Athanasia Kyriakakos and Dimitris Rotsios’s remarkable video-sculptural installation Intron (click image left) was housed in the Greek pavilion on the occasion of the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Intron was a collaboration between Athanasia Kyriakakos and architect Dimitris Rotsios. What was noteworthy about this work is that it brought together a variety of innovative features. (more…)
The most interesting works, in my opinion, at the KW institute—and indeed the Biennial as a whole—were videos and I have already posted on two. The next work I would like to treat is by Patricia Esquivias it is entitled Folklore #1, 2006. DVD 15min. This video is intriguing due to its mixture of anthropology, memory and absurdism. (more…)
Willie Doherty’s Non-Specific Threat, 2004, is a simple and powerful single channel, video projection. The camera moves in a circular tracking shot around a tough looking baldheaded man with a gold chain around his neck and a denim jacket. The mise-en-scène appears to be a derelict warehouse. It’s the kind of place which might be chosen for the purposes of torture and/or murder. As the camera tracks slowly around this threatening presence a male voiceover, disembodied from the central figure, makes a series of cryptic statements punctuated by pregnant pauses. For example: (more…)
Ever is All Over, 1997, consists of two overlapping video projections (2 min 38 sec). I saw this at the Beyond Cinema exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Gallery in Berlin in 2007. There are two aspects of the video on the left there is a landscape with rolling green fields populated with an exotic flower popularly known as the Redhot Poker (Kniphofia uvaria). This idyllic landscape, with its connotations of paradise, is projected at an angle to create some anamorphic distension that contributes to its dreaminess as does a lyrical, musical soundtrack provided in collaboration with Anders Guggisberg. (more…)
Video can quite effectively create a highly immersive effect when it takes on a sculptural dimension. Take for instance Ergin Cavusoglu’s Point of Departure, 2005, a multi-screen video installation with an array of screens designed to allow the viewer to ‘walk into the picture’. (more…)
Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture v. 1.2 is a remarkable synthesis of modernist-minimalist sculpture and video projection. Strangely this fascinating piece was not shown at the main Ars Electronica 2007 exhibition space in the OK Centrum Gallery but was instead relegated to a rather decrepit building on the streets of Linz. Fortunately we wandered around the town long enough to stumble upon it. (more…)
I am revisiting my folder of photographs and videos taken at Documenta 12 in order to begin an archaeological investigation of why such a major exhibition failed. One of the theories evident in the reception of Documenta 12 is that many of the artists were unknown. One can take this at face value, but there were artists in the exhibition who are well known and some who, although less known, have acquired a significant degree of recognition within the Euro-American art system, one such is the Indian documentary filmmaker and artist Amar Kanwar. (more…)
Regina José Galindo’s performance Who Can Erase the Traces?, 2003, was shown in video form at the Venice Biennale in 2005, where she won a Golden Lion award in the category “artists under 30″ for the works she exhibited which also included Himenoplastia: a video of an operation she underwent to reconstruct her hymen. Regarding her use of her body as an art form Galindo has stated: “My body not like an individual body, but a social body, a collective body, a global body. To be, or to reflect, through me, her, his, their experience; because all of us, we are at the same time ourselves and others.” (Aucklandtriennial). (more…)
Rebecca Belmore represented Canada in the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. She presented an installation which was of interest because of its faithfulness to Claire Bishop’s description of installation art as differing from “traditional media (sculpture, painting, photography, video)” because it “addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space’ (Bishop 2005: 6). (more…)
I saw Gary Hill’s Viewer, 1996, exhibited at the Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 29 September 2006 - 25 February 2007. The work is a silent five-channel video loop that shows a line of seventeen homeless Mexican day labourers recruited by Hill from the environs of his studio in California (Israel), in what appears to be an elongated police lineup. What seems most significant for the viewer is that the line of men are in fact video projections. The viewer is able to see the bodies of these people moving slightly providing a sense of presence that is palpable: the viewer has the sense of being viewed. Hill has not given these people a voice but he has given them an extraordinary presence that can be compared to the portraiture of Rembrandt for example. The scale, the silence and the potency of the darkened room provides the subject matter (exploited Third World labour) with considerable dignity, SEE VIDEO.
Daniel von Sturmer’s, The Object of Things, 2007, is a video-sculptural installation filling the Australian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. Obviously there have been quite a number of sculptural installations since the 1990s (Coulter-Smith 2006), but this one is particularly interesting not only because of its intersection of sculpture and video but also because of its intersection of narrative and abstraction. (more…)
John Massey’s As the Hammer Strikes, 1982, is a three screen video shown at the Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin (29 September 2006 to 25 February 2007). This video is remarkable because it was made in 1982 which is quite early for a use of three screen video. (more…)
Originally published in Eyeline contemporary art magazine, Australia, October, 2002
I was told that there was a ‘lot of film’ at Documenta. After seeing it for myself I would prefer to use the term ‘photomedia’ (embracing videography, world wide web, digital art, graphic design, books and other print media that employ reprographic imagery). After Walter Benjamin we are well aware of how powerful photomedia can be, and in many instances, although by no means all, the photomedia-art at Documenta was powerful and sophisticated, mainly due to its ability to convey information. This was a very political Documenta but more interestingly it was an exhibition that showed ways in which political art can combine an interaction with life praxis with a highly creative use of media. In this sense Documenta 11 indicated how far politically oriented art has evolved since the political pop art produced by New York artists such as Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke in the late 1970s and 1980s. (more…)
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