Light Reading Series 9
Bernd Behr with Brian Dillon
Wednesday 20 May 2009, at 7pm

Light Reading’s ninth series continues with a dialogue between artist Bernd Behr and writer and critic Brian Dillon. The event will include Behr discussing his current project WEIMAR VILLA, as well as screening his recent works HOTEL PALINDROME and HOUSE WITHOUT A DOOR (both 2006).

Behr’s work is produced at the investigative intersection between art and architecture, and more precisely on the instances and possibilities of architectural performativity in the moving image. Behr’s new work in progress, WEIMAR VILLA, addresses notions of an archaeology of modernity and the archeologically modern in relation to the Bauhaus. Spanning locations in China and Germany, the film conflates the construction site of a Bauhaus-themed luxury suburb on the outskirts of Shanghai with the recently exhumed ruin of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s house, originally part of Walter Gropius’ row of prototype "Master Houses" in Dessau. The project follows his exploration of the spatial conditions of a 1972 lecture by Robert Smithson in HOTEL PALINDROME and HOUSE WITHOUT A DOOR (both 2006) which collapses a WWII US military test site with 1920s Expressionist Film.

Behr’s work can often be seen to employ a method of lateral investigation; in place of neutral documentary, the camera performs the archeological act, examining architectural topographies of the 20th Century and their social implications. In Behr’s practice, the research process infiltrates the perception of the work as a finished product, enabling it to actively question the production of knowledge with regards to its subject. In this way, Behr’s work simultaneously performs a subtle operation of current investigation and retrospective consideration, creating work that performs contemporaneously not only through its medium of video, but also acts as a proposition for potential re-engagement with the ruins and/or failures of its subjects.

Bernd Behr lives and works in London and has exhibited in numerous solo and group projects in the UK and internationally. Recent solo projects include “House Without a Door” at High Desert Test Sites, California, USA, 2008, e-raum, Cologne, Germany, 2007 and Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2006. Group exhibitions and screenings include Wurttemburgischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany, 2009, Blancpain Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland 2008, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, 2007, Chelsea Space, London, 2007, European Kunsthalle, Cologne, Germany, 2006 and Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, 2005.

Brian Dillon is UK Editor of Cabinet magazine and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent. He writes regularly for Frieze, Art Review, Modern Painters, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Wire. He is the author of a memoir, “In the Dark Room” (Penguin, 2005) and his “Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives” will be published in September 2009.

Light Reading is an ongoing series of critical dialogues that engage artists, writers and curators in conversation around a selected artist’s body of work. To book or to be included on the mailing list for future events, please contact:

Light Reading
3rd Floor, 316-318 Bethnal Green Road, London, E2 0AG
Nearest Tube / Train: Bethnal Green

Tickets: £5 door / £4 advance
Telephone: 020 7729 4494
Email: [email protected]
Places are limited so booking is essential

www.no-w-here.org.uk

John Bock
1st - 15th May 2009
on www.tank.tv

tank.tv is extremely pleased to present John Bock’s first online solo show. The special selection of fourteen videos includes several recently completed works and tank.tv will offer a unique opportunity to view these strong, chaotic and inventive videos : Alice Cooper, Boxer, Gast, Kleinodtodsod, Trecker, Fischgrätenmelkstand kippt ins Höhlengleichnis Refugium, Hysterie im Nonchalance, Pied de Porc, Bilanzgeraden, Schattenkanten Abfahren, Messi Mecker, Das Baumstück and Tierauflauf.

Bock (b. 1965 Gribbohm, Germany) attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HfBK) in Hamburg. He has exhibited internationally for over 15 years including solo exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, The Moore Loft in Miami, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and Insa Art Space, in Seoul. He has also participated in Documenta 11 (2002), the 2001 Yokohama Triennial, and the 48th, 50th and 51st Venice Biennials. Bock lives and works in Berlin.

Hannes Schupbach: Cinema Elements
London Tate Modern
Saturday 9 May 2009, at 6pm and 7:30pm

The stunning films of Swiss artist Hannes Schupbach extend the tradition of the meditative and lyrical film diary alternately defined by the work of Gregory Markopoulos, Robert Beavers and Nathaniel Dorsky, filmmakers united by an interest in the power and limits of the single shot and an idea of beauty grounded in a fascination with nature.

An accomplished painter and expert on textile art, Schupbach uses 16mm cinematography to explore cinema’s painterly dimensions, bringing to his films a keen attention to colour and light and their effect on mood and tempo. Schupbach’s meticulously structured silent films, like those of Dorsky, discover a multi-layered world, often using superimpositions and reflections to explore the hidden depths of the places and people evoked within them. We are pleased to welcome Hannes Schupbach for a program of recent and early work that includes his lovely debut film PORTRAIT MARIAGE (2000) as well as paired portraits of his mother and father –SPIN (2001) and VERSO (2008), respectively – and L’ATELIER (2008), a meditation on light and gesture within a gorgeously appointed artist’s studio in Paris.

Schupbach’s work has been shown in the solo exhibition "Stills and Movies" at Kunsthalle Basel from January to March 2009, which is followed by film screenings at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Harvard Film Archive and Tate Modern.

Programme 1 at 6pm

- Spin (Hannes Schupbach, 2001, colour, silent, 12 min)
Turning toward the interior. The concept of SPIN, an inherent turning momentum of electrons, stands for the constancy of time passing and for time itself. The unstoppable process of change is translated into film via the gliding movement of the camera. Bright light and blurring portray the environment of the film’s elderly subject, my mother, as pure atmosphere. Her slight calm gestures in the face of diminishing time and energy convey a personal presence undisturbed by specific goals. She sits and breathes quietly. When walking she travels across space. A tree full of apples turning away evokes regret, as does a sharp light which narrows and dissolves. In the final image my mother seems to taste a bitterness which is difficult to comprehend. I reveal our encounter through brief, selected insights.

- Verso (Hannes Schupbach, 2008, colour, silent, 16 min)
A portrait with my father.

- L’Atelier (Hannes Schupbach, 2007, colour, silent, 16 min)
Sight and thought. The atelier is the place where the artist dwells, the space for his actions and his thoughts. What comes into being here belongs to this place and is shaped in part by its presence. In the passage of days, inner advancement thus corresponds with a piece of the outer world, the real condition that allows the inner digression and enables the artist to return anew to this window, this tree, the house just in front. In the ‘drawing’ on film, described by the gestures of the recorded image, the physical space itself becomes the work. The space evolves in a counterplay to internal movement. Following an insight, a glance falls on one object, then another. The described manner of embracing, in the very making of the work, the sight of objects and the movements that lie resolved within them got me thinking admiringly of the two painters Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard: Cézanne, the master of line and the ‘painterly quantum,’ who depicts space as a reality composed of individual moments, Bonnard, the master of painting that renders an animated space.

- brief intermission -

Programme 2 at 7:30pm

- Portrait Mariage (Hannes Schupbach, 2000, colour, silent, 9 min)
Portrait mariage begins and ends with a textile motif. A pattern of ribbons on a damask tablecloth becomes a broad network extending into the depth of the image. Guests are gathering for the wedding of friends. A picture of relationships shines through the smallest of gestures. Single details and movements are brought together and become part of the coloured and transparent film space. The rite of passage is superimposed upon landscape textures and moments of preparation. The image as a precious border displays visible surfaces while also preserving an interior of bodies and spaces left open to the imagination. The sequences condense spontaneous recordings into metaphoric clusters.

- Toccata (Hannes Schupbach, 2002, 16mm, colour, silent, 28min.)
Il tocco means not only touch; it can also mean a small quantity, a single brushstroke in painting, the striking of a bell or piano keys. The surroundings meet the eye. The direct touch releases an interior impulse. Surfaces open to states of being. Out of this encounter arises the image. From the images, an inner place. In film, as in the mind, are brought together distant spaces and bodies, and the layerings of time. A house, a city in Italy, traffic, and the movements of people are filmed visibly in the present. But the images embrace a living and extended continuity. The light of one day links my eyes to the eyes of someone who lived in the same city two, three, or five hundred years ago. On a church wall, a sculptor has left an arched curtain in stone. Through the rhythm of its inward and outward foldings, the film becomes … still.

- Falten (Hannes Schupbach, 2005, colour, silent, 28 min)
In the form of folds: separate areas of a piece of fabric come together at new points of contact and angles. Individual sections come to the fore while others remain hidden. In motion, the surface of a cloth gleams like the delicate impression of light in film. The French experience includes forms of discovered, singled out or artificially employed nature. And parallel to this, the search for the natural in art. Leaves and flowers appear as if drawn. One’s own hand becomes an object, a figure. How are the leaves arranged on a tree? It is a culture of the aesthetic, of that which refers to perception in its most direct sense.

All films are 16mm, colour and silent.

The screenings will be followed by a book launch for the new publication, "Hannes Schupbach: Cinema Elements", with texts by Adam Szymczyk, Eleonore Frey, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Andrea Picard, and Hannes Schupbach. Published by Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2009.

Made possible by a generous grant from SWISS FILMS / Pro Helvetia, Arts Council of Switzerland. With support from the Embassy of Switzerland.

at

Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Nearest Tube: Southwark / London Bridge / Blackfriars

Tickets: £5 / £4 concessions (one ticket for both programmes, includes drinks reception)
Box Office: 020 7887 8888

www.tate.org.uk

Parakino: Blanca De La Torre Garcia - Some Politics Of Appropriation

15 May 2009, at. 6 p.m.
Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Łaźnia
ul. Jaskółcza 1, 80-767 Gdańsk - Poland

The term appropriation art came into common use in the 1980s with artists such as Sherrie Levine, who addressed the act of appropriating itself as a theme in art. Challenging ideas of originality, drawing attention to relations between power, gender and creativity, the social sources and uses of art, Levine plays with the theme of "almost same".

Aspects of appropriation appear in all areas of visual art history if one considers the basic act of making art as the borrowing of images or concepts from the surrounding world and re-interpreting them as art.
Some even might classify Leonardo da Vinci as an appropriation artist, because he used recombinant methods of appropriation, borrowing from sources as diverse as biology, mathematics, engineering and art, and then synthesizing them into inventions and artworks. Duchamp also went so far as to use existing art in his work, appropriating an apparent copy of the Mona Lisa into his piece, L.H.O.O.Q. What would our culture be without borrowing, adaptation and derivatives? In the area of visual art, such a question has taken on additional relevance given the extent to which appropriation and the recycling of pre-existing materials have become crucial factors in contemporary practice.

The following artists utilize methods of pseudoappropriation taking some classic subjects in the History of Art and using them as starting point of their videos, establishing an iconographic bridge between video and history of art, in an attempt to mixtify and enhance both traditions.  In order to illustrate this point, artist Evaristo Benítez in D Apres Courbet tells a story using a succession of gripping abstract images and Andreas Berzotti Death of Arts  reinterpretes Hitchcock s psycho s death as some kind of Arthur Danto s death of Art. While Luis Bezeta creates a moving painting in Moviecuadro, Julia Oschatz evokes the XIX  century romantic experience of the Sublime (Between Caspar, David and Friedrich). Antonia Fritche (Bump), films with a mobilephone a very impressionist aesthetic valued with the choice of a full screen, enlarging pixelisation and so picture decomposition. In her videos, Sabine Gross refers to popular works of art history, such as The Scream, by Edvard Munch, or Happy Tears, by Roy Lichtenstein. Through computer animations, Gross amplifies the intense emotional quality inherent to these pictures, allowing such very distinct aspects to dissociate themselves from their source and become independent. Andreas Sachsenmaier s L Ultima cena shows an apparent image of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci where female figures are sitting and standing at a long table, all well-known prototypes, which we can see daily in the media. Inspired by a painting by Jan Vermeer, in Mariana Vassileva s video The Milkmaid the motif becomes transformed, not only into our present but also into a virtual spaceless and timeless sphere. As she remains motionless and only the milk flows one could say that in this work, photography, video and sculpture unite in one medium. In Where to Sleep, Goya, Eugenio Ampudia spends the night sleeping inside the Prado Museum and under The Executions Of The Rebels of the 3rd of May by Francisco de Goya, raising questions regarding the construction of the social space and the struggle against conventions. Cristina Lucas (Talk), strikes and questions Michelangelo s sculpture Moses, as, according to the legend,  its creator did when it finished, and Lucas tries to find the truth about it.

Have these pieces some aura of the originals? Is to carve tombstones for the past the only way left to be original?
All the works could be seen as as a head-on confrontation with the anxiety of influence, and this creates the possibility of an allegorical reading of the work.

Together, these videos restate the history of art on an original point of view, miming moving image and enigmatic art history stereotypes with a strange blend of camp and genuine feeling. In creating such compilation, I try to pay homage to classics of Art History while at the same time asserting that there is some threadline that has been continued  along history, and not necessary a breaking point, a before and an after marked by the born of Video Art.
Therefore, the margins, the sites, the question of concept versus the whole panorama or the medium of video have to be reevaluated and brought into a different kind of discourse.

http://laznia.pl
http://video-art.pl/
http://postvideoart.wordpress.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/video-art