nazi soldiers in the propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni Riefenstahl and her perfectly honed athletes in Olympia (1938) are heavily referenced in this work.
We find that alluring visual effects of this kind of propaganda suggest a sinister subtext; that the qualities valued in sport – camaraderie, bodily and mental control, submissive behaviour and endurance of pain – are also valued in militarised societies. We link the sportsfield to the battlefield as a location for the demonstration of legitimate patriotic aggression, and success in both as a source of national pride. Through the display of these Australian replica sports heroes using a tongue-in-cheek, fascist-styled aesthetic the fascist nationalistic aggression is implied and transposed into Australian culture.
Winning work for the 2010 Basil Sellers Art Prize.
Avernus
In this work the artist experiments with creating a narrative as a hybrid of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and various collected memories associated with loss, and the moments leading up to the loss of a person from one’s life, through death or another form of parting. The movement was developed between the director and the two performers and was designed to reflect the transient movements of water and the act of washing/cleansing.
This work has been developed in collaboration between the CineB Festival, Chile and MUBI. Working with the Nine Inch Nails album ‘Ghosts I – IV’ and 36 international directors a feature film is currently being created based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The feature film is due for release in 2013 and will tour to London and New York.
More at festivalcineb.com
Links
Pilar Mata Dupont – www.pilarmatadupont.comTarryn and Pilar – www.tarrynandpilar.com
Hold Your heroes – www.hyh.com.au
Videos
The Musical (2001) by Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata DupontPerformance and video work
Hold Your Horses presents: The Soloists (a case study)
Working with WA composer Tim Cunniffe, Hold Your Horses (Thea Costantino, Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont) have created ‘The Soloists (a case study)’, a choral adaptation of Freud’s famous ‘failed’ case, Dora.
Dora is an eighteen-year-old ‘hysteric’ hopelessly entangled in the destructive relationships of her family and their intimate friends. Freud’s attempts to enact a cure are thwarted by Dora’s ability to elude the analysis. In The Soloists, the testimonies of each character within the case study compete within a sound world made entirely of human voices.
The work was developed during a residency at the Fremantle Arts Centre and presented in a solo exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre from the 21st May – 17th July 2011.
‘Ever Higher’ (excerpt) from Tarryn Gill & Pilar Mata Dupont
This work was created with the support of the Western Australian government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.
Filmed on location at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Interview: Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont (2010)
Image: Bloodsport promo photo by Kim Tran
Larissa Sansour – Space Exodus
Posted August 7th, 2013 under FestivalBorn in Jerusalem, Lariss Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Her work is interdisciplinary, immersed in the current political dialogue and utilises video art, photography, experimental documentary, the book form and the internet.
Sansour’s work features in galleries, museums, film festivals and art publications worldwide. Recent solo shows include Anne de Villepoix in Paris, Photographic Center in Copenhagen, Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, DEPO in Istanbul and Jack the Pelican in New York. She has participated in the biennials in Istanbul, Busan and Liverpool.
Upcoming shows in 2013 include the MuCEM in Marseille, the Bluecoat in Liverpool, Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, Harlem Studio Museum in New York and the Turku Art Museum in Finland.
Larissa is represented by Galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris and Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai. She lives and works in London and Copenhagen.
On Air: Larissa Sansour
The ikono On Air Festival is showing Larissa Sansour’s “Space Exodus”.Excerpt from “A Space Exodus” (2009)
A Space Exodus quirkily sets up an adapted stretch of Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey in a Middle Eastern political context. The recognisable music scores of the 1968 science fiction film are changed to arabesque chords matching the surreal visuals of Sansour’s film.
The film follows the artist herself onto a phantasmagoric journey through the universe echoing Stanley Kubrick’s thematic concerns for human evolution, progress and technology. However, in her film, Sansour posits the idea of a first Palestinian into space, and, referencing Armstrong’s moon landing, she interprets this theoretical gesture as “a small step for a Palestinian, a giant leap for mankind”.
The film offers a naively hopeful and optimistic vision for a Palestinian future contrasting sharply with all the elements that are currently eating away at the very idea of a viable Palestinian state. In A Space Exodus, Sansour does finally reach the moon, although her contact with Palestine’s capital is cut off.
This five-minute short is packed with highly produced visual imagery. The arabesque elements ranging from the space suit to the music are merged within a dreamy galactic setting and elaborate special effects. A great deal of attention is paid to every detail of the film to create a never before seen case of thrillingly magical Palestinian displacement.
- A Space Exodus was nominated for the Muhr Awards for short film at the Dubai International Film Festival
- The artwork above, Floating, A Space Exodus by Larissa Sansour, is currently for sale at Lawrie Shabibi. Find comprehensive details on this artwork here.
Links
- Homepage : Larissasansour.com- Artist Larissa Sansour Speaks Out About Her Ejection From the Lacoste Art Prize for Being “Too Pro-Palestinian”
- I Exist (in some way) — exhibition in Liverpool – Palestine portrayed as plastic state in new art show
- Larissa Sansour at the Barjeel Art Foundation
- Larissa Sansour at electronicintifada.net
Videos by Larissa Sansour
Nation Estate (clip)Nation Estate is a 9-minute sci-fi short film offering a clinically dystopian, yet humorous approach to the deadlock in the Middle East.
With its glossy mixture of computer generated imagery, live actors and arabesque electronica, Nation Estate explores a vertical solution to Palestinian statehood. In Sansour’s film, Palestinians have their state in the form of a single skyscraper: the Nation Estate. One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population – now finally living the high life. More here.
SBARA
Heavily referencing the 1980 cult classic The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, Sbara explores the castigation of Arabs in contemporary Western dialogue.
By adding an audio montage combining historical and current quotes on the Middle East to footage paraphrasing scenes from the original film, Sbara seeks to expose the cyclical nature of Middle Eastern rhetoric and policies and emphasize the psychological terror inflicted upon those at the receiving end of this repetitively stagnant political discourse.
Run Lara Run
This short video touches upon issues of identity and belonging. It explores the idea of displaced identities, typical of societies that have undergone political turmoil – and their diasporas. Cultural hybridity is also called into question.
Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T (excerpt)
A requiem for a small piece of land, Land Confiscation Order 06/24/T explores the notion of territory as constitutive of not only national, but also personal identity.
Bethlehem Bandolero (excerpt)
Bethlehem Bandolero is a kitsch video featuring Sansour herself as a Mexican gunslinger arriving in Bethlehem for a duel with the Israeli Wall. Wearing a big sombrero and a scarf, the artist walks the streets of Bethlehem and greets the locals before taking off for her final showdown.
The editing is inspired by television effects from the seventies. The humour of the piece is stressed by the underlying music.
By fusing world crises and blatant absurdity, Bethlehem Bandolero challenges the current dialogue on the Middle East by shaking its conceptual foundations.
Ori Gersht – Still Life & Big Bang at Times Square
Posted August 7th, 2013 under FestivalFrequently referencing art history, Ori Gersht’s imagery is uncannily beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between beauty and violence. This has included an exploration of his own family’s experiences during the Holocaust, a series of post-conflict landscapes in Bosnia and a celebrated trilogy of slow-motion films in which traditional still lives explode on screen.
In his evocative and innovative films and photographs, Ori Gersht weds the past and the present. With the latest technology he takes a discerning look at multiple histories and the ways they are communicated: histories that have shaped his own identity and helped define the state of contemporary society. Gersht’s images, with sources ranging from 19th century still life painting to the Holocaust, reveal the links between history and memory, creation and destruction, and beauty and violence while exploring the passage of time.
Bio
Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967, but has lived in London for over 20 years. Throughout his career his work has been concerned with the relationships between history memory and landscape. He often adopts a poetic, metaphorical approach to explore the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories. Gersht approaches this challenge not simply through his choice of imagery, but by pushing the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth.On Air: Ori Gersht
The ikono On Air Festival is showing three of Ori Gersht’s films:Falling Bird (2008)
Courtesy of Mummery+Schnelle Gallery, CRG Gallery, Noga Gallery, Brand New Gallery, Angles Gallery
‘Falling Bird’, is based on Chardin’s still life painting titled ‘A Mallard Drake Hanging on a Wall and a Seville Orange’. The film reveal a hanging mallard, suddenly free-falling towards a mirror like black surface, collapsing into its own reflection. On impact the bird penetrates the liquid surface and in doing so triggers an epic chain reaction, reminiscent of a geological disaster.
The film is part of a body of still life works, which are related to seminal old masters paintings. In these works, Gersht explores relationships between pho-tography and technology, revisiting fundamental philosophical conundrums concerning optical perception, conceptions of time and the relationships between the photographic image and objective reality.
Excerpt
The film allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging over old master still life and vanitas paintings. However, technology has aided Gersht in creating contemporary versions, bringing the concerns of still life masters into a contemporary context. By basing his films and photographs upon paintings within the long-established art historical tradition, Gersht draws attention to the painterly nature of his work which closely resembles these iconic master-pieces. Yet they are distanced due to the instantaneous digital process which translates every second in reality to a minute on film in the case of the moving image pieces and in the photographs, captures each shattering still life at a speed of 1/3200 of a second and stores the information immaterially as data on a harddrive until each is transcoded into a film or fabricated as a C-Type print, returning the image to the world of two-dimensional artworks.
Throughout this body of work peacefully balanced compositions become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation, is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.
Big Bang (2001)
Courtesy of Mummery+Schnelle Gallery, CRG Gallery, Noga Gallery, Brand New Gallery, Angles Gallery
In Big Bang, Gersht explores relationships between photography/film and technology, revisiting fundamental philosophical conundrums concerning op-tical perception, conceptions of time and the relationship between the photo-graphic image and objective reality.
The film depict and explosion of an elaborate floral arrangements based upon 17th century Dutch still life paintings. Dependent upon the advanced techno-logy the film depict an event that was inconceivable to the old masters. This visual occurrence that is too fast for the human eye to process and can only be perceived with the aid of technological devices, is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconsciousness’ in his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’.
Excerpt
Gersht´s film allude to the inherent shadow of death and decay hanging over old master still life and vanitas paintings, complete with moths hovering above the explosions. Technology has aided Gersht in creating contemporary versions of frozen life, bringing the concerns of still life masters into a contemporary context. By basing his film and photographs upon paintings within the long-established art historical tradition of still life painting, Gersht draws attention to the painterly nature of his work, which closely resemble these paintings.
Flowers, which often symbolize peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation, is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography and film to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.
Extracts from Big Bang at Times Square, April 2012
Dew (2001)
Courtesy of Mummery+Schnelle Gallery, CRG Gallery, Noga Gallery, Brand New Gallery, Angles Gallery
The video was filmed in the Negev Desert, the camera was stationary, and the entire film was created in a single shot.
While filming a Bedouin camp I realised that the viewing was obstructed, when turning the camera to an auto focus mode, I figured out that the obstruction was caused by condensation of dew drops on the lens. Since the camera was focusing on itself the dew drops were sharp in focus.
I filmed the process of evaporation ( over 2 hours, which were later compressed to a 4.5 minutes film). When the lens finally cleared up, the camera automatically shifted it’s focus of attention to the background ( the Bedouin camp and the landscape).
The transition in this film is very slow, while watching, the viewer is unable to detected the temporal changes, however, at the end, when the film loops on itself the viewer is becoming aware of the visual journey.
Apart of its political and geographical evocation, the film is exploring the relationships and tensions between the still and the moving image.
Links
- Book by Al Miner: History Repeating- New York Times: Beauty, Tender and Fleeting, Amid History’s Ire
- Guardian: War
- X-tra: Ori Gersht – Lost in Timeblossoms into art: Ori Gersht at the Imperial War Museum – in pictures
- “Ori Gersht”. Information Center for Israeli Art. Israel Museum.
- Art of Ori Gersht at Europeana.
- Ori Gersht at the Noga Gallery
Videos
History Repeating: A Conversation with Artist Ori Gersht and Curator Al MinerOn the occasion of his first major survey exhibition, Ori Gersht: History Repeating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (August 28 – January 6 2012), Gersht and exhibition curator Al Miner discussed Gersht’s evolving body of work and the diverse threads of history woven throughout his oeuvre. With a special introduction by Norman Kleeblatt, Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum.
In the Artist’s Words: Ori Gersht on Violence and Beauty
Ori Gersht: This Storm is What We Call Progress
Artist’s insight: Ori Gersht | Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present
Artist Ori Gersht talks about his book “History Repeating”
Ori Gersht: History Repeating published by Lund Humphries in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the most comprehensive survey of the photographs, films, and videos of the Israeli-born artist to date. This richly illustrated book presents the best of Gersht’s achingly beautiful work and explores how he intertwines spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and collective memory.
Giulia Giannola – Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor
Posted July 25th, 2013 under FestivalIndividual and society, individual action and collective action are some of the themes around which Giulia Giannola’s work circulates. The italian artist just won the first Völklinger Art Award for “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor” (2012) which will also be shown as part of our festival program in September.
The video takes its name from the English nursery rhyme datable between 1475 and 1695, sung by children in a counting game with buttons, flower petals, cherry stones, pebbles or other objects in order to ‘determine’ their future job: tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief. Giannola converts the game into factory work, staging a human production line intent on extracting seeds from watermelons. Each individual has his role, mechanical, repetitive, punctuated by the rhythms of the nursery rhyme which is recited by the last link in the chain who is involved in counting the seeds. A reflection on work conditions in a factory before the industrial revolution where the workers act like mechanisms of an immobile engine. The selection of each frame, the formal balance, the aesthetic care and the repetitiveness of the rhythm exalt this work of Giannola who succeeds in transforming the scene into a theatrum mundi in which we can all recognise ourselves.
Bio
Giulia Giannola was born in Naples in 1985. She studied Visual Arts at IUAV University in Venice, where she began to work with performances and video. After her degree she moved to Berlin where she is currently studying at the Universität der Künste. In her performances she creates choreographies, staged situations, and actions in public spaces to reflect on the value of personal and collective time.Book: Referring to the unofficial twinnings that reflect Berlin’s current immigrant population instead of the official equivalents of the city, Invisible Twinning explores the city’s long tradition of urban horticulture and reveals ideas of health in the widest sense: as balance and imbalance as well as on a societal and personal level, looking at how people navigate and share resources within a city. Invisible Twinning was published as part of the Asia-Pacific-Weeks 2011 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.
Images: Video Stills from Giulia Giannola’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor (2012), Courtesy of e x t r a s p a z i o, Rome
Videos by Giulia Giannola
Show ReelTiming
It’s a calm little place
Clock
Swimming Lane
This video deals with the theme “Time”.
In this video I played with different time levels.
The swimming pool divided in lanes is particularly suitable for this purpose.
Every swimmer has a different speed (natural speed, innatural slowness, innatural quickness…). The resulting absurd and chaotic situation, can be a metaphor for the collective time.
Despite chronological time is the same for all, everyone has its own “speed.
Kochzeiten (Cooking Times)
Awarded project Invisible Twinning
Meridian| Urban Project, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin
invisibletwinning.blogspot.com/
synapse.info/projects/invisible-twinning/
“Experiment über kollektive Lebensrhythmen”
On the May 20th, 2010 four actors paid 10 euros worth of supermarket items with coins valued at 1 cent upto 50 cents at the supermarket Real in Braunschweig. The aim of the action was to stop the flow of traffic in the lines and record the behaviour of the cashiers and the people waiting in line.
Some of them stressed, some of them resigned, and some of them offered to pay themselves, in order speed up the process. In the performance, money, which is conceived to accelerate commercial exchanges, ends up causing the payment process to even go slower and stop the normal flowing of operations.
The antropologue Marc Augé has defined the anthropological “no-places” (supermarkets along with shopping-malls, hotel chains, airports) as a category of places, mostly with commercial aims, where people are often inserted into mechanisms, characterised by standardised behaviours which they have learned.
The supermarket is a specific place which is part of a bigger system, and influences our everyday life and its rhythms, and definetly defines them.
Also see Elettrocardiodramma, experiment on collective life rhythms (1)
-> More at Giulia Giannola’s Vimeo Channel
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