Commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, The Enclave is an immersive, six-screen video art installation by Irish contemporary artist Richard Mosse. Partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s modernist literary masterpiece Heart of Darkness, the visceral and moving work was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo using 16mm colour infra-red film, which captures otherwise invisible parts of the spectrum. The resulting imagery in Mosse’s work is hallucinatory and dream-like with the usual greens of jungle and forest replaced by shimmering violet. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects its complexity, using a strategy of beauty and transfixion to combat the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many.
By becoming aware of an idea that is new to us, we talk about it all the time. And beyond that, all the subjects that we approach, we approach them through this new prism. We are going as far as proselytism - essentially to convince ourselves. We repeat the same words, slightly reformulated, until we are convinced. It is a way of swallowing our conditioning to this idea, while hinting that we are already sure. In politics or in love. We repeat ourselves. We repeat ourselves. We repeat ourselves.
Past and present life in the anarchistic "free city" of Christiania, in Copenhagen, Denmark. In Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in Free State, Christiania is approached at face-value, as a self-described laboratory of freedom, an environment that provides an almost unparalleled opportunity to unravel a very particular history of markedly contrasting power relations and vivid social forces. Borrowing from the usually dispirit practices of cultural geography and fictional narrative the project is constructed as a visual, spatial, and aural investigation of the site. The situation at Christiania in 2001 is compared with its distant past as a military base, its more recent utopian regeneration, and its possible future.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
The inhabited world is a constructed environment: a space that has been defined, created, and scaled for the sustenance and privilege of the human species alone. Humans have created a language that we cannot see beyond, one based on capital that hurdles us towards social and climate collapse. Contours reveals this position while also meditating on what it would mean to move away from this language in order to privilege not only the human but the other than human as well.
Philipp Fleischmann develops special cameras designed to formulate specific relations between the material of the footage (16 or 35 mm film) and the object of the recording. For instance, in his 2013 project “Main Hall,” he deconstructs the main exhibition hall of the Viennese Secession, filming the exhibition architecture with 19 individual cameras and thus creating images that show the view of the exhibition space onto itself. Fleischmann’s recent work, “Untitled (Generali Foundation Vienna)" identifies the film camera as a spacial object-form by itself. Correlating with the history of artistic interventions on site, the object is placed in the former exhibition space of the Generali Foundation at Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15, Vienna, and provided with a cinematographic view.
A three-channel video installation, working with the themes of risk, hybridity and the unfathomable to explore the city of New Orleans through the remarkable life and times of Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the first person known to have explored the sonic tonalities of the music we now call jazz.
Nearly devoid of editing resources, the videos feature single shots of anonymous people in daily life, subtly revealed/highlighted through zooming. Instead of uncovering reality, though, the videos end up turning it into pure invention. The “videorhizomes” are not limited to production and screening in regular, traditional circuits. The process includes sending the videos to a person that is randomly chosen from the phone book.
Catatonik is a multi sensory installation project which becomes part of my final study for the course design for social change. It is an attempt at trying to build spatial and sensorial elements which lets the body feel the microcosms of experiencing part of a coal mine and in turn an ingrained empathy as the effect of the experience. A consciously designed installation set to present the physicality of a place purely through an ethnographic reconstruction of sound and image in a different fabric of reality informed through research. The installation was entirely made in the campus of DJAD both the recording of the audio, video and its related textures.
This three-channel video installation by James Benning shows three scenes from David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The two-minute-long screen arrangement of imperceptibly moving images alludes to the beginning of racism. The three screens each show a solider in the American Civil War, black slaves picking cotton in the field, and imposing KKK.
An experimental installation inspired by the shot and reverse shot, one of the basics methodologies of cinema. The audiences follow the path designed by Jang to see the images, and simultaneously they are also recorded by a hidden camera in the reverse angle. This embodies the concept “gaze of gaze.” The film was shot in three different places to capture the atmosphere of DMZ. The installation consists of two-channel projections, CCTV cameras, and objects representing the DMZ.
Portrait of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature.
Brazilian short film, directed by Julia Murat.
REkOGNIZE is a three-channel video installation and a meditation on photography, memory, and movement. Artist and Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, Arrival) finds inspiration in Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood, a site of the early 20th-century Great Migration. During this time, millions of African Americans moved from the rural southern United States to cities in the north and west. The Hill District saw a flourishing of culture during these years and was a site of artistic development for luminaries such as August Wilson, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Errol Garner, and many others. REkOGNIZE takes its visual cues from the Pittsburgh landscape, especially the city’s tunnels, which serve not only as literal entry points into the city, but also as metaphors for this movement of people and culture.
Falling Frames is the first fragment of a series in which Langkamp explores the framing and visualization of three-dimensional perspective through the two-dimensional medium of video, both technically as well as conceptually. To record the work, a special device was built that's attached to a tall industrial crane, which contains a stack of wooden picture frames that can be released from a height of ten to fifteen meters. The camera is placed right in the center of the action and captures the frames' movement while they fall down. The slow motion recording of 240 still frames per second allows us to experience every millimeter of movement to the very detail. While the frames get smaller and smaller in perspective as they move further away from our view, they are immediately followed by the next frame and the next one, until they've all reached the floor and found a place to rest.
The decision to move to Holland doesn't sound like a wise idea. Why move to a country that could be flooded at any moment? For the last 25 years, the political climate has shifted. The public debate on migration has become harsher, more heated, and polarized. What would have been considered right-wing xenophobia back then, is now considered mainstream. Populists simplify complex realities into good and evil, victims and perpetrators: ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Their rhetoric often consists of dehumanizing words and metaphors. One of these is ‘water’. In reality, water is not an immediate threat to the average Dutch person; but it is a huge threat to the thousands trying to reach the Netherlands. People trying to survive the Mediterranean Sea in rubber boats. Trying to survive winter on the Aegean coast in primitive tents. To them, water really is deadly.
Experimental film & Installation. This is the video editing used for video projections in the short film "Caverne". The video was then passed in negative and projected onto walls of a cave.2011
Wang’s work investigates the ways in which sound and listening can play pivotal roles in shaping social space. For Music While We Work, Wang assembled a group of retired workers from a Taiwanese sugar refinery in the small industrial town of her childhood. She and her collaborator, the political activist and composer Chen Bo-Wei (Taiwanese, born 1971), led a series of recording workshops for the retirees and their spouses. They then returned to the factory, where Wang asked them to “paint a world composed by their listening.”
"Ummmi’s Lonely Girl features a young Shibuya girl, sometimes she messes things up, sometimes she is sad or depressed but she lives her life for the fun moments. In these moments she can forget everything which has come before her in life. She needs these moments to keep her going. In constructing this work I tried to embracing the feeling of the fluctuating heart, bouncing between happiness and sadness. Playing with the stereotypes of youth culture, such as loneliness, and a life of excess, I carried this drunk girl from my parents apartment on edge of Shibuya, to Shibuya Station to wait for the first train home. This is a performance archive video." -UMMMI.