Found Footage: Cinema Exposed
5 April–3 June 2012
EYE, the new film museum in Amsterdam, opens on April 5th with Found Footage: Cinema Exposed. The exhibition and accompanying film program reveals how artists and filmmakers utilize the virtually inexhaustible reservoir of images that can be found in film archives, on Internet, TV and DVD. This found footage serves as raw material with which they make new works and give new meaning to existing moving pictures. The participants include Douglas Gordon, Bruce Conner, Aernout Mik, and Matthias Müller.
Found Footage: Cinema Exposed is curated by Jaap Guldemond, Director of Exhibitions at EYE.
The exhibition takes up an area of 1200 m2 and can best be described as a landscape of freestanding projection screens, monitors, flat screens and 16mm projections in which the rattling projector is also a component of the work. The exhibition Found Footage: Cinema Exposed begins with American filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933–2008), who started making films without using a camera as long ago as the late fifties. Via artists such as Douglas Gordon (1966) and Matthias Müller (1961), renowned for their appropriation of footage from well-known feature films, the visitor is acquainted with the work of Italian duo Gianikian/Ricci Lucchi (1942) that rearranges, slows down and adds color to fragments from early, silent cinema. The visitor also encounters home movies rescued from the hands of garbage collectors by Pablo Pijnappel (1979), TV Décollages by Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell (1932–1998) and the installations specially designed for the exhibition by Aernout Mik (1962) and Christoph Girardet (1966), using footage from the EYE’s own collection. Other participating artists include David Claerbout, Anri Sala, Bill Morrison, and Joachim Koester
Found Footage: Cinema Exposed elucidates the historical use of found visual material and examines the complex techniques and motivations with which the makers analyze the “grammar” of the moving picture. The exhibition is in keeping with a tradition at EYE of presenting archive material in a new context; in the eighties and nineties, EYE—then still the Filmmuseum—took the lead in inviting filmmakers to make new films from unknown film fragments from the collection.
Film program
In the new spaces of EYE, the visitor can become acquainted with the thematic film program, which is an extension of the exhibition. This includes work by important (early) found footage artists, such as Harun Farocki (1944), Gustav Deutsch (1952), Bill Morrison (1965) and Péter Forgács (1950).
Publication
Found Footage: Cinema Exposed is accompanied by a 264-page publication with texts by Tom Gunning, Marc Glöde and exhibition curator Jaap Guldemond among others.
