I See, So I See So. Messages from Harry Smith
05 Sep - 20 Dec 2015
I See, So I See So. Messages from Harry Smith, 2015
Kasper Akhøj / Tamar Guimarães, A Família do Capitão Cervásio (Capitain Gervasio's Family), 2013/2014
Kasper Akhøj / Tamar Guimarães, A Família do Capitão Cervásio (Capitain Gervasio's Family), 2013/2014
I SEE, SO I SEE SO. MESSAGES FROM HARRY SMITH
Peter Adair + Kasper Akhøj/Tamar Guimarães + Wallace Berman + Franco Pinna + Harry Smith + Suzanne Treister + Rosemarie Trockel + Apichatpong Weerasethakul
5 September - 20 December 2015
Curator: Regina Barunke und Anja Dreschke
"My movies are made by God; I am just the medium for them". The experimental filmmaker, mystic and ethnomusicologist, Harry Everett Smith was a major protagonist of American counterculture of the 1960s and was especially well known in Europe for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music. His works combine autobiographical links to 19th-century occultism and spiritism with anthropological (sound) studies on the shamanism of the Lummi Nation und experiments with psychedelic substances in the attempt to visualise synaesthetic and mystic experiences. Using Harry Smith’s life and work as its starting point, the group exhibition "I See, So I See So. Messages from Harry Smith" presents artists and theorists working at the interface between visual art, film and anthropology. In their examinations of mediumism as a ritual, experimental and artistic practice, each of them raise specific questions concerning media semantics, exploring the politics of the aestheticisation, commodification and globalisation of ecstatic practices and their experimental appropriation and transformations through the means of art. The "medium" itself - in its two-fold sense as technical media and personal medium - presents itself in this way in the crosshairs of divergent artistic and scientific approaches and connections. Anja Dreschke is media anthropologist, filmmaker and research fellow at the DFG project Trance Mediums and New Media at the University of Siegen, Regina Barunke is art historian and artistic director of the Temporary Gallery, Cologne.
Peter Adair + Kasper Akhøj/Tamar Guimarães + Wallace Berman + Franco Pinna + Harry Smith + Suzanne Treister + Rosemarie Trockel + Apichatpong Weerasethakul
5 September - 20 December 2015
Curator: Regina Barunke und Anja Dreschke
"My movies are made by God; I am just the medium for them". The experimental filmmaker, mystic and ethnomusicologist, Harry Everett Smith was a major protagonist of American counterculture of the 1960s and was especially well known in Europe for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music. His works combine autobiographical links to 19th-century occultism and spiritism with anthropological (sound) studies on the shamanism of the Lummi Nation und experiments with psychedelic substances in the attempt to visualise synaesthetic and mystic experiences. Using Harry Smith’s life and work as its starting point, the group exhibition "I See, So I See So. Messages from Harry Smith" presents artists and theorists working at the interface between visual art, film and anthropology. In their examinations of mediumism as a ritual, experimental and artistic practice, each of them raise specific questions concerning media semantics, exploring the politics of the aestheticisation, commodification and globalisation of ecstatic practices and their experimental appropriation and transformations through the means of art. The "medium" itself - in its two-fold sense as technical media and personal medium - presents itself in this way in the crosshairs of divergent artistic and scientific approaches and connections. Anja Dreschke is media anthropologist, filmmaker and research fellow at the DFG project Trance Mediums and New Media at the University of Siegen, Regina Barunke is art historian and artistic director of the Temporary Gallery, Cologne.