Clive Holden: Composition For An Ensemble, or The Spirit of The Games

From May 17 to September 8, 2024, the Canadian Cultural Centre presents Composition for an Ensemble, or The Spirit of The Games, an exhibition by Canadian filmmaker and digital artist, Clive Holden. 

Curators: Catherine Bédard and Stephen Bulger

Clive Holden is interested in the representation of celebrity and fame, and what surrounds it, the conditioning of our gaze in relation to this type of images, and the gaze of his fellow photographers and filmmakers.

With its central screening specifically designed for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, the exhibition consists of a digital, video and photographic installation combining an original commission,UNSUNG, with other works by the artist that provide a broader conceptual context for the commission. The artist works with archive images from past Olympic and Paralympic Games. The spectacular images of athletic movement and the dramatic potential of the faces are staged, mixed, looped and transformed into visual rhymes.

Drawing on a musical analogy, the structure of UNSUNG is an organisation of notes and chords (visuals in motion). The raw materials—photographic or filmic archive images—when presented as they are, are like musical notes. Musical chords—the juxtaposition of archive images—are made up of several “notes” played at the same time. It is only recently that technology has made it possible to create live moving visual chords—visual segments played simultaneously within the same image. This form of new power in moving images connects visual art to music. With UNSUNG, Clive Holden produces a work playing the images as silent notes and chords in a live experience.

In Paris, where cinema was invented, UNSUNG, the central work of Composition for an Ensemble, will be perceived in several ways: as a post-cinema work; as a kinetic sculpture; as a painting in motion; or as a live performance. Innovative and ambitious in spirit and form, this large-scale moving image proposes an experience that resonates with the athletic spirit and the spirit of the Games.

This exhibition is part of the Paris 2024 Cultural Olympiad programme.
It is also part of the official programme of The European Night of Museums and Nuit blanche.
Organized in partnership with the Canadian Paralympic Comittee and the National Film Board of Canada.