Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the ‘mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated and subsequently manifest within the general human complex’. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of his multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.
Confronting a meter-high red cordon, Anna Uddenberg questions our social consensus: "How can a fragile piece of red fabric so easily direct the flow of human movement?" Anna Uddenberg is a Berlin-based contemporary artist. This film offers a glimpse into her first solo exhibition in China, held at Tank Shanghai. Structured in three parts—Casting, Rehearsal, and Performance—the film offers a stylised, non-linear response to Uddenberg’s sculptural language, exploring themes of bodily discipline, synthetic femininity, and ritualised consumerism.
This animated short by Theodore Ushev is like a whirlwind tour of Russian constructivist art and is filled with visual references to artists of the era, including Vertov, Stenberg, Rodchenko, Lissitsky and Popova.
The film is a stage play hybrid showcasing dark and absurd sketches based on contemporary Hungarian news of the 2000's with campy, senseless musical interludes in-between. Highly experimental in nature that - like Marmite - will split its' crowd into ones that'll love it and others that'll loathe it. There's no middle grounds here. The topics included are: The Hungarian Olympians' doping scandal, political terrorism, the national elections... and more.
In 1988, art student Damien Hirst and a group of like-minded associates mounted an exhibition in a building in the East End of London. Entitled Freeze, it was a huge critical and commercial success, propelling Hirst and the group into the spotlight of the avant-garde. More than five years later, Hirst exhibits to international acclaim and is regularly derided in the tabloid press. This portrait of Hirst, which resumes the Omnibus season, is presented as a drug-induced nightmare after Hirst has been put to sleep by a sinister dentist, played by Donald Pleasence. In between interviews with fellow Freeze artists including Angus Fairhurst , Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin , Hirst is seen preparing Mother and Child Divided, his work for last year's Venice Blennale. The piece consists of a cow and a calf, each sawn in half, pickled in formaldehyde and exhibited in four tanks.
In the fall of 1987, Philippe Haas accompanied the sculptor Richard Long to the Algerian Sahara and filmed him tracing with his feet, or constructing with desert stones, simple geometric figures (straight lines, circles, spirals). In counterpoint to the images, Richard Long explains his approach. Since 1967, Richard Long (1945, Bristol), who belongs to the land art movement, has traveled the world on foot and installed, in places often inaccessible to the public, stones, sticks and driftwood found in situ. His ephemeral works are reproduced through photography. He thus made walking an art, and land art an aspiration of modern man for solitude in nature.
In this revealing study of Norval Morrisseau, filmed as he works among the lakes and woodlands of his ancestors, we see a remarkable Indigenous artist who emerged from a life of obscurity in the North American bush to become one of Canada's most renowned painters. Morrisseau the man is much like his paintings: vital and passionate, torn between his Ojibway heritage and the influences of the white man's world.
CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.
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 ...
Escorted by his valet Sganarelle, Dom Juan, a libertine gentleman, brave and hypocritical, seduces women, fights duels, denies his father's authority, and mocks Heaven. Carried away by his passion for women and gambling, he goes so far as to commit perjury. A classic revisited by Mesguich with a lot of visual effects: special effects, magic tricks, imposing sets. A playful staging for this tragi-comic play.
Featuring collectors, dealers, auctioneers and a rich range of artists, including market darlings George Condo, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, this documentary examines the role of art and artistic passion in today’s money-driven, consumer-based society.
Shot in Southern England over the course of six weeks by a crew of three American filmmakers, CircleSpeak offers a nuanced look at the passions and beliefs of the people immersed in the crop circle phenomenon during the season of 2001. This feature-length documentary presents interviews with serious “researchers”, self-proclaimed “hoaxers”, local farmers and villagers who are all, in one way or another, involved in this strange and compelling summer spectacle taking place year after year.
An obsessively-made documentary, filmed over 16 years, exploring the creative life and adventures of the eccentric artist and entrepreneur Harrod Blank. From his youth growing up in the woods with chickens and working as a camera assistant for his father- the venerable film-maker Les Blank- to the creation of his first attention-getting artcar, to his current multi-faceted career as creator and head of a nationwide art car movement, all the while pursuing his visions of non-conformity. Featuring interviews with his girl-friends, his mom, his brother, his raconteur lifelong pal, Kevin, as well as Blank’s own painful yet hilarious self-examinations. With special appearances by Les Blank and many fine art car artists. “The pressure to conform is incredible, ” says Blank, “but I don’t care what other people think. The reason I’m alive is to create.”
Lifting the lid on the fascinating last decade of Andy Warhol's life and the legacy he left for future artists, through never-before-seen footage and interviews with insiders.
Mock -documentary about a Finnish contemporary artist who took the world by a storm.
Documentary about the not-likely-legendary Portuguese art group from the 1980's.
Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson? is a feature documentary film about this controversial and divisive artist who in the ensuing five years has only solidified his stature with unnerving and provocative new works that elicit extreme reactions from both critical naysayers and vocal proponents alike. Wolfson is not content to play by the rules of a conservative self-policing art market that favors the status quo, instead preferring to make us squirm as he engages a host of lightning-rod issues facing our society today; homophobia, misogyny, racism, white nationalism, antisemitism and violence to name but a few. Wolfson is an art maker on the world stage whose immersive works take on today’s endemic virtue signaling and politically correct narratives, veritably throwing it all back into our faces.
A pioneering force in feminist art for more than four decades, Judy Chicago paved the way for generations of women artists. She decided to join forces with Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova to inspire people to imagine a different, more humane world.
An account of the many tribulations that Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, known for his subversive art and political activism, endured between 2008 and 2011, from his rise to world fame via the Internet to his highly publicized arrest due to his frequent and daring confrontations with the Chinese authorities.
Research and dissemination documentary-film about contemporary art in which more than 30 staff members of museums and galleries, visual and sound artists, collectors, art critics and curators share their knowledge and give an account of their experiences and anecdotes.