Descriptions & images of videos
Video večer / Video Evening #01
Press Play_Taking on Performance
Composed by ADA Rotterdam: Maja Bekan, Sjoerd Westbroek, Deirdre M. Donohue, Margo Onnes, Esme Valk, Gerwin Luijendijk
Les Kiriki – Acrobates japonais
Segundo de Chomón (ES)
1907
Duration: 00:02:41
video, found footage from Youtube
A family troupe of acrobats made up to appear Japanese perform various amazing stunts in front of the camera.
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Segundo Víctor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz was a pioneering Spanish film director. Chomón began his career by working for Georges Méliès as a colorist, moving on to Pathé Frères where he contributed in the setting up of a system of industrial coloring called the Pathécolor, as well as producing many short films. In 1907 he invented the film dolly. Chomón directed numerous documentaries, had a go at animation and with an interest in special effects, mastered the effects of film splicing. He directed all in all about forty films and made an attempt at many different genres.
Monster
Ruth Legg (UK)
2006
Duration: 00:09:17
video
Ruth Legg is an artist working and living in London (UK) and Amsterdam (NL). Her recent works have explored how individual artists and makers contribute to codes of communication. Focusing in particular on how a code can be claimed as one’s own in an effort to negotiate and potentially upset the conventions of inclusion and exclusion. Legg graduated with MA at Piet Zwart Institute (NL) in 2007. Currently she is working on her PhD Art Practice at Goldsmiths University (UK). Recent exibitions include: Putting Aside the Falsities of Magic, Plan B, Amsterdam 2010.; All Our Independent Women, The Mews, London 2009. ; The New Spirit Happening, The Changing Rooms, Stirling, UK; The Sinking Road, Zwaanshals, Rotterdam, 2008. ; Dogs & Sunsets, Duende Studios, Rotterdam, 2007.; Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow 2008, Revisiting Belgrade, Hotel Kasina, Terazije Square, Belgrade.
The Community in Space
Jacqueline Forzelius (SE)
2010
Duration: 00:05:49
video
This video is part of a series called Patsy -the wig. Patsy is a character, who has taken on the task of telling us the state of things. Patsy has for example talked about the value of work, how to relate to advertisements, how to do small talk, how to flow talk, how to revolt and in this video; how to relate to art and space.
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Jacqueline Forzelius (1982) lives and works in Bergen, Norway. After studying at the National Art Academy in Bergen, she received a Masters in Fine Art from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. In Forzelius work there is always a game to be played. It is not a playful game, because it is not open for play. Still it is a funny game. It is a game that exists for itself, rather than for its players, whom in this case is just Forzelius herself. Forzelius is both the ‘game master’ and the participant. The rules are formed by solutions for non-existing problems. It is silly and pathetic, but something is at stake, and it’s not a joke.
Gefangenenbilder / Tattooed Prisoners
Alexandra Gerbaulet (DE)
2007
Duration: 00:14:00
video
Tattooed Prisoners deals with tattooeing as a political expression by looking at a model project in the youth prison Neustrelitz, East-Germany.
The prison’s project allows for young offenders to cover up the unconstitutional symbols that are tattooed on their bodies.
The film is about the tension between tattoos as an expression of the individual, as well as about the language of power expressed through pictures and their access to the body and its expressions.
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Alex Gerbaulet, born in 1977, is an artist, filmmaker and curator living and working in Berlin and Braunschweig, Germany. For her artwork the notion of documentarism is an important impulse. Gerbaulet’s films discuss recurrently the issues of migration, tolerance and racism, as well as their association with German normality. She prefers a hybrid understanding of art, which for her includes the production of videos, just as much as the organisation of workshops and symposia in order to create new contexts for aesthetic, political and social experiences.
A different kind of love
Ruth Buchanan (NZ)
2006
Duration: 00:10:09 (excerpt from 00:27:00)
video
In her work Buchanan moves through artistic legacy and asks how various spaces of history, both conceptual and physical, characterise artistic agency in the present. Her previous work looked at the barely perceivable impact of New Zealand painter Flora Scales on the development of a local Modernism in New Zealand. Consequently this project came to be very much about how one develops a personalised agency. Her current project shifts from this almost unknown character to investigating the very public figures of authors Agatha Christie (GB), Janet Frame (NZ) and Virginia Woolf (GB). In making this shift of scale or presence she seeks to re-consider modes of address, or more precisely, she asks: ‘How does one speak as an artist when participating in an economy of voice, and subsequently, what space is it that this voice makes?’
“I approach these fascinations by constructing ‘meetings with meaning’, whereby an encounter between the concrete and the abstract acts as the impulse for developing various gestures. These meetings can imply working intensely with an original manuscript, archival collection or specific location. These gestures take the form of sculpture, video, text, 35 mm slides, photographs, audio, readings or installations, which carefully choreograph these individual elements into one space that steps in and out from, magnifies and reduces, intensifies and diffuses the voice of the individual and the collective, the voice of the factual and the fictional, the voice of the historical and the contemporary.” (Ruth Buchanan)
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Ruth Buchanan lives and works in Berlin. She finished her studies in fine art in 2002 at BFA. Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland, NZ. and in 2007 she completed her MA at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Between 2008/10 she was a research resident at Jan Van Eyeck Academy in Mastricht. Recent exhibitions include: Laying Freely, Casco, Utrecht, 2010; Chanting Baldessari, 2009, Maastricht; Lying Freely, with Eveline van den Berg, 2008, Sheffield, GB; 4th Y2K Melbourne Biennale of Art and Design, 2008, Melbourne, AU; Le societas! 2008, Amsterdam, NL: De Veemvloer. Open in total darkness, 2007, Munich, DE; The movement movement. With Özlem Altin 2006, Rotterdam, NL; etc..
Tandava Dance (from the movie Damini)
Rajkumar Santoshi (IN)
1993
Duration: 00:01:36
film (excerpt), found footage from Youtube
Taṇḍava is a dance of destruction and re-creation. According to Hindu mythology, the divine art form of Tandava is performed by god Shiva, the god of destruction. The Tandava is a vigorous dance that is the source of the cycle of creation, preservation and dissolution. In this short scene out of the Bollywood film Damini, which tells the story of a woman fighting against injustice, we see the actress Meenakshi Sheshadri performing the Tandava.
Play
Martine Stig (NL)
2009
Duration: 00:10:00
video
The artist Martine Stig was trained as a photographer. In recent years she has began working on scripted reality films in which she assigns the passers-by with the role of the actor by focusing on certain communal actions and chance occurrences. For the film Play she shot a great deal of documentary footage in the streets of New York using the city’s well known filmic décor and the hard winter light as elements in her work. Stig describes the film as follows: “The streets became a stage, the city a theatre. From the database of collected scenes I edited a story. Unaware of my camera the passers-by became part of a choreography. By playing with codes of filmic narration, Play interrogates the instinctual need of human beings to build up stories in order to make sense of the world.”
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Martine Stig (1972) lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She finished her fine art studies in 1995 at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and in 2003 she completed her studies in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: Ante at Motive Gallery in Amsterdam (NL) in 2010; Quickscan nl#01 at Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam (NL) in 2010; Dutch contemporary photography, SIPA at Seoul Art Center in Seoul (KR) in 2009 and Pages at Photo Espana in Madrid (SP) in 2009.
Search
Inger Alfnes (NO)
Duration: 00:06:36
2005
video
In her video performances, Inger Alfnes investigates the borders between “true” and constructed reality and presence and non-presence of the body. She is interested in the visual relationship between the body and its environment. By use of simple additions to the screened image and by using her own presence as a reference for the eye, she creates small shifts in our perception of reality. In the work Search, Alfnes plays around with the modernist belief that man and environment should express an ideal whole.
“In Search, I have covered the wall with black tape in a modernist pattern. With the same tape I covered my mouth. Using the black tape, I try to camouflage my mouth by fitting into the stripes on the wall while moving my body around in space. In biology camouflage is interpreted as a survival strategy. In Search I am especially interested in the duality between camouflage interpreted as a survival strategy and camouflage as a manner of social invisibility.”
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Inger Alfnes, born in Norway 1976, lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She graduated from her BA fine arts in 2005 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In 2008 she completed her MA at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Floppelgangers, TK Maxx shop, Leeds, (UK) in 2010; Getting A Hoek, Den Nederlandsche Cacao Fabriek, Helmond, (NL) in 2008; City Choreographies/Viewing Positions, The Nunnery, London, (UK) in 2008; Oktoberfest, Nieuwe Vide, Haarlem (NL) in 2008; My travels with Barry, TENT, Rotterdam (NL) in 2008.
PELOHA
Louise Menzies (NZ)
2009
Duration: 00:04:30
16mm film transferred to DV
PELOHA (a contraction of peace, love and harmony) is the name of the former headquarters of The School of Radiant Living in Havelock North, New Zealand and the site where this work was made. This film is part of a wider series of works responding to the school’s history and was originally shown as a 16mm film projection. Taking an early example of self-help culture, the work shows a woman in profile, performing a series of physical exercises. By showing the scene in profile, almost in the manner of renaissance painting, the work at first seems to depict a space parallel to that of the viewer. However, through the materiality of the 16mm film, Menzies cleverly plays both with the idea of the image as a view onto a scene in a seemingly remote past, as well as its actual presence in the here and now of the exhibition space. In doing so, PELOHA hovers between a concrete materiality and an elusive eroticism. The work is accompanied by an artist’s book. (To be published by Clouds in March 2011.)
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Louise Menzies is an artist from New Zealand, based in Auckland. Recent exhibitions include Break at Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (NZ) in 2008; Gut feeling at Window, The University of Auckland (N.Z.) in 2009; Move Your Arms in Circles at Gambia Castle, Auckland (NZ) in 2009 and Letters to Students of the Radiant Life at the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington (NZ) in 2010/2011. Earlier this year Louise was an artist in residence at Soma, Mexico City and will present a project at La Galeria de comerico, Mexico City, in 2011.
