Shot by Dian Zagorchinov, Igor Dimitri and Chiara Nardone; edited by Dian Zagorchinov

Joyce Clay – Book I, Book II

Joyce Clay Bio – Book I Image Gallery – Book II Image Gallery

The underlying theme common to my works is the conflict or dialogue with myself and my interactions with the world. What should I hide about myself? What should I show? What should I reveal? There are questions, there is inquiry – and all of this goes on within the context and with the understanding that I’m sharing the space and creating an experience with other people who are busy with the same thing. The two works I have presented here feature performance, sculpture, and body in an intertwined relationship. Body is a part of the sculpture, and an inseparable piece of it. The performance is putting into question the presence of the body, and the experience is relating to the artist as a person or as a part of the object in that moment. As the designer of these frameworks for experience and an integral performer of them, I experience the performed sculptures as an extension of my body, and as a frame for my body that defines borders, declares division, and offers points of access and inaccessibility. In these works, I create a specific structure for the situation or interaction, which I assume has clear guidelines. However in reality, each person present, individuals loaded with imagination, cultural conditioning, social inhibitions, influence of their peers, will perceive, interpret and act differently in the given situation, and that’s when things get interesting.

Shot and edited by Dian Zagorchinov

Sarah Lüdemann and Adrian Brun – Blind Spot

Sarah Lüdemann Bio – Adrian Brun Bio – Image Gallery

The pile of paper containing thousands and thousands of sheets is reminiscent of laborious and repetitive exercises that are used for drill, punishment or mastering a skill. In this sense of an ongoing production and reproduction the pile also generates a metaphor for something one sits on top of in order to breed and keep alive, like a pile of eggs and in a more abstract sense a set of rules and traditions or a system.

In its multitude the sheets of paper become a solid body, which cannot only be marked on the surface, but also carved into, penetrated and shaped both literally and metaphorically. While the structure – the appearance of the pile – remains intact on the outside, changes occur on the inside. Both destroying and building, this penetration of the body may be regarded in a political context as a metaphor for underground movements and the act of undermining systems and ideologies, until they eventually collapse. In the context of scholarly, repetitive exercises the two performers take on the roles of master and disciple.

The seeming authority of the observer or the master is in itself a failure within the system, as the action carried out on top of the pile is not completely visible. Both the observer and the observed are aware of each others presence and their limited control. Somewhat both roles are interchangable, so that everyone is the observer and simultaneously the observed. The acceptance of this ritual is an absurdity in itself, however, it is so that systems continue to function or are eventually changed.

From Germany and Argentina respectively the artists are drawing on their personal histories as well as those of their countries, challenging current political systems and social power structures (class, gender, race, religion) still shaping our times.

Shot and edited by Marina Belikova

Kirsten Palz – Manuals for R

Kirsten Palz Bio – Image Gallery

The Manual as Script, Drawing and Experiment. I define the Manual as an open directive and conceptual sketch for a factual or potential intervention in space. The manuals are named after the industrial manual and prescribe the execution, matter and functionality of specific situations and objects. The manuals describe these developments, processes and objects trough texts and diagrams. Manuals for R comprises a selection of manuals written in 2013. These new manuals are a continuation of the series Writings as Sculpture started in 2012.

Shot by Dian Zagorchinov and Igor Dimitri; edited by Dian Zagorchinov

Emi Hariyama and Mariana Moreira – Impermanence

Emi Hariyama Bio – Mariana Moreira Bio – Image Gallery

As part of the theme of this work is paper, the stage will be set with multiple levels of hanging paper and a paper cylinder, in which one of the artists will wait prior to the performance. Once the music begins to play, she will dance, playing with light and shadow as it falls upon the paper. Suddenly cutting herself free from the cylinder, the other artist will join in the background, painting the word “Hakanasa” (“transience,” “impermanence,” “fragility of existence”) upon a hanging sheet of paper in Japanese. Both artists, dressed in paper costumes, will be covered with writing and words. As the first artist dances and the second artist works, the paper costumes will be torn from their bodies and the first, through the dance, will tear down the paper hanging with the word “Hakanasa” upon it, revealing another drawing behind. This work, inspired by the main use of paper – communication and recording of ideas – and its short life, focuses on the nature of change as well as the transience of ideas and forms. From the paper cylinder a concept is born in the form of the dancer, described and defined by the words applied to it. From its birth to its eventual destruction, it fights against becoming outdated, oldfashioned and useless. The initial black and white scene evokes the sterility of the written word upon paper, as opposed to the vibrance of reality, and distances the audience from everything except the world of written communication. In its fight against the changing context, the concept’s initial definitions and descriptions are stripped away, leaving it less and less of what it was. Finally, in a last act of violence, the dancer as concept will try to defy the nature of “transience” and “impermanence” itself via her attack on the first canvas, where the second artist will have written “transience”, only to reveal the vibrant piece of art behind: a reality which she cannot destroy, and in acting against it, she is destroyed by it. This work attempts to focus on the utter inability to permanently define or express anything, the inability of the human mind to create an immortal concept.

For the 13th year, the MusraraMix Festival is an international multidisciplinary event that takes place in the borderline neighborhood of Musrara, initiated and produced by the Naggar school in Musrara. The festival is a hub of artistic and social happenings, embodying the political and cultural essence of Jerusalem and Israel. Every year the festival is based around one theme. The 13th year of the festival is the year of NoEgo.

This year, dozens of artists from Israel and abroad explore issues related to ego: the ever present motif, hidden or outspoken, which is an obstacle as much as it is a motivation in our life and in the process of artistic creation. The program of the festival explores the ego from the personal point of view as well as from the collective point of view, through self expression and free will. It allows a glimpse into the relationship built between the artist and the community, between artists, and between people in general.

Our age is characterized by new social connections, information flow and virtual sharing. This makes life into a new fabric, woven by practical threads that align into a balance of power that is changing before our very eyes – between local and global, between the limits of art and the limits of life. The access to information and to technological means is now available to everyone. The viewer becomes a part of the artwork and the artist – a part of a community.

Ego is present in the creative process and in life. In MusraraMix collaboration is vital, inevitable and driven by human resources: Musrara students, neighborhood residents, young and professional artists, and the audience.

A WAKE is consciousness with an eye on an open coffin. A gathering in celebration as well as mourning, it is humor as much as horror. As a platform dedicated to interrogating time-based art, with A WAKE, MOMENTUM explores what happens when our time runs out.

MOMENTUM celebrates the Day of the Dead, Los Dios de los Muertes, with A WAKE: Still Lives and Moving Images. This exhibition combines, video, cinema, and photography in a co-mingling of media which bring the still into motion, and the motion into emotion. The exhibition takes the form of a processional of monitors leading into the gallery itself, which will be oversaturated with projections. In the tradition of inviting the dead to a party with the living, we crowd the gallery with the conversations of flickering ghosts; a saturation of images in dialogue with one another. Reflecting upon our daily inundation by images of death, where news programs sensationalize death no less than the fictions of TV shows and feature films, A WAKE addresses the media as the Vale of Tears, the surface between now and the hereafter, as well as the past. Co-mingling archival films with contemporary art, we enact a conversation across mediums and generations to celebrate life as well as death.

A WAKE is a ritual viewing of the body after death; a coming together to observe the end of time, to celebrate the transition through the vale. It is also an emergence into consciousness, as well as a consequence or result. Taking this transitional point between being and representation as our title, A WAKE confronts us with the process and the presence of

AES+F

DÉFILÉ STATEMENT

‘WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER’ STATEMENT

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“Défilé” (2000-2007), dig projection, 7 dig photos. “Who Wants To Live Forever” (1998), 6:25min. In «Défilé» we explore the way individuals deal with the concept of mortality by juxtaposing images of death with images of beauty, in this case high fashion. In pairing fashion with death, we have found a modern-day counterpart to the traditional juxtapositions of love and death and beauty and death. An obsession with fashion, symbolizing temporality, can be seen as a way to deal with the fear of death. It is an ancient preoccupation, as can be seen in the elaborate rituals in Western and non-Western cultures associated with death. Humans have always attempted to «decorate» death, based in part with a desire to ward off death. “Who Wants To Live Forever” is a critique of the global media, addressing not only the media, which uses the sexual scandals and the death of the celebrities but also the exhibitionistic behavior of the media star. The career top of a media star, who produces nothing but his face on the screen, is death.

ANNIKA ERIKSSON

ARTIST STATEMENT

FURTHER TEXT

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“The Great Good Place” (2010), dig video. This video shows the life of a community of abandoned indoor cats living in a park in Istanbul. “The Great Good Place” was shot in Istanbul, documenting the street cats who live in dwindling numbers throughout city. A regular urban presence, when removed from their environment they appear eerie, floating in darkness. In the context of this exhibition, they seem like creatures of the night; familiar sights on the streets of Istanbul, becoming familiars of a more supernatural kind. But perhaps they remain, after all, simply cats upon which we project our own realities. During 2012 ‘’The Great Good Place’’ has been shown in the first international Kiev Biennale as well as the Shanghai Biennale.

ANNA BELLA GEIGER

ARTIST’S CV

FURTHER TEXT

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“Passagens n.1″ film converted to digital media, 1974
Passagens n.1, is a video from the series I titled Situações-limite. The point of the piece is to bring visually, through repetitive movements of my climbing stairs – a sense of unfinishable path. Changes of scenery, going through narrow and broad steps, inside – outside, bringing a sense of continuity/ discontinuity, the difficulty of crossing. In my three repetitions (inside and outside stairs scenes) I perform slight differences, and the tiresome effort increases. In this and other videos from the same period I deal with the symbolic and also with the specific language of video. For instance, the movement of the artist crossing the cathodic tube in its 4 corners, creates an invisible center of the image.

JARIK JONGMAN

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

ARTIST’S CV

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“Sachsenhausen” (2009/2010) dig projection, 14 photographs. Premier. Predominantly a painter, the starting point for my paintings is always photography and it is now for the first time that I’m showing a series of photographs that were taken at the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, during a three month residency period in Berlin, in the winter of 2009/2010. Taken with a Lomo camera and presented digitally, the result merges the painterly, the photographic, and the cinematic. Thus blurring of media creates a timelessness most jarring in this tragic location situated shockingly close to Berlin.

DAVID MEDALLA

ARTIST’S CV

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“The Ghost of Isaac Newton in Another Vacant Space” (2011), video performance. David Medalla presents a video impromptu. Eienstein is walking on the road of Biesentalerstrasse Berlin when he sees the ghost of Isaac Newton, eating an apple, addressing an empty room in another vacant space. A dialogue ensues…. David Medalla is constantly shifting his strategies and media; when one thinks one has him pinned down as a situationist, a surrealist, or a conceptualist, one is stumped as he continues to endlessly conceive other fantastic, often unrealisable schemes. He is an icon of an artist who has made no clear distinction between his art and his life in a body of work stretching back to the sixties.

FIONA PARDINGTON

ARTIST’S BIO

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

FURTHER TEXT

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“We Dream of Gentle Morphius” (2011), from “Organic” dig projection of the photo series “Still Lives”
Fiona has been working in a still-life format within museums, recording taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) and other historic objects such as hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now extinct huia bird. In these works, she brings to a contemporary audience an awareness of traditional and forgotten objects. Her art practice occupies itself with both memory and mourning, and the ineffability of the photographic image. Her photographs demonstrate a mastery of analogue darkroom technique combined with the digital. Presented for the first time as a digital projection, these combined images, says Fiona Pardington, “work on a number of levels – once again my whakapapa/genealogy – random items that belong to beloved family members and important family members i had little contact with – like a child’s silver christening cup found by chance in a skip by my aunt when my grandmother’s house was cleared after sale- it belonged to my father…silk scarves found in french flea markets, shells taken from beaches important to ngai tahu because they are mahinga kai/traditional food gathered from the sea….seaweed, bottles dug out of the sand, midden shells from the beach the ngai tahu cheif tangatahara lived near. paua shells from otakou- paua shells are important food but also the shell can be seen as a tourist cliche and is sitting in a strange NZ cultural limbo presently. crystal wine glasses from op shops, native flowers and introduced weeds and pest plants introduced from overseas by the colonizers….”

PAUL RASCHEJA

ARTIST’S BIO

ARTIST’S CV

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“Crash” (2009) Series, 3 Videos #1
“Crash” is a car accident scene that continously reveals one picture forward and at the same time continues to repeat itself. Gradual picture exposing strengthens the curiosity of what would happen next, multiplication intensifies the brutal tension, which can emanate with outrageous beauty. Finally, tension and tempo can bring on a visual catharsis. In drawing out a moment of film to manipulate the media and the viewer, Paul Rascheja confronts the basis of our fascination with violence. Too horrified to look, yet too mesmerized to look away, we are caught in this endless moment at the cusp of life and death.

In collaboration with guest curators and international film archives and film festivals, we are launching a program of 16mm film nights. In addition to a curated program of screenings, each LOST AND FOUND film event will also be an open forum for artists working in 16mm to screen their works and open up discussion about working in this increasingly rare medium.

To mark the launch of LOST AND FOUND, we present our inaugural event as an exhibition coinciding with the Berlinale Film Festival:

A multichannel film installation screened on projectors from the 1920′s – 30′s.
Artists unknown (1920′s – 1940′s).
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Usually when we wish to recollect something from the past we see it as a still frame. It happens, that imagination about the far, often unknown past comes to us as an eye-blink, a single image hovering in time. Sometimes this memory of the image reminds us of something that we know or more often it has an accidental connotation. During the process of watching films, we usually transfer our private space into an unknown area, which could be unreadable for somebody from outside. Private stories that we could watch on the screen, go beyond both aesthetic and cinematic practices which are known from narrative and documentary cinema. An apparently chaotic plot, lack of dramaturgy, seems to be less interesting, but then again, this world without artistic qualities discovers for us an unknown or often ignored layer of representation.

Home movies evoke the world in which we as strange viewers, who have no access to the private stories played in front of the camera, become invisible participants. As such we recognize this thin layer, the border that divide the imaginary world from “here and now”. The process of recollecting events from the past works also in reverse: when we look at pictures taken by others, facts from our private lives are called to mind. Participating in this blaze of places and characters, we start to think that we, not the other, created these images – that we saw them like that, fooling our memories into occupying the space of the anonymous filmmakers. Following this logic, private stories carry on the dialogue with each other. Accordingly, screened images would somehow repeat the work that we as viewers have to do by ourselves in recollecting these disparate stories. Projecting our own experiences, we become the unknown eye behind the camera. The exhibition is structured as multichannel projections, all of the materials date back to the 1920′s – 1940′s and come from private archives, the people and places are a mystery. . .

Curated by Roman S.

Emi Hariyama has graduated from the Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow with top scores, and won numerous international competitions and awards. She has performed at the ballet theatres in Moscow, Essen, San Jose, Boston, and Leningrad, amongst others, and is currently with the Staatsballett Berlin. The Japanese-born ballerina, together with her family, furthermore organises the biannual “Dream Concert“ held in cities throughout Japan. Emi Hariyama is the director of EIA, specializing in Performance and Event Production, Arts management, and Arts Business Consulting. She works with artists, filmmakers, and musicians, maintaining an exciting interdisciplinary practice alongside her expertise in traditional ballet.

The spectrum of Daniel Dodd-Ellis as a stage performer ranges from opera, classic drama, experimental theater, and interdisciplinary performance. His studies of Theater and Vocal Performance at Sarofim School of Fine Arts in Texas/USA and at the New York City Opera have decisively shaped his understanding of improvised movement, vocal play and spatial awareness. Under the direction of Robert Wilson he performed the title role in the touring blues/gospel opera “The Temptation of St. Anthony“. Furthermore, Daniel is a lyricist and playwrite, composes poetry and successfully performs with his soul/funk band “Daniel Dodd-Ellis & Band“. In Germany, he has collaborated with Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Daniel Hall and Patrick Nuo, amongst others, and co-created two performances in galleries in Hamburg and Berlin titled “Love and War“ and “The Mantis“.

#NewAestheticVideo (2012) by Mark Amerika
This mock trailer for a movie that was never made but lives on the Web as a distributed narrative, refers to an eponymous artist whose artistic presence and remixed persona is a mashup of mobile phone videos, animated gifs, Google Earth glitch imagery, and the corrupting presence of a literary voice summoned from the digital-beyond.

Gen 244 (2011) by Scott Draves
Artificial intelligence and human designers come together in this generative, participatory “cloud art” work made with mathematics and Darwinian evolution by Draves’ Electric Sheep open source code. The essence of life is created in digital form in the artwork’s cyborganic mind comprised of 450,000 computers and people who vote on their favorite designs which reproduce according to a genetic algorithm.

04302011 (2011) by Sophie Kahn
Laser portraits that appear incomplete and fragmented as a result of disruptions caused by the models’ movement and breathing during the scanning process, suggest a metaphor of instability in our digitally mediated identities.

Streaming Museum’s fall 2010 exhibition featured at Zero One San Jose Biennial, Tina b. Prague Contemporary Art Festival, the Big Screen Project NYC, and throughout its global network of screens in public spaces.

We Write This To You From the Distant Future is a multi-media exhibition of work by visionary creators in the arts and sciences that focuses on a future world imagined and possible to build.

The exhibition title is a line spoken by the narrator in Immobilité (2009), a 75-minute feature length art film shot with a mobile phone video camera by Mark Amerika, with music score by Chad Mossholder. A remix collection from Immobilité opens the exhibition evoking questions – how will a technologically advanced world effect what it is to be human and what is the world with advanced technology to become?

In Michael Najjar’s bionic angel (2006) series (courtesy, bitforms gallery, NYC), creatures in the throes of transformation are a metaphor for inevitable genetic self-creation and possible immortality of the human body.

EMANUEL DIMAS DE MELO PIMENTA, Kairos: an architectural design for a building in Earth’s orbit, 2011

This video and sound artwork was created in memory of John Cage, René Berger, Joseph Beuys, Hans Joachim Koellreutter, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and John Archibald Wheeler – seven magical doors to a new universe. The sound art is composed of extraterrestrial sounds and was presented in concert SETI in 2002.

“Human must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives” – Socrates (469-399 BC)

“Following Nature’s own design principles, human may be able to produce most-economic designs while at the same time solving formerly insoluble design problems” – Richard Buckminster Fuller

Kairos is an orbital building, a privileged observatory of Earth, open to civil society, recalling the ancient Sumerian concept of ‘deep time’, projecting a complex of human values in a large-scale spectrum. KAIROS is a conceptual work that merges architecture design and art project in a same corpus – a crossing point between aesthetics, function and technology. Being an architectural design, it presents structural developments in terms of function and technological challenges. As a visual artwork, it crosses all fields of environments and functions, projecting unexpected images that are, at the same time, abstract and figurative, linear and non-linear. As an artwork it questions and criticizes the concept of contemporary art and culture in general. In few words, Kairos is a design for an orbital building.

Kairos was launched on September 10, 2011, at Holotopia Academy, Amalfi Coast, where Ulysses met the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. The work became a part of the permanent collection at the ancient 17th century tower which was transformed into a contemporary art museum by the scientist and art lover, Alberto del Genio, Founder of the Holotopia Academy which is devoted to music, art and philosophy. On the 27th of October 2011 Kairos was exhibited at the Robotarium technology/art center in Lisbon, Portugal, curated by its founder/director and robotic artist, Leonel Moura. and in November of the same year the book Kairos: A Bird Orbiting Planet Earth was released. It includes details of the project, and a history of space satellites, laboratories and stations.

Streaming Museum opened the exhibition CYBORG ALARM: When Technology, Imagination and Body Collide on May 28, 2012, from 6 to 10 pm at Big Screen Plaza, NYC, featuring artwork by 2011 NYFA Fellows and Finalists.

The artworks featured in CYBORG ALARM exemplify how art can translate these issues across time, space and cultures. Telling a story through images of the human dimension in the digital world, they could be considered “contemporary hieroglyphs.” They include:
 

Karolina Sobecka’s Capacity to Act in a World (2011) investigates the limits and meaning of human agency. It explores behavior within an interdependent matrix of elements, sets of norms and constructed histories. The piece exposes our capabilities for navigating and understanding the world in our overtly mediated environments.
 

In Dreams (2009) by Michael Greathouse is inspired by film noir and b/w Hollywood horror films and produced exclusively with composited computer animation. It depicts continual repetition of a single moment of a human portrait floating in animated waters. In Dreams addresses identity in terms of continuity and journeys through an anachronistic world with endless dimensions.
 

04302011 (2011) by Sophie Kahn is a collection of laser portraits of New Yorkers inspired by rotating 3-D models of people on large public screens in sci-fi movie scenes. The portraits appear incomplete and fragmented as a result of disruptions caused by the models’ movement and breathing during the scanning process, suggesting a metaphor of instability in our digitally mediated identities.

REVELATION: Jeremy Blake, Jenny Marketou, Yorgo Alexopoulos, Marty St. James
60:00
 

 
ARTISTS:

In the fall of 2011 the exhibition Revelation, in commemoration of 9/11, presented a collection of existential portraits and reflections on streams of realities that exist simultaneously in the contemporary world. Featured artists include Jeremy Blake, Jenny Marketou, Yorgo Alexopoulos, and Marty St. James. The artwork was balanced with a showcase of visionary programs that confront the world’s most pressing problems with solutions to bring about the Regeneration of society and the environment – The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, Green World Campaign, and the Ubuntu Education Center, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Jeremy Blake and Yorgo Alexopoulos are presented courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art in New York.

Revelation Part 1 – featured the artwork of Jeremy Blake and Jenny Marketou which is juxtaposed as a dialog that brings to view beautiful images that are concealing inherent danger. Blake’s Chemical Sundown aims at LA’s fantasy of exceptionally colorful sunsets that are in reality ominously artificial and caused by pollution. In Marketou’s Levels of Disturbance, a revolving sphere intrudes over video footage of the natural landscape of Los Alamos filmed from an airplane, mesmerizes and subverts attention from the reality of its radioactive history.

Revelation Part 2 – Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Redux is part of his Winchester series that distills and abstracts American myths of violence and spiritual reconciliation. The dreamlike flow of images gives an abstract emotional tour of the fearful chambers of his subject’s mind. Marty St. James’ Oneiric enters inner dimensions and confines of the individual, and reconstructed reality is explored in The Invisible Man. Yorgo Alexopolous’ No Feeling is Final is an abstract narrative symbolizing the interconnection between mathematics, humans, nature and universe, the real and virtual. Blake’s “Station to Station: Indiglo Heights is the fifth in a series of five individual time-based paintings,representing an imaginary urban transportation system. ”Contemporary anxieties concerning chemical weaponry, global warming gasses and mysterious technologies were also kept well in mind while making this work,” Blake wrote, “as was the sensory excitement of travel and the hypnotic allure of bright, pulsating city lights.”

Video portraits from conflict zones and architecture hovering above earth –
The intimate video portraits of Marines in Afghanistan by Balazs Gardi bring real-life connection with the men serving in one of the most dangerous conflict zones in the world. The work was created as a project of Basetrack, a web-based reporting initiative supported with a grant from the Knight Foundation.

This contrasts with a world-view from outerspace in Kairos – an architectural design for a building to orbit the earth by Emanuel Pimenta, that is informed by Socrates (469-399BC): “Humans must rise above the Earth – to the top of the atmosphere and beyond – for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” Pimenta dedicated this video and sound artwork to his collaborators, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and to the humanist concepts of Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Beuys and other visionaries.
 

 
Chemical Sundown, 2001, video still. Courtesy of
Kinz + Tillou Fine Art

JEREMY BLAKE, Chemical Sundown, 2001, Station to Station #5, 2001, Winchester Redux, 2004

Chemical Sundown, 2001

In the past few decades Los Angeles has outpaced New York City as the urban environment that best exemplifies the apocalyptic in American consciousness. One portentous prospect, global warming, is hinted at in the popular wisdom that LA sunsets are exceptionally colorful because the atmosphere surrounding the city is polluted. Despite the fact that today’s mass anxieties are often yesterday’s news, cliches surrounding a specific place sometimes hold interest for me because they indicate inter-subjective fantasy locations and/or events more compelling than their sources in reality.

Chemical Sundown is a time-based painting that combines architectural and abstract imagery, inspired by the legendary optical effects of LA’s tainted air. The piece begins with a graphic depiction of a horizon line that begins to radically change shape, indicating a landscape capable of liquefying without warning. Soon, images appear which portray a glamorous modernist structure, built on this land despite the inherent danger. This structure is equipped with sliding walls and large windows designed to let in natural light. The changing light, in combination with the smog, creates clouds of color that range from beautiful to ominously artificial. Technically, this work deliberately ignores certain restrictions on bright colors in the NTSC color system. Other “raw” elements are also consciously left visible. The intention is to enable something like the visual equivalent of the controlled distortion common in electronically produced music.

In one room of the structure a film loop is shown embedded in a set of monitors. The footage (from the film Casino Royale) shows a woman in a pink gown, standing on a pink spinning bed, enjoying a shower of feathers swirling around her. This image of unapologetic hedonism is used here as a sexy, phantom presence. I also like the subtle implication that the cycling footage might have a hidden, but specific effect on the function of the architecture around it. (I imagine this working in much the same way that-in the movies at least-a ray of light might activate the door of an ancient tomb.)

An oval shape is repeated throughout the piece. This shape is meant to recall the sun, the lenses of sunglasses, and is arranged in groups of two that resemble the number eight. The 8 shapes provide a visual link to an earlier and related series of works entitled “Bungalow 8″, which dealt with the glamour, decadence and ambiance of Hollywood’s mythic character.

Jeremy Blake, 2001

Courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York
 

 
Station to Station, 2001

Station to Station is a series of five individual time-based paintings (digital animations on DVD) that have been conceived to work as discrete pieces, but also forms a coherent series or system that, when shown together, adds substantially to the meaning and the impact of each individual work. Although each work is multifaceted, the basic structure of the series is simple. The first, third, and fifth monitor of this five-screen series represent stations on an imaginary urban transportation system. The second and forth represent travel between these stations.
The space intersected and contained by this system is meticulously gridded off, entirely design-mediated, and one which changes in color and mood constantly. Distinctions between inside and outside, and near and far prove to be difficult to draw, and largely deceptive when they are drawn. Contemporary anxieties concerning chemical weaponry, global warming gasses, and mysterious technologies were also kept well in mind while making this work, as was the sensory excitement of travel and the hypnotic allure of bright, pulsating city lights. For much of this imagery and atmosphere I have drawn from daily life in New York, as well as memories of the smoggy vistas of Los Angeles, but a major inspiration for the for the design of the three stations comes from an element of the subway system in Tokyo.

On a trip to Tokyo several years ago I was struck by the design of a bank of coin operated storage lockers in a downtown subway station. This bank was relatively large (from my snapshots I’d estimate at least 12 feet wide and 7 feet high). The door of each locker had one small section of a large landscape photograph printed on it. When all the doors were closed, a large landscape was visible, and the overall effect when viewed from a distance effectively simulated the experience of looking out a window at an attractive view. More often than not however, unused lockers were left open, creating gaping black holes in sections of the bigger picture. The fact that this apparently deep space quickly proved itself to be both traumatically shallow and defined primarily by its utility struck me as definitively contemporary. Therefore, each of the stations in Station to Station is outfitted with one of these banks of lockers, as well as abstract elements that have been derived from its design. In this work abstraction is treated not as static and monumental, but as something that may set in and wear off like the effects of a drug-or that may appear and disappear like a mirage.

Another, more general source for this work is “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s excellent biography of urban planner Robert Moses. Caro describes Moses as a brilliant, corrupt, and almost unbelievably arrogant figure-and the planner to whom we owe many of the defining characteristics of the infrastructure in and around New York City. In his book Caro has crafted gripping descriptions of Moses blasting through bedrock and destroying neighborhoods to build the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and clearing slums only to reinforce their existence with monumental housing projects. The fact that one person, and therefore one person’s subjectivity, is the source for so much of what I had always assumed was the result of a gradual accumulation of projects by different planners struck me as disturbing. In the course of reading “The Power Broker”, I began to imagine Moses as the Darth Vader of New York aesthetics, subliminally telling generations well meaning New York artists who have been influenced by their surroundings what they might have suspected but least wanted to hear, “I am your father Luke…” This fantasy is obviously an exaggeration encouraged by some startling reading, but its true that Moses’ grim aesthetics still help to define what its like to travel through New York. Moses was generally pro automobile and anti-mass transit, so there is a deliberate irony in my naming a station after him.

At its inception, rail travel transformed the way in which space was perceived and the speed with which temporal and spatial information was processed. Each passenger with a view out of the window was provided with a framed, flattened, constantly shifting landscape. In a way that we now take for granted, each passenger had suddenly become the director of a non-narrative cinematic experience. Station to Station draws on this precedent as a foundation for its formal structure in order to better reference its own, relatively new space-altering potential as a completely subjective landscape created in a time-based medium and accessible through multiple simultaneous views. In general my work draws from both traditional painting and time-based media in order to create something new.

Jeremy Blake, 2001

Courtesy of Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York
 

 
Winchester Redux, 2004

The Winchester trilogy and Winchester Redux are inspired by my interest in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. The Mansion is an architectural wonder that Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, constructed over the course of 38 years, beginning in the late 1800’s. After suffering the premature death of her child and then her husband, Winchester, informed by her deep belief in Spiritualism, concluded that the angry spirits of those struck down by her family’s guns had cursed her. An advisor agreed and suggested that she build an enormously large house–an endeavor that would both accommodate good spirits and ward off evil ones with the sounds of never ending construction. The result is an eccentric, sprawling 160-room mansion, well outfitted for the undead with staircases going nowhere, doorways leading out into open air several stories above ground, and miles of darkened hallways for the spirits to roam.

The Winchester films combine 8mm film footage, static 16mm shots of old photographs, hundreds of ink drawings, and intricate frame-by-frame digital retouching. They are meant to provide an abstract and emotional tour–not so much of the architecture, but of some of the more fearful chambers of Sarah Winchester’s mind. The abstract imagery represents supernatural activity, heightened by paranoiac glimpses of shadowy gunfighters, painterly gunshot wounds blossoming into Rorschach patterns, and a spectrum of images from Winchester rifle advertisements. The entire series is informed by the idea that the Victorian aesthetic (embodied by the Mansion’s architecture) and the psychedelic sensibility (referenced through hallucinatory manipulation of the film) are sympathetic opposites.

My interest in the Mansion is rooted in an understanding that the site is more than just a monument to one person’s eccentric preoccupation-it is the tangible outcome from a collision of social and historical narratives. The series ties together several mythic strands fundamental to an American national identity in an attempt to justify Winchester’s architectural free-for-all. The figure of the gunfighter facilitates spiritual regeneration through violence, and lawmen and outlaws are thus treated with reverent trepidation-as are the ghosts of their victims.

Beneath the dreamlike flow of images, the structure of the films is very deliberate. They first explore the exterior of the Winchester Mansion, and then reveal glimpses of the interior, with an emphasis on parts destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. Sarah Winchester chose not to repair certain damaged sections, preferring to build around them, as she imagined that the house’s resident spirits disapproved of these accommodations. The camera next zooms in on a cinema complex of three space-age movie theaters situated across the street: Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23, alluding to the fact that it is film, TV and the media that perpetuate the icon of the gunfighter. This is represented by richly layered montages of the Old West and pop-culture imagery, as well as art and film celebrities who appear as phantom stand-ins to embody the specters of the Cowboy and of Sarah Winchester herself.

The Winchester series distills and abstracts American myths of violence and spiritual reconciliation.

Jeremy Blake, 2004
Winchester Redux, courtesy of Creative Time and Kinz + Tillou Fine Art
 

 
Biography

JEREMY BLAKE (1971 – 2007)

Jeremy Blake was an artist of recognized accomplishment and promise. His artistic achievements and career were fast on the rise. He was considered influential and iconoclastic. Sadly, Blake committed suicide in July 2007 in New York City one week after his beloved companion of 12 years, Theresa Duncan, committed suicide–the reasons for which remain open only to conjecture.

Blake first garnered attention in the late 1990s with his large-scale, semi-abstract digital C-prints that rendered the appearance of being paintings and photographs, but were neither. He then began to animate sequences of such images to create continuously looping digital video works that emulated paintings and film, but were neither. His visually dense images often incorporated both abstract and representational expressions through the language of Modernism and voices of Film Noir. Blake’s aesthetically stylized works addressed a range of subjects from violence and terrorism to glamour and decadence, from metaphors of architectural spaces to profiles of cultural personifications.

Blake’s works have been exhibited internationally. They were included in three Whitney Biennials, are represented in twelve museum collections, and are a topic of dissertations and textbooks. He is widely acclaimed as a pioneer in merging the traditions of painting with a new digital world. He created hybrids of new media works, new genres, and a new kind of art experience. He made “paintings” that were digital prints and films that were “moving paintings”. He was an innovator who opened doors to how others will express themselves long into the future.

Blake continued to challenge our expectations, as well as his own. He dissolved the distinction between object and time-based art while combining abstraction and representation in fresh and exciting ways. He used the most eloquent of formal vocabularies to illustrate hidden stories, present cinematic portraits and portray social perspectives. He was a narrative abstractionist who embraced history, pop culture, biography and fiction, and he always made things to be beautiful. His works are seductive; his subjects are provocative; his meanings are profound.

Jeremy Blake opened our eyes and expanded our ideas as to what art can be and how we see and think about the world. His contributions will be forever remembered and his legacy everlasting.

Kinz + Tillou Fine Art, New York

In collaboration with lokal_30, MOMENTUM is proud to present the solo exhibition of Zuzanna Janin, THE WAY: Majka from the Movie. This exhibition marks the premiere of the complete series of Majka from the Movie – the first time all 9 episodes have been shown together. The serial video project Majka from the Movie (2009-2012) merges investigations into the history of art and film with a focus on rebellion. In the episode REVOLUTION (Heroes & Heroines) the artist addresses the history of urban protests: from the revolt of 1968, to the resistance movement in the totalitarian regime of Poland in the 1980s, to the protests against ACTA; thus highlighting an essential characteristic of contemporary art – the potential to visualise that which is ‘in-between’ – development processes, change, ongoing rebellion. The video Majka from the Movie (8 episodes and a pilot episode in collaboration with Tomasz Kozak) is a body of quotes from films and music of the last 40 years, which develops a vision of history and culture interlaced with ongoing political and social revolt. The video series will be accompanied by a sculptural installation, which will face Majka – rebellious fictional character from a 1970s film – with a boy, a notorious vagabond. In the episodes ‘JOURNEY’, ‘WALK’, and ‘THE WAY’ Majka encounters Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and talks with them about heroes, dreams and the role of artists in the world.

In the course of the exhibition at MOMENTUM | Berlin, works by Zuzanna Janin will be shown on SKY SCREEN, our public art initiative in Rosenthaler Platz. There will be a Curators talk at the Berlinische Galerie, and the private museum Hoffmann Collection will host a panel aimed at discussing the engagement of artists and art in contemporary social, political and cultural problems, as well as the role of art as a tool of social change. The project will be presented later at the Królikarnia Palace, part of the National Museum in Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and The National Museum in Cracow. It has previously been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and Kunsthalle Wien (2010).

Since 2005 lokal_30 has been providing the space and environment for various projects and artistic actions. The venue continues to operate as a place for artists to meet and work, a site for artistic activities, a backdrop for photographers, a set of art movies, a creative workshop, an exhibition space, and a meeting-place for the art world and everyone interested in art. The mission of lokal_30 is to serve art and artists, and give rise to new projects of all kinds: one-off events, works-in-progress, performances, actions, socially-engaged initiatives, meetings and debates.

ABOUT FACE. A military command. A reflection of our tumultuous times. A comment on the cult of beauty perpetuated by every television screen.

The works in this exhibition – ranging from painting to performance, video, and poetry – each address in their own way these turbulent times. Wars, financial crisis, environmental disasters. They have all happened before. About face. They will all happen again. Not even the art world is safe. Artists are busy responding, re-thinking, revolting. Some people stop and listen. The rest of the world goes on as usual. The revolutionaries become icons. About face. The next generation of revolutionaries rises against them.

What drives our destruction? About face. What drives our self destruction?

Is destruction at the heart of all creation? Is our sinister devotion to icons the same fuel we burn when we destroy them. The microscopic line between destruction and construction. A postmodernist’s wet dream.

Terrible beauty. About face. The beauty of terror. Yet even while we indulge in it, we deny the filth, we wear masks of purity, clean facades maintained by wipe-clean surfaces. Anything to save face. About face.

Reversal, revolution, repetition, identity, defacement, destruction, rebirth. The three emerging talents in this group exhibition converge upon these issues in surprising ways. Jarik Jongman, a painter, invokes performance for the first time in his interactive painting series, (de)facing revolt (2012). Ensuring the complicity of the spectator, this exhibition is not about watching – it is about being. States of being and becoming are reflected through Mariana Hahn’s evocative performance, I Sweat You (2012), her poetry sticking in our brains. The rhythms of Sarah Ludemann’s video works stick too from the relentless demolition of body in Schnitzelporno (there within the tender embrace of humanity’s structures) (2012), to the repeated dissintegration of structure in flap goes the wing of the butterfly in slow motion. and I close my eyes and sense the cracks in my flesh (2010-2012). Flesh and blood or concrete and steel, it is all created to be destroyed.

ARTIST’S BIO

ARTIST’S WEBSITE

Cao Fei, Rabid Dogs (video, 8 mins), 2002

Artist’s statement:

“We love whips; we need to bite; we dare not bark. We work tamely, faithfully and patiently like dogs. We can be summoned or dismissed at the bidding of our master and understand his intentions clearly at once. We are surely a miserable pack of dogs and we are willing to act as beasts that are locked in the trap of modernization. When will we be daring enough to bite our master, to take off the masks, to strip off the furs and be a real pack of rabid dogs?”

Cao Fei (1978) is a Chinese artist based in Beijing. She is known for her multimedia installations and videos, and is acknowledged as one of the key artists of a new generation emerging from Mainland China. She mixes social commentary, popular aesthetics, references to Surrealism, and documentary conventions in her films and installations. Her works reflect on the rapid and chaotic changes that are occurring in Chinese society today. Her recent project RMB CITY (2008-2011) has been exhibited in Deutsche Guggenheim (2010)，Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2009), Serpentine Gallery, London (2008), Yokohama Triennale (2008). I. Mirror by China Tracy, 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), Chinese Pavilion; RMB CITY- A Second Life City Planning has been exhibited in Istanbul Biennale (2007); Whose Utopia, TATE Liverpool (2007), Nu Project, Lyon Biennale (2007). Cao Fei also participated in 17th & 15th Biennale of Sydney (2006/2010), Moscow Biennale (2005), Shanghai Biennale (2004), 50th Venice Biennale (2003). She also exhibited video works in Guggenheim Museum (New York), the International Center of Photography (New York), MoMA (New York), P.S.1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Musee d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris (Paris), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo). And Cao Fei is the finalist of Hugo Boss Prize 2010, and won The 2006 Best Young Artist Award by CCAA (Chinese Contemporary Art Award ).

Liang Juhui, One Hour Game (video of performance installation, Skyscraper Construction Site, Tianhe, Guangzhou), 1996

Liang Juhui’s action “One Hour Game” disturbs the “normal process” of vertical urban expansion. In an elevator in a skyscraper under construction in Guangzhou’s new town, he sets up a video game and plays the game for an hour while the elevator continues to move up and down, carrying workers to work. The usual path of construction is hence disturbed. What is more interesting is that, here, there is a detournement of the metaphoric significance of the elevator through the intervention of the game. The elevator has become more like a sight-seeing elevator in an amusement park than a construction tool.

Liang Juhui was one of the founders of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group which emerged in Guangzhou during the early 1990’s. The members of the group, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Lin Yilin, and Xu Tan, presented regular performances and site-specific installations to directly intervene with the rapid social and political transformation of the city of Guangzhou. Being one of the first cities in which the new economic experiment of China took place, the rate of urban development in the early 90’s was unprecedented. Being keenly aware of the limited time frame of the economic open door policy, the order of the day for the vast majority was to accumulate as much wealth in the shortest time possible. During this time, popular culture and media from nearby Hong Kong as well as icons and merchandises from the “West” were dutifully consumed with little resistance shown. The direction of culture was adrift in a socialist turned ultra-capitalist society. The lack of official venues for hosting exhibitions or cultural events in the early 1990s meant the working group had to take their actions to the street. The Big Tail Elephant Working Group was crucial in preserving the integrity of critical artistic practice at such a unique historical juncture. They questioned the common ambition in the development of the city at the expense of denying social and moral values. Acutely aware of the ineffectiveness of the avant-garde movement of the early 1980s in China to refute official ideology, the group’s mission was less to initiate social change than to question the relevancy of contemporary art in everyday life. (Hou Hanru, “Barricades, Big Tail Elephant Working Group”)

ARTIST’S BIO

ARTIST’S WEBSITE

Cui Xiuwen, Ladies Room (video), 2000

Artist Statement:

“While producing art works, I often angel sexuality to explore the problems of femininity and woman as part of the society. In Ladies, I chose the nightclub’s ladies’ room where the female workers from the club come to do -various activities. The scene showed a reality beyond one’s imagination. The scene reveals a very serious problem in society, and the problem will have its effects in history. On the surface, what I shot was about the state of women, but what I cared more was the social class behind scenes and how viewers read the work from cultural, historical and economic perspective. I chose the video to shoot this work, and the moving image expressed clearly the concept of time and space and content.”

Not particularly much to be seen here: some girls in front of a mirror readjusting dress and makeup. A much less stylish woman doing some clean up amongst them. These two images are stills from the 6’ 12” video Ladies Room by Cui Xiuwen. Trained as a painter, she has been focusing on themes of sexuality and gender early on, once shocking her audience with paintings of naked men whose genitals she particularly emphasized; something even more uncommon in China than in the West. At the occasion of a dance night out in a posh Beijing club, she realized that there is another side to the beautiful glamour girls on the dance floor. “Like hell in heaven, or heaven in hell.” as she puts it. Nevertheless, she felt that oil painting, her main artistic medium so far, would not be sufficient to express what she wanted to communicate. Shortly afterwards Cui came into contact with shooting video and had found her technique. Hiding a camera in the ladies’ room of an expensive Beijing night-club, she simply filmed the women in front of the mirror. They rearrange or change clothing, check out their appearance, admire themselves, re-do makeup and exchange gossip. It is only towards the end of the video that it becomes apparent that what seems to be ordinary girls enjoying an evening out in fact are prostitutes having a break from work. They also tuck away their money in bras and briefs, call their customers to arrange for new dates and catch their breath before returning to the clubroom. Cui does not comment on the scenes but offers a rare insight on one particular facet of the much-acclaimed China boom. Like Zhang Dali’s head down suspended plaster casts of migrant workers in Chinese Offspring the women in the lavatory do the lowest of services to those who profit most of the streams of money in contemporary China. And by doing so, add to the glamor of the scene. (Christof Buettner)

“Staging the World – Performing the Floor” introduces artistic positions, which address the interplay between the individual and society with the help of performance and visual media. Depicted are psychological and social courses of action as well as concealed communication features in order to highlight, how moral conceptions, rituals and conventions guide our action, how the person is confronted with expectations of the group and how it tries to fulfill them by means of adaption, rearrangement and canalization.

The floor is the perfect medium for staging this picture. As an often underestimated architectural side phenomenon it is nevertheless the way to the primarily “important” rooms of a building and therefore in its ambivalence neither the inside nor the outside, but both the interface and the indicator between these extremes.

Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist. Often working collaboratively, his practice is concerned with histories of anti-colonialism and transcultural exchange. He was invited through 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art to perform at MOMENTUM|Sydney (2010), with “Who’s Eating Gilberto Gil”, a performance-lecture using history, popular culture, art and music, invoking the tropes of cannibalism to discuss recent ideas about race, settler–colonialism and contemporary necropolitics. M O M E N T U M is proud to invite Sivanesan back with another performance-lecture on the topics which take his research-based practice around the world.

The Anticolonials traces a thread of anti-colonial anti-politics through history and into the present, offering a patchwork reading from scraps of material culture and glimpses of contemporary mediated life. Itinerant artist Sumugan Sivanesan will present a performance-lecture developed whilst shifting between Sydney, London and Berlin.

MOMENTUM brings together, for the first time, selected video works representing the trajectory of Sumugan Sivanesan’s practice. From the early works of 2003-2004, experimenting with form, sound, and the body, Sivanesan’s practice moves toward a growing fascination with the body politic, creating works increasingly documentary and political in nature, and finally moving into research, installation, and performances which take the form of lectures building stories around remarkable histories almost lost to popular consciousness. By way of this dialogue with both overt and hidden histories, Sivanesen delves into the roots of nationalism and the mythologies of identity.

In a trajectory which moves through video, sound, electronic arts, and music, by 2009 Sivanesan is engaged with documenting the cultural upheavals unraveling around him, literally, in the predominantly indigenous neighborhood of Redfern, coincidentally where MOMENTUM | Sydney took place in 2010. Sivanesan’s research into the causes of these upheavals develops into a broader interest in “the part that mythmaking has played in the history of colonialism around the globe. In performing this kind of exploration, Sivanesan’s more recent work has drawn deeply on the profound contradictions at the heart of both colonising and de-colonising processes – and the inequities, absurdities and impossibilities that crop up in the life stories of particular people who have been caught right where these contradictions are revealed at their sharpest…

OSVALDO BUDET

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Born in 1978 in Puerto Rico, Osvaldo Budet graduated with a Bachelors in Painting from Escuela de Arts Plasticas, then earning a Masters of Fine Arts in the US. Coming from a colony (Puerto Rico) in Post-Colonial times has given Osvaldo a unique perspective on the relationship between authorities and the powerless. This new body of work explores what happens when Colonization is used to impose control on the resources and land which belong to nobody or everybody. Osvaldo sees his role as art maker as a colonizing force, and coupled with his fascination for political conflict, this drives his documentary film practice. It is the desire to create and inhabit ‘truthful’ storytelling which compels him most. These worlds of politics and poetics, of fiction and truth are tightly intertwined. During Osvaldo’s recent artist in residence high in the Arctic circle on the Archipelago of Svalbard with the the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, he began to explore the notion of the expedition as an interrogation of the scientific, social and economic realities which lead to climate disruption as nations simultaneously explore and exploit this landscape. Osvaldo’s recent film, paintings and photographs examine this landscape of tundra and ice, a place which belongs to nobody, a land colonized by many and a fragile region which until now has been keeping this world in balance. Works shown courtesy of Walter OTero Contemporary Art (Puerto Rico).

HANNU KARJALAINEN

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Born in Helsinki in 1978, Hannu Karjalainen develops his video practice from a grounding in photography and his training in the Helsinki School with a Masters in Photography. He has works in many museums and private collections. Nanjing Grand Theatre (2012) explores the memory inherited in an architectonic site. The Nanjing Grand Theatre, a western classical style building designed by Chinese architects originally housed western cinema in the 1930s Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution the building was dedicated to Beijing Opera and temporarily called Revolution Concert Hall. Now renamed Shanghai Concert Hall, the building is a prime location for classical music concerts. A decade ago, this building was moved 70 meters from its original location. The video work is shot on the original site of the concert hall, where an elevated highway now passes through the city. Passing lights and shadows take human forms as we hear snippets from the soundtrack of the very first film screened in Nanjing Grand Theatre, Broadway (1929). The film adaptation of the musical is now deemed lost in its original form, with only an edited version made from separate silent and talkie versions existing. Work shown courtesy of Gallery Taik (Berlin / Helsinki).

Committed to supporting artists and artistic innovation, MOMENTUM works with both local and global artists, from students to superstars. With an ongoing exhibition program active both in Berlin and abroad, in collaboration with museums and institutions in our global network, MOMENTUM brings to Berlin work by international artists that would not otherwise have been seen here, and ensures an international audience for exceptional local artists. MOMENTUM plays an active role in the Berlin art community and works with exceptional Berlin-based artists to enable them to make new work for a global audience. MOMENTUM generates exchange, sharing resources, and broadening audiences by providing links and communications between international networks of artists and institutions.

Australian artist Sam Smith has long been interested in the capacity of moving images to manipulate our sense of time and space and to absorb viewers into fictitious realms. This project is the first time he has shot on celluloid film in addition to video, bringing a new dimension to his exploration of cinematic conventions in an era of digital production. Sam Smith is a video and installation artist currently based in Berlin, Germany.

MAP OFFICE is a multidisciplinary platform devised by Laurent Gutierrez (Casablanca, 1966) and Valérie Portefaix (Saint-Etienne, 1969). This duo of artists/architects has been based in Hong Kong since 1996, working on physical and imaginary territories using varied means of expression including drawing, photographs, video, installations, performance and literary and theoretical texts. Their entire project forms a critique of spatio-temporal anomalies and documents how human beings subvert and appropriate space.

Laurent Gutierrez is an Associate Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he leads the Environment and Interior Design discipline and the Master of Strategic Design as well as the Master in Urban Environments Design. He is also the co-director of SD SPACE LAB. He is currently doing a PhD on the “Processes of Modernization and Urbanization in China focusing on the Pearl River Delta region”.

Valérie Portefaix is the principal of MAP OFFICE. She received her Master of Architecture degree from School of Architecture Paris-Belleville and a PhD in Urbanism from University Pierre Mendes France. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Produced in response to the open call to reflect on possible routes from Jerusalem and Berlin to Venice for the Utopia Station project of the 2003 Venice Biennale, Viral Operation seizes upon the figurations of unintentional biological threat and the maintenance of the state and body by experimenting with the devolution of borders within the potentially utopian platform of continental Europe. Presented as a short video, the project follows MAP Office as they arrive in Berlin via the Hong Kong International Airport wearing the surgical masks that are considered, at least in greater China, a social nicety more than anything threatening. During the time of SARS, however, this appearance coupled with their point of origin made them a potential contaminant to the geographic health of the region; leaving the airport, they are accompanied by armed security guards.

Runscape is a film that depicts two young men sprinting through the public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze to the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun. A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space. In this action, invisible facades are constructed across a grid that spans the area between the codified signs of polished facades, an open-ended and performative notion of being-in-transit.

[Robin Peckham]

In 1996, when Jean Baudrillard first published “The Conspiracy of Art” he scandalized the international art community by declaring that contemporary art had no more reason to exist. The question of aesthetic banality and retreat from issues of public life and “the real” are questions that have plagued the art world for centuries, from the very first copied Renoir apple to Tino Sehgal or Sophie Calle experiences that anthropologically mix aesthetics, art and life. Baudrillard has since become interested in the simulations of reality set forth by film and vice versa.

In film, the work of simulation becomes drama, a comparative drama that seeks to simulate reality. Runscape is used to knit together the geography of Hong Kong, a cartography that trades on the idea of mapping by running through the streets (a young man is seen pounding / racing through the streets purposefully, in stark contrast to the plethora of crowds that are slowly inching forward along the traffic jammed pavement of Causeway Bay.) The runner dodges past pedestrians, runs diagonally through meticulously urban planned plazas, up flights of stairs and through the shopping malls of Hong Kong in order to appropriate the city on his own terms. The direction of his sprint, the contour of his cityscape is directed by his own desires, a remapping of cartography that allows him to remake the city in his own image. In Runscape, the idea is that a single individual can remap the cartography of the city, to redefine the city on each individual’s terms, to make each city mapping unique to each individual rather than a grouping of concepts, random census tracts, defunct neighborhoods and property blocks. The runner is at times cooperating with the city, in running along the stairs and sidewalks that are mandated, at other times, he jumps over unsuspecting walls and leaps over fences, pitting the city as an adversary, a challenge to his movement, testing the limitations of the concrete jungle as it slowly comes alive with the unorthodox use of its cityscape.

Political and cultural boundaries collapse as the figure jumps over districts in Causeway Bay, Central, and Aberdeen. The runner stitches a new type of geographical exploration that reimagines the terrain on a new mapped media. References and location systems zip by a sprinting figure in a rapidly moving short film where motion, major landmarks and assorted cultural topography become simply a simulation, simulacra of importance. Runscape is about the seduction of film as moving photography, images of Hong Kong flash by us in blinding images knit together only by the running figure as he races across the entire city.

Time and Space: Drawing on the Earth showcases photographs and televised documentation of the monumental land art projects of Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers. All together entitled the Rhythms of Life, this body of work encompasses the largest contemporary land art undertaking in the world, forming a chain of 47 massive stone sculptures, or Geoglyphs, around the globe. The project has involved over 6,700 people across seven continents and 13 countries, as diverse as: Turkey, Israel, Chile, Bolivia, Sri Lanka, Australia, Iceland, China, India, Nepal, Slovakia, USA, Kenya, and Antarctica. Andrew Rogers employs local cultural historical references, materials, and building methods in constructing his Geoglyphs that are made on a scale that can be seen from space. He also intends them to endure in their environments for hundreds of years. Rogers’ sculptural practice is ultimately durational, from the length of time it takes to realise each project (upwards of 6 years in some cases), to the time they will leave their mark upon the surface of the earth, to the time it takes to view and experience structures on this scale.

Using documentation of this vast global undertaking, Time and Space: Drawing on the Earth interrogates what we mean by time-based practice. As a platform for time-based art, MOMENTUM is showcasing this body of work in order to ask the question: What is time based art? How do we as an institution, and arts professionals more broadly, define time-based practice? Do we privilege the medium, or the viewer and the durational experience of watching a work unfold across time? Or does time-based practice encompass the means and process of the creation of an artwork?

Showing land art is a departure from MOMENTUM’s usual focus on video and performance art. And yet land art is integrally time-based. Andrew Rogers’ durational interventions on the surface of the earth are in many ways the direct opposite of Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral moments with nature, yet both bodies of practice privilege time in the same way. Where one is meant to disappear without a trace, the other is designed to degrade slowly over millennia. Rogers’ practice is the essence of monumentality. Working with local communities, researching and reaching back to the ancient, primal symbols of each host culture, he refashions them in the present for endurance into the future. Though built of stone, each structure erodes back into the landscape, crumbling into the different earths from which they were made. It is this process of change over time, inherent to all land art, which renders it time-based.

On October 29th MOMENTUM Berlin celebrates the Day of the Dead, Los Dios de los Muertes, with A Wake: Still Lives and Moving Images. This exhibition combines, video, cinema, and photography in a co-mingling of media which bring the still into motion, and the motion into emotion. The exhibition takes the form of a processional of monitors leading into the gallery itself, which will be oversaturated with projections. In the tradition of inviting the dead to a party with the living, we crowd the gallery with the conversations of flickering ghosts; a saturation of images in dialogue with one another. Reflecting upon our daily inundation by images of death, where news programs sensationalize death no less than the fictions of TV shows and feature films, A Wake addresses the media as the Vale of Tears, the surface between now and the hereafter, as well as the past. Co-mingling archival films with contemporary art, we enact a conversation across mediums and generations to celebrate life as well as death.

A Wake is consciousness with an eye on an open coffin. A gathering in celebration as well as mourning, it is humor as much as horror. As a platform dedicated to interrogating time-based art, with A Wake, MOMENTUM explores what happens when our time runs out.

A wake is a ritual viewing of the body after death; a coming together to observe the end of time, to celebrate the transition through the vale. It is also an emergence into consciousness, as well as a consequence or result. Taking this transitional point between being and representation as our title, A Wake confronts us with the process and the presence of death in order to wake us up to the inevitable result of the passage of time.

AES+F

DÉFILÉ STATEMENT

‘WHO WANTS TO LIVE FOREVER’ STATEMENT

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“Défilé” (2000-2007), dig projection, 7 dig photos. “Who Wants To Live Forever” (1998), 6:25min. In «Défilé» we explore the way individuals deal with the concept of mortality by juxtaposing images of death with images of beauty, in this case high fashion. In pairing fashion with death, we have found a modern-day counterpart to the traditional juxtapositions of love and death and beauty and death. An obsession with fashion, symbolizing temporality, can be seen as a way to deal with the fear of death. It is an ancient preoccupation, as can be seen in the elaborate rituals in Western and non-Western cultures associated with death. Humans have always attempted to «decorate» death, based in part with a desire to ward off death. “Who Wants To Live Forever” is a critique of the global media, addressing not only the media, which uses the sexual scandals and the death of the celebrities but also the exhibitionistic behavior of the media star. The career top of a media star, who produces nothing but his face on the screen, is death.

ANNIKA ERIKSSON

ARTIST STATEMENT

FURTHER TEXT

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“The Great Good Place” (2010), dig video. This video shows the life of a community of abandoned indoor cats living in a park in Istanbul. “The Great Good Place” was shot in Istanbul, documenting the street cats who live in dwindling numbers throughout city. A regular urban presence, when removed from their environment they appear eerie, floating in darkness. In the context of this exhibition, they seem like creatures of the night; familiar sights on the streets of Istanbul, becoming familiars of a more supernatural kind. But perhaps they remain, after all, simply cats upon which we project our own realities.

ANNA BELLA GEIGER

ARTIST’S CV

FURTHER TEXT

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“Passagens n.1″ film converted to digital media, 1974
Passagens n.1, is a video from the series I titled Situações-limite. The point of the piece is to bring visually, through repetitive movements of my climbing stairs – a sense of unfinishable path. Changes of scenery, going through narrow and broad steps, inside – outside, bringing a sense of continuity/ discontinuity, the difficulty of crossing. In my three repetitions (inside and outside stairs scenes) I perform slight differences, and the tiresome effort increases. In this and other videos from the same period I deal with the symbolic and also with the specific language of video. For instance, the movement of the artist crossing the cathodic tube in its 4 corners, creates an invisible center of the image.

JARIK JONGMAN

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“Sachsenhausen” (2009/2010) dig projection, 14 photographs. Premier. Predominantly a painter, the starting point for my paintings is always photography and it is now for the first time that I’m showing a series of photographs that were taken at the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, during a three month residency period in Berlin, in the winter of 2009/2010. Taken with a Lomo camera and presented digitally, the result merges the painterly, the photographic, and the cinematic. Thus blurring of media creates a timelessness most jarring in this tragic location situated shockingly close to Berlin.

DAVID MEDALLA

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“The Ghost of Isaac Newton in Another Vacant Space” (2011), video performance. David Medalla presents a video impromptu. Eienstein is walking on the road of Biesentalerstrasse Berlin when he sees the ghost of Isaac Newton, eating an apple, addressing an empty room in another vacant space. A dialogue ensues…. David Medalla is constantly shifting his strategies and media; when one thinks one has him pinned down as a situationist, a surrealist, or a conceptualist, one is stumped as he continues to endlessly conceive other fantastic, often unrealisable schemes. He is an icon of an artist who has made no clear distinction between his art and his life in a body of work stretching back to the sixties.

FIONA PARDINGTON

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“We Dream of Gentle Morphius” (2011), from “Organic” dig projection of the photo series “Still Lives”
Fiona has been working in a still-life format within museums, recording taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) and other historic objects such as hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now extinct huia bird. In these works, she brings to a contemporary audience an awareness of traditional and forgotten objects. Her art practice occupies itself with both memory and mourning, and the ineffability of the photographic image. Her photographs demonstrate a mastery of analogue darkroom technique combined with the digital. Presented for the first time as a digital projection, these combined images, says Fiona Pardington, “work on a number of levels – once again my whakapapa/genealogy – random items that belong to beloved family members and important family members i had little contact with – like a child’s silver christening cup found by chance in a skip by my aunt when my grandmother’s house was cleared after sale- it belonged to my father…silk scarves found in french flea markets, shells taken from beaches important to ngai tahu because they are mahinga kai/traditional food gathered from the sea….seaweed, bottles dug out of the sand, midden shells from the beach the ngai tahu cheif tangatahara lived near. paua shells from otakou- paua shells are important food but also the shell can be seen as a tourist cliche and is sitting in a strange NZ cultural limbo presently. crystal wine glasses from op shops, native flowers and introduced weeds and pest plants introduced from overseas by the colonizers….”

PAUL RASCHEJA

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“Crash” (2009) Series, 3 Videos #1
“Crash” is a car accident scene that continously reveals one picture forward and at the same time continues to repeat itself. Gradual picture exposing strengthens the curiosity of what would happen next, multiplication intensifies the brutal tension, which can emanate with outrageous beauty. Finally, tension and tempo can bring on a visual catharsis. In drawing out a moment of film to manipulate the media and the viewer, Paul Rascheja confronts the basis of our fascination with violence. Too horrified to look, yet too mesmerized to look away, we are caught in this endless moment at the cusp of life and death.