Marine Hugonnier - Ana Hanusova (2001)
Friday, May 9, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
"In the year 2000, I was asked by Camera Austria, an Austrian art magazine, to contribute to an issue published in response to the election of October 1999. This request gave me the opportunity to rethink, in a context of political and social imperatives, the role of artistic activity. After spending some time envisaging what a gesture in response to Camera Austria would require (a rethink of my relationship to History), I decided to invite a women, who had been part of one of the orchestras in the concentration camps to come and play a piece of music of her choice which would be broadcast live on the Austrian national radio channel, O1." - Marine Hugonnier
"I spent long months doing research which led me to meet a few survivors. I'm not sure that, for the first meetings, I was particularly convincing. Many of them wanted to forget. This raised the question of programmed memory loss and collective amnesia concerning history. These first meetings discouraged me for a time. I suddenly realized that there was certain legitimacy in the desire to forget - my own grandfather had never wanted to talk to me about what happened to him, pushing his refusal to confront the past to the point of never even going to see a war film at the cinema. I remained convinced, however, that it was still possible to confront this history with our everyday existence.
The video recording, which was filmed during the live broadcast on national radio O1 of Anna Hanusova's performance, includes images of Vienna. This images show the International Atomic Energy Authority, the UN building, the oil refinery (Olraffinerie Schwechat), the Sony and Microsoft buildings, the big wheel (the Riesenrad) and the Prater amusement park surrounding it, the Karl Marx Hof, a cinema in Vienna and the number 05 which the symbol of resistance in Austria. These various images, which punctuate the film, enable me to go beyond the political conflict specific to Austria and to place the event in an international context. These different images are to be seen as signs of our contemporary world at the dawn of cybernetics, nanotechnology, biotechnology and the mapping of DNA." - Marine Hugonnier
�Marine Hugonnier�s artworks are infused with her long-standing interest in the discipline of anthropology. They focus on and act out the differences between one type of perception and another: specifically the historical, social, and political ramifications of how we deal with our orientation in the present moment. That Hugonnier�s work does this makes it a covertly socio-political statement that refuses, and seeks to short-circuit in viewers on a one-by-one basis, the consensus of unthinking forward motion, routine of distraction, and easy amnesia prevalent amongst the occupants of big cities. Making works which consistently pull off this trick means never using the same aesthetic approach twice: over the past few years Hugonnier has slowly but steadily constructed an expandix of quiet unassuming and discrete works which viewers are bounced in slow motion, re-orientated and ref-framed in case by the slow, surprising transmission of the artwork�s qualities and its pervasive effect on their perceptual abilities." - Martin Herbert, Today is Yesterday's tomorrow from Marine Hugonnier, CGAC, 2001
Marine Hugonnier was born in Paris in 1969 and grew up in the United States and France; lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized by Centro Galego de Arte Contempor�nea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Kerstin Engholm Gallery, Vienna; and Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris. Her group exhibitions have included Spiritus, Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall; Travers�es, l'ARC, Mus�e d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Squatters, Fundac�o de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism, Site Santa Fe's Fourth, International Biennial, New Mexico; My Generation, Atlantis Gallery, London; Movimientos Inmoviles, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; and Marine Hugonnier & Henrik Plenge Jakobson, Centre d�Art Neuch�tel, Neuch�tel, Swizterland.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Mark Leckey - Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
"Described by one commentator as the best thing they'd ever seen in a gallery, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore is an extended paean to the unadulterated bliss of nocturnal abandon. A documentary of sorts, Leckey's video chronicles the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth".
- Matthew Higgs, ArtForum
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore uses found and original footage of discos and raves across Britain during the 70s, 80s and 90s. Details of clothing, technology, music and other cultural references surface briefly like uncanny folklore as the film explores a culture of collective leisure and consumption.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Francis McKee - In Profile: Mariele Neudecker (2002)
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
In Profile is a new series of monographic DVD publications on contemporary artists working with film and video. Born in Düsseldorf in 1965, Mariele Neudecker has lived and worked in the UK since 1985. Her work investigates the physical and psychological spaces that we, as viewers, carry within ourselves. She uses primary landscapes, representations taken from books or postcards, or those extracted from memory or from imagination. Using sculpture, film and photography she creates a sometimes playful frisson between historical cultural representations of the sublime landscape and our perception, imagination and memory of the reality of experience.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Ben Lewis - Art Safari: Sophie Calle (2005)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Sophie Calle is the Grand Dame of French contemporary art. Her famous works of art usually involve following a set of rules or a procedure – following a stranger to Venice; obeying a set of instructions from writer Paul Auster; or working as a hotel maid.
Her art combines romantic autobiography and detached conceptualism. She gives Ben permission to make a film about her on one condition: he has to think up a ritual or set of rules for her to follow, similar to the rules which govern her works of art.
Ben visits gallerists and theorists to take advice on what to suggest to her. He submits idea after idea. She rejects one after the other. Finally, in a final encounter with the artist, Ben realises that this ritual of rejection is the set of rules he wanted Sophie to follow.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Helena Almeida - Helena Almeida (2004)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Helena Almeida is a unique artist, with an exceptional and exemplary career, at many levels. Helena Almeida’s complex working method flows into the usage of black and white photographs, images of herself, in which the memory of an action, of a performance, seems to be depicted.
In the exhibition Pés no Chão, Cabeça no Céu (Feet on the Ground, Head in the Sky), the connection between Helena Almeida’s course and the physicality of the space that harbors the body is brought into focus.
Sente-me, Ouve-me, Vê-me (Feel me, Hear me, See me), from 1978/9, presented only once (and in an incomplete state) at the Galerie Erike + Otto Friedrich, and the series Seduzir (Seduce), produced between 2000 and 2002, which is presented here, complete for the first time. In both these series, video is used besides photography.
Sente-me, Ouve-me, Vê-me (Feel me, Hear me, See me) is a landmark in Helena Almeida’s work, because it is a polymorphous project that makes use of video, sound and photography, but also because it configured a project that brought together the sensorial side implied in the vocative addressed at the viewer, and the irony of its projective character: Vê-me (See me) is sound; Ouve-me (Hear me) is written on the mouth, as if sown in a suture; Sente-me (Feel me) refers to relations with inanimate objects.
The series of works generically entitled Seduzir (Seduce), of recent production, is composed of a large group of photographs of the artist’s feet, sometimes also of her hands, or even her body, frontal images. The series also includes a videographic work. It consists of a long action around a wooden stool, originally a study for the series – as can be confirmed by the coincidence of some photographs and some of the scenes of the video – but that finally established itself as an autonomous work, enormous in its intensity, and in the magnetism with which it seizes us.
Caught by the wires of Helena Almeida’s work, or suspended in its vocative, the recognition of the inner energy in artistic creation is always remarkable: the certainty of knowing that this is a unique path that cannot be walked again.
Delfim Sardo, January 2004
Biographical Note
Helena Almeida was born in 1934 in Lisbon, where she lives and works, and studied painting at Lisbon’s School of Arts. She started to show her work in the 1960’s. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1967, at the Buchholz Gallery in Lisbon. She as since exhibited in various galleries and museums, not only in Europe (Spain, Switzerland, France, among others) but also in Brazil, Macau, USA and Japan.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Beat Streuli - Brussels 05/06 (2006)
Download this at KaraGarga.
Video installation and photographs exhibited at Murray Guy gallery in New York, 2006.
For more than 15 years Swiss-born Streuli has trained his camera on the modern city dweller: chance passersby, faces in the crowd, details of hairstyle and clothing, a fragile or stern or gregarious look. His photographic and video works examine the denizens of various urban centers, from New York and Krakow to Tokyo and Tel Aviv, plucking visages and gestures from the flow of street life. Though he captures his subjects unawares, in the midst of their daily activities, it would be a mistake to consider Streuli's metropolitan portraits as simply natural, genuine, or purely spontaneous. On the contrary, his images have a certain recognizable look, and bear the mark of artistic selection. His work plays on a whole series of contradictions between the natural and the stylized, documentary and fiction, publicity and privacy, human dignity and mass alienation, glamorized poses and the cruelty of light.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Harun Farocki - Die Schulung AKA Indoctrination (1987)
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
"This film is about a five-day seminar designed to teach executives how to "sell themselves" better. This course, designed for managers, teaches the basic rules of dialectics and rhetorics and provides training in body language, gesture and facial expression. The aim of selling something has always been a principle of mercantile action. Yet it was only through the marriage of psychology and modern capitalism that the idea of selling oneself was perfected." - Lutz Hachmeister, television journalist and professor of communications.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy - Soft Rains & Our Second Date (2003)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
In this new series of works, the McCoys present electronic installations that examine narrative spaces. Extending from previous work of databased television and film material, the artists new work further explores the idea that thought, experience and memory are structured through genre and repetition.
Entering the gallery, the viewer sees seven platforms each containing a tiny fragmentary film set. The platforms each embody images and sounds from a particular cinematic genre (the eighties slasher, the fifties melodrama, the sixties art film, etc). The platform/genres can each stand autonomously or together they produce a cinema-hopping amalgamation of themes and eras. Over 50 miniature video cameras and lights are suspended over the sets, creating a new filmic entity generated live. By exposing the film sets together with their film, the McCoys expose and yet retain the magic of movie-making. We can see the working parts of the apparatus, but are still won over by the whole. The sets themselves are an exploded spatial view of what one experiences temporally in film.
The images are shot by several cameras simultaneously, each from its own angle, each focused on a different area of the set, and the multipart compound of images that these cameras together create is then sent to a computer running custom software that picks from the range of choices, “editing” it into the seven movies.The McCoys handle the passage of time by spreading “actors” and locations out in space to represent different moments, which are then intercut onscreen to suggest movement in time and place. Each story is told in six to ten shots.
In the rear gallery, the McCoys present “Our Second Date”. This piece extends the form of “Soft Rains” by including the artists themselves within the constructed narrative. In “Our Second Date”, the couple can be seen watching a movie which is being created adjacent to them on a rotating set. This piece begins a new cycle of work which examines the role that media has played in the development of the artists' relationship.
Download this at KaraGarga.
Martha Rosler - Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure (1980)
Download this at KaraGarga.
1980, 12:20 min, color, sound
Secrets From the Street examines the intersection of cultures and classes as exemplified by the street life of San Francisco's Mission District. This videotape, produced for an exhibition held jointly at San Francisco's City Hall and its Museum of Modern Art, argues — against the show's theme, Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure — that accounts of cultural life that omit the question of social power are mythical: The real "secret" is the obscured relation of economic and political domination exercised by one's own culture over the observed subculture. Or, as Rosler states in the tape's voiceover, "The secret is that to know the meaning of a culture you must know the limits of meaning of your own."
Download this at KaraGarga.
Yoko Ono & John Lennon - Rape (1969)
Monday, April 28, 2008
Download this at KaraGarga.
In November 1968 work began on one of one of John & Yoko's most ambitious film ventures, a 75-minute mini-feature called Rape. It starred Eva Majlata, a 21 year old Hungarian actress who couldn't speak English. She cannot escape the prying attentions of the camera which follows her around the streets of London, through a park, allowing her no privacy and almost causing her to walk into the path of a truck. She attempts to escape in a taxi, but is still followed. She is eventually cornered in an apartment from which she apparently cannot escape and her tearful pleas to the camera remain ignored. Rape was shot when John and Yoko were both at Great Charlotte Street Hospital following Yoko's miscarriage. The cameraman was Nick Knowland, who worked on most of John and Yoko's productions.
The film received its world premiere on Austrian Television on 31st March 1969. That year it was also shown at the Montreux Television Festival and the Mannheim Film Festival. A day after the Austrian TV broadcast John and Yoko held a press conference in Vienna. John commented: "We are showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in our contemporary world. This isn't just about the Beatles. What is happening to this girl on the screen is happening in Biafra, Vietnam, everywhere." The theme of the relentless, clinical camera lens, 'raping' the privacy of individuals or groups for the entertainment of the viewing public intrigued critic Willie Frischauer, who wrote in the Evening Standard; "This film does for the age of television what Franz Kafka's The Trial did for the age of totalitarianism."
Download this at KaraGarga.
