De Appel

Directions - European Video Art Screenings (Preview) Part 2

29 Sep - 08 Oct 2015

DIRECTIONS - EUROPEAN VIDEO ART SCREENINGS (PREVIEW) PART 2
29 September — 8 October 2015

From September 29 until October 8, the Appel arts centre is hosting part 2 of the preview screenings for Directions. The first installment of screenings took place from 12 – 20th of September.
the screenings are from 6 – 11 pm
Admittance: free
Entrance through Moes bar and restaurant, prins hendrikkade 142 souterrain

FULL DESCRIPTION
This second edition of Directions will continue to investigate what lies between video art and cinema, revealing the influences that lead the artist through his or her creative process. The different interpretations of the cinematographic language, that have followed from its origins to today, are a fertile ground for artistic experimentation. This makes the interrelations between cinema and video art more and more frequent, and the two scenes now seem to feed each other. The selected artists are able to use the cinematic language in a personal and unique way, in order to create their own universe reassembling the film grammar.

Developing connections between the selected artists by facilitating a dialogue that puts relations and differences as well as the relationship with the cinematic form in the foreground is one of the main goals of the project. Thus, the project favors not only the screenings, but also the need to deepen them.

September 29 & 30 Broersen & Lukacs: Mastering Bambi
Walt Disney's 1942 classic animation film 'Bambi' is well known for its distinct main characters – a variety of cute, anthropomorphic animals. However, an important but often overlooked protagonist in the movie is nature itself: the pristine wilderness as the main grid on which Disney structured his 'Bambi'. Broersen and Lukács recreate the model of Disney's pristine vision, but they strip the forest of its harmonious inhabitants, the animals.

October 1 & 2 Sarah Vanagt: In Waking Hours
In the short film In Waking Hours we see historian Katrien Vanagt - who studied the Latin writings of this Plempius - cloaked in the skin of a 21st-century disciple of Plempius. Her cousin, filmmaker Sarah Vanagt, is there and captures how this modern "Plempia" meticulously follows her teacher's instructions. Thus, in a dark kitchen in Brussels, they become witnesses at the birth of images upon the eye.

October3 & 6 Jakub Nepras: Metropolia
The city hovers authoritatively overhead. A unique view of the colossus in which most of us live. An icon of today’s city in a regular turning rhythm every moment links a new event to itself. The rotating frequencies contain visual and symbolic rhythms of present-day cities. But mostly from Shanghai and Prague. An abstract story of a universal city culminates in several phases and then sinks back into darkness.

October 7th: Matthias Muller: Cut / Ali Kazma: Play / Adam Ulbert: Alexander and The Toad
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s film 'Cut' (2013) renders the screen as a skin to be punctured and penetrated, with the cinematic interface acting as a fragile boundary between inside and outside. Through editing found footage with surgical precision, they craft a disturbing montage that exploits our reflexive identification with the figures we follow onscreen (what film theorists have evocatively called 'suture'). Closeups of wounds, spilled blood and other unsettling tactile images inspire a certain nausea as the film potently cuts through self and other, the 'flesh of the world' and our very own blood and guts."
Ali Kazma’s 'Play' stages the representation of the body through an artistic discipline; the theatre. Shooting the Wooster Group’s Hamlet rehearsals and the actual performance, Ali Kazma takes the audience into a haunted world where the borders between the past and the present, the original and remake, real and representation are skilfully blurred; a world of ghosts that evokes contemplation on memory, loss and death in a seemingly contrasting technological set-up."
“Alexander and the Toad" is part of an ongoing video series called "The Originator". The video is an introduction for further series in which the main character ¬ supplemented with further figures ¬ will participate in a mutual carnivalesque procedure to meet what they call the Originator. "Alexander and the Toad" is based on a 17th century alchemical text (which fragmentally shows up in the video). This cryptic text - "The Vision of Sir George Ripley by Eirenaeus Philalethes" - tells the story of the basic alchemical trans¬substantional procedure using the image of a Toad to explain the correct way of the alchemical operations for the alchemist.

October 8th: Broersen & Lukacs: Mastering Bambi / Sarah Vanagt: In Waking Hours / Jakub Nepras: Metropolia

This second edition of 'Directions' is supported by: Czech Center (Rotterdam), Goethe Institut Niederlande (Amsterdam), LIMA international platform for sustainable access to media (Amsterdam), TCH Projects - Hungarian Cultural Forum (Amstelveen), Yunus Emre Instituut (Amsterdam) and Vlaams Cultuurhuis De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam).
 

Tags: Christoph Girardet, Ali Kazma, Broersen & Lukacs, Matthias Müller, Jakub Nepras