We Build the Country - The Country Builds Us!

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.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Filmed at the United States Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Watson is Down pairs footage of soldiers at computers engaging in combat-simulation training with scenes from the video games.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. Three Dead depicts a military exercise within a mock Iraqi town built on the outskirts of Twentynine Palms, California, blurring the line between computer simulation and reality.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In Immersion, Farocki presents footage of a role-playing exercise in which military psychologists demonstrate how to use the PTSD program on their colleagues, who describe traumatic wartime experiences. On a second channel, their descriptions play out as virtual renderings.

An exploration of how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war. In A Sun With No Shadow, Farocki calls attention to the subtle differences between the simulations for combat training and PTSD. With the former, the sun can be programmed to cast shadows in the virtual combat zones, while the latter, less expensive technology does not offer this feature.

Based on an installation by Alberto vev

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.

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.

Portrait of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist whose specialty is ephemeral sculptures made from elements of nature.

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.

Brazilian short film, directed by Julia Murat.

Ilya Kabakov is considered one of the most important contemporary artists worldwide. Born and raised in the Ukraine in the period between Stalin and Gorbatschow he left the country in the 80s. In his Installations and his numerous paintings Kabakov creates a world of its own, which leaves the heaviness of socialist and post-socialist life far behind. The film links Ilya Kabakovs artistic spaces with insights into Russian everyday life, which itself sometimes appears like an installation by the artist.

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.

Video installation by UMMMI.

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.”

An installation containing video files of the artist's persona, alongside a karaoke piece of her as she watches her viewership fall and two mirrors side by side of messages she received, from two different users online.

Each pixel is separated like an exploded screen, set in a chaotic way into the space. The video has a whole movement in the room, as one three dimensional image. The experience resembles the brain, working with electromagnetic waves and low voltage information.

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.

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.

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.