Cactus

De-Extinction(en)

Huyghe's film installation captures a moment of reproduction between insects over 30 million years old. The title resonates with current scientific experiments into the de-extinction of prehistoric species.

Centers(en)

Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor.

I’m Scared But I’ve Been Here Before(en)

A short film adaptation of the titular poem by Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

Art of Memory(en)

Manipulating a variety of sources, Vasulka uses creative imaging tools to situate historical images against Southwestern landscapes of incredible beauty. Contorting the images into a variety of isomorphic forms, Vasulka creates a literal shape for these memories, developing these shapes as metaphors for the processes of fragmentation, condensation, and inversion, that inevitably contort fact into memory. While much of the raw material for the tape is drawn from World War II and its rehearsals, the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, The Art of Memory is really an extended meditation seeking to reconcile the blurry, banal photographs of historic figures with the mass destruction they helped engineer.

NAO_VA_EMBORA.mp4(pt)

Requiem for the 20th Century(fr)

“Requiem pour le XXè siècle” is a manifesto against war. It is an elegy. The photograph is connected with images that are part of our collective memory: extracts from newsreels of World War II that have been reworked and transformed through various optical and electronic processes. World War II was a condensation of violence (biological and environmental destructions, racism, ethnic clearing, and persecution of people who are different…) and ongoing wars perpetuate that violence. This work is a metaphorical representation of all past, present and future wars. Constructed on the dramatic tension between the violence of wars and the presence of the intersex hermaphroditic “Angel”: Their eyes are bandaged; they are a symbol for difference, having an ambiguous position: observer, witness, victim or judge.

I Am Making Art(en)

In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each gesture. Each articulation of the phrase is given a different emphasis and nuance, as if art were being created from moment to moment. This index of body movements is ironically offset by the repetitive monotony of the exercise.

The Vasulka Effect(en)

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.

data-verse 2(en)

data-verse is a data-driven audio-visual trilogy by artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda which marks a two-decade culmination in the artist’s research. The trilogy addresses the layered dimensions of our world, from the microscopic, to the human, to the macroscopic. Through Ikeda’s process, massive scientific data sets have been transcribed, converted, transformed, de/re/meta-constructed and orchestrated to visualise and sonify the different dimensions that co-exist in our world between the visible and the invisible. Each variation immerses visitors in the vast data universe in which we live, capturing hidden facets of nature and the vast scientific knowledge underpinning our existence. This large-scale data-driven trilogy is generated by extremely precise computer programming and features a minimalist electronic soundtrack, harmonised with Hollywood-standard, high-definition, 4K DCI video projections of scientific data onto a large screen.

star born brutal(en)

'star born brutal' is a diaristic exploration of liberation and trauma, in which recurrent memories oscillate between the Imaginary and the Real. The filmmaker is confined by an overwhelming desire to recover a wholeness which is tied to the memories shaping their identity. Within this struggle, the schizophrenic experience creates a deterritorialization of masculinity, and embraces the fluidity of trauma and attachment in its absence. In this context, masculinity becomes a negotiation for an emancipation from the suffering inherent to birth.

you don't know JACK like I did.(en)

An experimental re-edit of Jack Frost, starring Michael Keaton.

Pancoran(en)

Motorcycles and cars are lost in the sound of traffic and disappear in bands sliced into film footage of Jakarta’s roads. The horizontal and vertical lines or checkerboard patterns emphasizing the density and chaos of the crowded roads were made by optically printing 16mm film.

Green Grey Black Brown(en)

Departing from the traditional factory lines of production on the plastic plant manufacturing industry. From there, the film expands into the realm of synthetic nature, portraying a highly engineered landscape,developed by startups. The images appear to be bound together by a dark slime—an oily, recurrent presence as a connection to the strange and gory logics of petro capitalism and global territories of extraction.Petroleum, in both refined and unrefined forms, serves as a temporal vector: it is the raw material for plastic plants, Revealing the absurd techno-solutionist vision of the future.

Moby Dick(he)

Guy Ben-Ner, one of Israel's foremost video artists, gained international recognition with a series of low-tech films, starring his family in absurdist settings carved out of their intimate spaces and their everyday surroundings. Many of his videos are inspired by screenplays for films, folktales and novels. Analyzing these literary and cinematographic passages allows him to exploit the conventions of film narrative: how to tell a story, captivate an audience through a tale, sustain a degree of tension and entertainment, and so on. At the same time, he corrupts the magic of fiction by openly showing us the entrails of everything he records, without worrying about revealing the tricks of the trade. A large part of his filmic oeuvre features a conglomeration of cinematic and literary references which the artist quotes, adapts or interprets. Ben-Ner self-referentially links the great themes and their literary, cinematic and artistic realization.

Candle(en)

Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.

[sound of subtitles](en)

Deaf artist Seo Hye Lee gives new subtitles to a selection of archive films about pottery, ones which playfully examine the disparity between how people with different levels of hearing experience art.

Toxic City Music - Evan Caminiti & Paul Clipson at ISSUE Project Room(en)

Inspired by the “psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism,” Evan Caminiti’s Toxic City Music utilizes sounds sourced from daily life in NYC. These found sounds are heavily processed and woven into instrumentation ranging from electronically treated guitar to modular synthesizers. Toxic City Music evolved over the course of several years, resulting in a wealth of material which will be re-processed and uniquely presented in an improvisatory manner in live performance. The Wire describes the new work as "The sound of things falling apart with unbearable slowness…[with Caminiti] reporting his observations with acuity, integrity, and artfulness."

Grinder-Man - G-VTR01(ja)

A 19-minute short film featuring the six performances of the Japanese performance art group Grinder-Man. Only released on VHS.

Cumulonimbus(en)

A 1970 projection of what may come when pollution over powers nature.

Studies(ko)

“Kim has explored the conditions of contemporary life encompassed by digital media and representational devices, creating original video work that combine powerful images and unfamiliar narratives based on autobiographical experiences . . . His new work, Studies (2024), is a fiction film with cinematic experimentation borrowing from the horror film genre. Heecheon Kim has invented a fantasy of horror that opens up a new dimension of creation in which the fragility of borders allows a possibility of narratives.”