Artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt creates elaborately staged films that investigate the power of language and the conventions of cinema as an allegory for societal and individual behaviors. With the multi-channel film installation Euphoria he continues this examination by exploring capitalism, colonialism, and the influential effects of unlimited economic growth in society.
CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...
A nameless drifter navigates a barren landscape punctuated by satellite dishes, radio towers and droning airplanes. Stopping periodically in anonymous hotel rooms, she makes attempts to connect to an unidentified second party.
An experimental media installation of three windows exploring fragments of liminality. Three unique re-constructions of experiential instances volumising the cataclysms of thresholds. Experience the absence of definition, the absence of boundaries set and the absence of rationale. A myth is not to be understood, a myth is passed on, like a game of Chinese whispers, it takes its course and ages with time, suiting the demography and tale, it warps and distorts
A single-channel version of Kubota's installation of the same name, Rock Video: Cherry Blossom is a lyrical fusion of nature and technology. Branches of pink cherry blossoms etched against a vivid blue sky are the starting point for this sensual visual haiku. Through a fluid application of electronic processing, Kubota layers, digitizes, slows, colorizes and ultimately abstracts the cherry blossoms, creating poetic transmutations of space and image. The mesmerizing and unexpectedly witty confluence of serene blossoms and energetic imaging effects—the transformation of the organic into the electronic—is quintessential Kubota.
"Dancing is sculpting in time." Diotima captures the fluid grace of two people sculpting time through dance, in a continuous one-take shot around Indy Simin's "Echt in Vorm." Their movements inside, around, and upon the sculpture reveal a simple unity, where shapes, dancers, and their environment are perpetually in motion, blending into an inseparable, seamless harmony of a never-ending dance.
"Regina José Galindo’s Tierra (2013) explores connections between the exploitation of labor, resources, and human life in Guatemala. Presented at a larger-than-life scale, Galindo stands naked on a parcel of land that is excavated by an encroaching bulldozer. Conjuring imagery of machine-dug mass graves, the work draws attention to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people, mostly Maya Ixil, during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96). As the excavator digs around her, the artist stands fixed and unrelenting." - MoMA PS1
An audiovisual work that consists of 6593 frames of dust collected and scanned over a 2 month process by Nan Wang into an animated work combined with digital footage.
A remarkable walk through the life and work of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most important creators of the 20th century, revolutionary of arts, aesthetics and pop culture.
The decision to move to Holland doesn't sound like a wise idea. Why move to a country that could be flooded at any moment? For the last 25 years, the political climate has shifted. The public debate on migration has become harsher, more heated, and polarized. What would have been considered right-wing xenophobia back then, is now considered mainstream. Populists simplify complex realities into good and evil, victims and perpetrators: ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Their rhetoric often consists of dehumanizing words and metaphors. One of these is ‘water’. In reality, water is not an immediate threat to the average Dutch person; but it is a huge threat to the thousands trying to reach the Netherlands. People trying to survive the Mediterranean Sea in rubber boats. Trying to survive winter on the Aegean coast in primitive tents. To them, water really is deadly.
An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories.
To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.
After developing a poem at the height of the lockdown on a dystopian journey through the streets of North London to the tranquil relief of the Park. The poem, illustrated with the occasional image, reflects the range of emotions many people have gone through in these difficult times.
The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch. This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future.
In Antarctica, an artist prepares his installation simultaneously with a group of scientists conducting research. An essay on the persistence and loneliness of the creative act; like the flight of a butterfly in chaos theory or a silent prayer. A sensory experience. A visual poem made of ice, snow and wind.
Short film in competition at the 48Hours Film Project. Sci-Fi/Mystery genre. Directed by Simone Marsella, starring Ludovica Castrichella, Dario Grasso and Federico Imola.
In the first stages of prototype, Storm is an interactive VR installation that places audiences in the path of a phenomenal, awe-inspiring storm. Take a moment to be swept into an exhilarating multi-sensory vortex.
Shot in Sweden, the short film, ‘LAGOM: Breaking Bread With The Self-Righteous’ sees an appearance by Lhola Amira. She does not perform, she just appears. She looks a little lost in a field of flowers in bloom, a vista of beauty, yellow everywhere; she does not pluck a single flower. ‘LAGOM’ is the Swedish ethos of “not too much, not too little – just the appropriate amount.”
During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."