2 posts tagged “townhouse”
Townhouse Library Screenings 14 September 2008 // Library, 9:00 pm
Perfect Present Continuous Video program curated by Nat Muller
i attended a standing room only screening at the townhouse gallery downtown cairo last night curated by nat muller.
perfect present continuous brought together the work of four artists. nat introduced the series' themes of repetition, ritual, time:
“Perfect Present Continuous” is a wry reference to a grammatical tense (present perfect continuous), which indicates an unspecified time between 'before now' and 'now', wherein there is both an interest in the process as well as the result. This process may still be going on, or may just have finished. By placing the word ‘perfect’ at the beginning, an impossible – and at times ironic – utopian project is articulated. The selected works present us with visions bordering on the ideal and the flawed. They designate the moment between the potential of perfection and a preconceived failure, or the porosity between beauty and horror, present and memory, across the brink of time, geo-political space and place.
the evening started with lamia joreige's search to capture the perfect moon she saw in a starry beirut night. as nat says, the ritual of her taxi ride with video camera, the repetitive attempts to re-capture a perceived perfect moment overtakes the goal becoming itself more important. as with so much video art, i felt the digital video production and aesthetic let the piece down not quite allowing it to deliver the hypnotic transcendence it was aiming for, mirroring the captured futile attempt at capturing a live moment. nevertheless i this was the evening's strongest work.
Lamia Joreige (LB) Full Moon, 23’, 2007
The video and series of prints Full moon presents a few attempts over years to capture a poetic moment which happened once: A traveling with an extraordinary full moon while driving to Raouché crossing “the Ring”, then back home. The same traveling is repeated each time in a different way, the recordings which are each a diagnosis of our « present » in Beirut, constitute as many fragments of history. Is it possible to capture an instant? Aren’t we always beneath or beyond reality? Here, repetition becomes the reflection of a vain desire to capture beauty and at the same time a mean of renewal. It reflects on the process of creation.
jordanian / palestinian (i think) oraib toukan had a short playful ironic piece on falsified language and memory resetting. the visuals / production didn't add much to the idea.
Oraib Toukan (JO), Remind me to remember to forget, 2006, 2’50”
A short ironic narrative on language and meaning. In a split screen format, the video depicts two separate but synchronized performances. The phrase ‘remind me to remember to forget’ is written in one screen and then simultaneously snorted in another. Rhythmically set to the sound of stifled breathing, the video mocks a memory ‘made-to-forget’. The video erupted a chain of successive works that looked to falsify the language/wording of memory and our understanding of it.
then dutch artist jan de bruin had a simple one-shot take called waiting for felipe on boredom.
Jan de Bruin (NL), Waiting for Felipe, 7’, 2005
One-shot documentary film about two Italian police officers waiting for the end of their own inconvenience.
Larissa Sansour (PS/DK), SBARA, 8’30’, 2008
Heavily referencing the 1980 cult classic The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, the video piece SBARA explores the castigation of Arabs in contemporary Western dialogue. By adding an audio montage combining historical and current quotes on the Middle East to footage paraphrasing scenes from the original film, SBARA seeks to expose the cyclical nature of Middle Eastern rhetoric and policies and emphasize the psychological terror inflicted upon those at the receiving end of this repetitively stagnant political discourse.
macedonian artist yane calovski ended the night with the super art-humor piece featuring danish artist fos that didn't really leave an impression.
Yane Calovski (MK) & Fos (DK), An Early Lost Play, 2006, 11’42”
Early Lost Play is comprised of series of public actions performed by a character - a young woman, Tanja - dealing with her own indifference in the wake of the current political situation in Denmark. They are recorded on video and produced as 8 short episodes understood as interventions in the media. As the real situation evolves and progresses, the character's existential connection to reality, built upon a certain kind of social idealism, devalues and she loses the constraints as an individual submitted to accepted codes of social behaviour. The work attempts to deconstruct these existential codes and bring up and provoke issues of social morality, escapism, non-compliance and humanity. The actions performed by the character are linked to, and hint of, demystifying social ideology, through individual demonstrations against the conservative and liberal norms and standards.
a great evening (the cairo art scene feels exciting, rootsy and fresh) even though the art that attempted to deal with the place of arabs in a globalized post-911 world lacked depth and didn't seem to bring anything new to the table intellectually or emotionally.
video art more so than most art categories is mostly miss and some some really stand-out hit.
the first time i experienced a bill viola installation i was really blown away and one of my favorite pieces from my personal collection is a dark, haunting, deeply touching piece by laleh khorramian.
i have to admit the new-media / video / art i saw in beijing was super-impressive, the chinese seem to have quickly mastered the form and there are a few galleries / spaces that focus solely on the art and do it well.
nat muller is curator in-residence at townhouse for a year and i'm excited to see what she has in store.
Nat Muller (NL)
Is an independent curator and critic based in Rotterdam. She has held positions as staff curator at V2_, Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam) and De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics (Amsterdam). Her main interests include: the intersections of aesthetics, media and politics; (new) media and art in the Middle East. She has published articles in off- and online media; is a regular contributor for Springerin and Bidoun, and has given presentations on the subject of (new) media art (inter)nationally. Her latest projects include The Trans_European Picnic - The Art and Media of Accession (Novi Sad, 2004), DEAF_04: Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems (Rotterdam, 2004); INFRA_ctures (Rotterdam, 2005), Xeno_Sonic: a series of experimental sound performances from the Middle East (Amsterdam, 2005), DEAF07 (Rotterdam, 2007), the workshop 'Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Negotiating Artistic Practice, Audiences, Representation and Collaboration within Local and International Frameworks' (Amman, 2007). She has curated video screenings for projects and festivals in a.o. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, New York, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Grimstad, Lugano, Dubai and Beirut. She recently co-edited the Mag.net Reader2: Between Paper and Pixel with Alessandro Ludovico (2007), and is working on Mag.net Reader3: Processual Publishing, Actual Gestures, based on a series of debates organized at Documenta XII. She is co-initiator of the Upgrade! Amsterdam, and has taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy (NL), ALBA (Beirut), the Lebanese American University (Beirut), and A.U.D. in Dubai (UAE). She serves as an advisor on Euro-Med collaborations for the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). This year she was a jury member for the prestigious Berlin-based media festival Transmediale. She is curator-in-residence at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo from April 2008 to April 2009.
