Video Screenings

Video Screenings

Juan Downey, “Information Withheld,” 1983.
28.5 minutes, color, stereo.

Video Screenings
Date
January 24, 2011

Between January and May, e-flux is pleased to present a series of film and video screenings in our storefront on Essex Street. Considering the various modes of circulation and reception of the moving image, we have invited several exhibitors, distributors, independent collectives, and publications to program an evening of film and video in conjunction with their ongoing activities. This international program includes presentations from Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art (Berlin), LUX (London), MAP Magazine (Edinburgh), The Media Burn Independent Video Archive (Chicago), and Xposeptember (Stockholm). This series is organized by Laura Barlow and Tim Ridlen. All screenings are free admission.

MAP Magazine | Monday 24 January, 7 pm
Difficult Gifts

 

MAP magazine presents Difficult Gifts, a screening of artists’ film and video that examine the idea of art as gift. The gift first requires a willing giver, although it is questionable whether that giver is ever able to give freely, and whether the sharing of the gift is necessarily different from mere demonstration or display. The gift also requires a receiver who is able to freely accept, one who is perceived to be in the position of reciprocity. From Andrea Büttner’s exchange with a closed order of nuns, and Shahryar Nashat’s incorporation of peer art works, to Stephen Sutcliffe’s presentation of fragments from his personal archive of video, Difficult Gifts takes the view of what is on offer and what can be shared.

The programme features work by Andrea Büttner, BS Johnson, Duncan Marquiss, Shahryar Nashat, Laure Prouvost, and Stephen Sutcliffe.

MAP is a contemporary art quarterly, published in Scotland and distributed internationally. The screening Difficult Gifts marks the launch of #24, the winter issue which includes artist pages by Shahryar Nashat, an artist text by Matt Keegan, as well as features on BS Johnson, Audrey Reynolds, Tom Burr and more. www.mapmagazine.co.uk / twitter.com/MAP_magazine

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art | Sunday 27 February, 7 pm
The World Will Devour You, So You Better Taste Good

 

Inspired by the split screen video as a format that doubles the sphere of power to create a world of fantasies and ghosts, this program presents a selection of works that consider the encounter of two or more elements that fight and seduce each other, playing out the politics of power. In Shelly Silver’s video 1, 2001, about longing threat, power and seduction, a group of cops laugh and talk, while scanning the street for suspicious activity while an extreme close-up of a sensuously exposed neck; a soft pink fleshy ear turns to reveal an inquisitive hostile eye. The camera therefore functions as an aggressor, the mediator and a confessor, employing sound, image and text as accomplices in doing so.

The programme features work by Florian Zeyfang, Maria Tereza Alves, Martin Ebner, Maite Abella, Judith Hopf, Deborah Schamoni, JB Rathke and Shelly Silver.

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, based in Berlin combines cinema (the Cinema Arsenal), festival (the Berlinale Forum & Forum Expanded), distribution, film archive, dvd and book publishing, and offers research opportunities for curators, academics and other cinepiles. www.arsenal-berlin.de

Curated by Nanna Heidenreich and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus; inspired and presented by Shelly Silver, with special guest, Florian Zeyfang.

LUX | Monday 28 March, 7 pm
The Artists Cinema

 

Benjamin Cook, Director of LUX, London presents a selection of new and old favorites from the Artists Cinema, a UK commissioning program organized by LUX and The Independent Cinema Office. Each year a selection of international artists are commissioned to produce 35mm short films that are inserted between commercials and features to consciously respond to, comment on, interrupt and reflect on the cinema context.

The program features work by Bonnie Camplin, Keren Cytter, Aurélien Foment, Amar Kanwar, Deimantas Narkevicius, Rosalind Nashashibi, Catherine Sullivan with Farhad Shamini, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Akram Zaatari.

LUX is a UK-based arts agency which supports and promotes artists working with the moving image. www.lux.org.uk

Xposeptember | Monday 25 April, 730 pm
Image at Work

 

Curator Helena Holmberg presents a selection of films including Tamas St. Auby’s Centaur (1973–75), and Geta Bratescu’s The Studio (1978), from the Image at Work exhibitions on view at Index and the Romanian Cultural Institute, and from the accompanying film screening series at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (October 2010 and February 2011).

The exhibition Image at Work and its accompanying film and seminar program looked at the notion of work, regarding it as an activity that structures and transforms the world around us, setting boundaries and defining the self and the society. Starting with the idea of work as a fundamental human activity used to handle the world around us, the exhibition explored various aspects of the meaning of work. The exhibition examined issues of the changing structures and conditions of labor in our contemporary age, as well as issues concerning the artist’s work and how work is represented through images. It also aimed to view the meaning-creating processes that build contexts and a critical potential within an artistic work.

Image at Work was initiated by Xposeptember, a biannual art event in Stockholm, and realized in collaboration with Baltic Art Center, Iaspis, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Moderna Museet and the Romanian Cultural Institute. Helena Holmberg is the curator of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm and director of Xposeptember. www.xposeptember.se

Media Burn Independent Video Archive
Monday 30 May
Pop Video Test
7 pm, free admission

“The Pop Video Test” was a joint effort by Scott Jacobs and Tom Weinberg of the Chicago Editing Center, and the Video Group of the Bell and Howell Corporation in 1980. This cooperative effort between the independent video community and a corporate video distributor was intended to test the viability of the home video market. The videomakers assembled ten hours of video pieces meant as an alternative to available pre-recorded programming (i.e. Hollywood movies). Fifty VCR owners in the Chicago area agreed to examine and review the tapes. Test viewers then received the programming two hours at a time, in groupings labeled Video Art, Documentary, Entertainment, and Potpourri.

Inspired by The Pop Video Test, this program includes TVTV’s Adland, Juan Downey’s Information Withheld, and selections from the early community-based TV show Greetings from Lanesville.

Founded by Tom Weinberg, the Media Burn Archive is a collection of over 6,000 independent, non-corporate tapes that reflect cultural, political and social reality as seen by independent producers, from 1969 to the present.
www.mediaburn.org

For inquiries about any of these events, please write to contact [​at​] e-flux.com.

Category
Film

Deimantas Narkevičius (b. 1964, Lithuania) lives and works in Vilnius. Originally trained as a sculptor, Narkevičius tarted using film during the early nineties. Employing documentary footage, voice-overs, interviews, re-enactments, and found photographs, his films submit historical events to the narrative structures of storytelling and cinema. In his artistic practice Narkevičius examines the relationship of personal memories to political histories, particularly those of his native Lithuania. Eschewing the common features of contemporary documentaries, the central characters of Narkevičius’s narratives are often absent from the screen, replaced by objects, drawings, and other surrogates.He has exhibited extensively around the world at including at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the 49th and 50th Venice biennials, and Manifesta II and X. In 2008, Narkevičius was awarded the Vincent Award and the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, and in 2017, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius held a major retrospective of his work.

Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based artist working in film and painting. Her films use both documentary and speculative languages, where real-life observations are merged with paintings, fictional, or sci-fi elements to propose models of collective living. Her paintings likewise operate on another level of subjective experience, they frame arenas or pools of potential where people or animals may appear, often in their own context of signs and apparitions that signal their position for the artist. Nashashibi has shown her works in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah Biennial X. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017 and won Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. She represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennial. Her most recent solo shows include Vienna Secession, CAAC Seville, Chicago Art Institute and Kunstinstuut Melly, Rotterdam. She was National Gallery artist in residence 2020.

Akram Zaatari (b.1966, Lebanon) has produced more than fifty films and videos, all sharing an interest in writing histories, pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut’s contemporary art scene. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice. Zaatari’s represented Lebanon at the Venice Biennial in 2013 with his film Letter to a Refusing Pilot. His work has been featured at documenta 13 in 2012. His work is part of institutional collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; K21 Dusseldorf; MACBA, Barcelona; MoMA, New York; Serralves Foundation, Porto; Tate Modern, London and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

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