Kadist Video Library: Online Video Exhibitions
The Online Video Exhibition series activates a new venue for the presentation of contemporary video art. Each exhibition is organized by a different curator from around the world, and brings together artworks selected from the Kadist Video Library (KVL) and other wide-ranging video sources. CURRENT EXHIBITION AP: Assembling Personalities Curated by Rudolf Frieling March 30–April 30, 2020 With works by Guy Ben-Ner Keren Cytter Alex Da Corte Mark Leckey Li Ran Click to view full program information “Some assembly required” applies not only to the lasting global phenomenon of IKEA, but has become a foundational experience of making sense in art as well—for us as viewers, but first and foremost for the artists themselves. AP: Assembled Personalities dives into the topic of studio practice in art, film, theater, and performance at a time when the fake, the virtual, and the artificial have claimed their stake as persistent characteristics of our reality and our lives. The works presented here contribute to the staging and performing of the “real” inside the discourses of contemporary art. Ghosts from all walks of life loom large in this episode of the KADIST online exhibition series. This is the one where Guy, Keren, Alex, Mark, and Ran reassemble the props, the camera angles, the stories and scripts, and above all the icons or iconic performances of the past. The episode celebrates the complexities of assemblage in five distinct settings and frames of references. Guy Ben-Ner seeks guidance in literature and film from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book , to François Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage . Keren Cytter exploits personalities lifted straight out of Opening Night by John Cassavetes, fascinated by the sheer presence of an actress like Gena Rowlands. In a jarring counterpose, Alex da Corte, in his own terminology, “re-invents” the artist as an actor, playing Boris Karloff playing Frankenstein, in a studio void of any trace of narrative or history. Mark Leckey simply wants to look closely at Jeff Koons’ Bunny , but he wants to do so on his own terms and in his own studio. And in China, Li Ran sends a group of fellow tourists down the path of an unknown travelogue in the style of a Discovery Channel special. In this exhibition, we witness the agency of assembled personalities both as an individual artistic gesture as well as a collaborative effort executed in the realm of the studio—the default domain of the artist. Contemporary personalities in their own right, the artists re-address art history (Mark’s appropriation of a Jeff Koons’ sculpture), education (Guy’s appropriation of pedagogical tropes), and the visual arts, moving across and beyond binaries based on the art/life divide (Alex, Keren, and Ran). While this approach is not exactly new, the context for grasping the effects of the real/fake or life/art divide has dramatically changed over the last ten years. As if Jean Baudrillard’s spectre of the simulacra, with its continuous mise-en-scène of the fake, had re-entered the contemporary discourse through the front door of mainstream media, the videos in this online stream mediate the physicality and materiality of things, props, or bodies to produce a hybrid genre of moving image that grapples with the echoes of film, television, theater, and video. They share an interest in re-examining what forms contemporary sculpture might take, and what effects the theatrical visualization of sculptures might generate when the sculptural form cannot be tied to a binary of one or the other: the person or the actor, the real or the artificial identity. The iconic body or form is rather suspended in a blurry world of assembled identities and attempted forms. We, the public, however, are not spared either. While TV challenged film and theater by creating an experience for one home or one family, now, embedded in the digital network, we are an audience of one in front of our personal screen – often in the presence of other family members acting as their own “audience of one” as well. And we begin to recognize layers and layers of social and historical models, enriching but also complicating our relationship with these assembled personalities. Artwork Details Guy Ben-Ner Wild Boy , 2004 Single channel video, 17:16 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Keren Cytter Untitled , 2009 Single channel video, 16:51 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Alex Da Corte Slow Graffiti , 2017 Single channel video, 13 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Mark Leckey Made in Heaven , 2004 Single channel video, 2:11 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Li Ran Beyond Geography , 2012 Single channel video, 23:09 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection About the curator Rudolf Frieling was appointed SFMOMA’s curator of media arts in January 2006. He has co-curated the retrospectives of Nam June Paik (forthcoming, premiered at Tate Modern London in 2019), Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here (2019), Bruce Conner: It’s All True and the survey Soundtracks (2017). Other exhibitions include Film as Place (2016), Christian Marclay: The Clock (2013), Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Agent Ruby Files (2013), Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media (2012), Descriptive Acts (2012), Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break (2011), David Claerbout: Architecture of Narrative (2011), and the influential survey exhibition The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (2008). Frieling is also a senior adjunct faculty member at California College of the Arts. He studied English literature, social sciences, and philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and received a PhD from Universität Hildesheim, Germany. PAST EXHIBITIONS Summer of ’19 Curated by Marina Reyes Franco October 14 to November 14, 2019 With works by Allora & Calzadilla Halil Altindere Julieta Aranda Karla Claudio Betancourt Guerreiro do Divino Amor Lola Gonzàlez Sofía Gallisá Muriente UuDam Tran Nguyen Click to view full program information Using artist Karla Claudio Betancourt’s videos of the protests in Puerto Rico that resulted in the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló in July 2019 as a narrative thread, the selection of works in Summer of ’19 approaches issues of displacement, forced migration, politics, tourism as a means of oppression, gender roles, activism, and mourning. All of these concerns were central to the protest movement in Puerto Rico and emphasize shared struggles that go beyond borders and often force people to cross them, too. Research into the KADIST Collection was guided by meta words and tags that led to finding the works, emphasizing the digital nature of the curatorial project. Sofia Gallisá Muriente’s B-roll (2016) provides an introduction to the tax incentives for the rich and tourism-tinged economic aspirations of the recent Puerto Rican governments, by reimagining the promotional material used to attract American investors. By focusing only on the b-roll, the artist emphasizes the visual tropes recurrent in this type of marketing of the Caribbean, as well as the absolute disconnect between social classes. It might look like paradise, but for whom? Guerreiro do Divino Amor takes a slightly fantastical approach by conjuring Rio de Janeiro’s fictional twin city, SuperRio, in his video SuperRio Superficções (2106). In it, a sort of TV weather woman presents SuperRio as “an ecosystem of superfictions that interfere with the development of the city and of the collective imagination”. Halil Altindere’s Wonderland (2013) follows a rap group through their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood as they denounce the displacement and encroachment on their community, a sadly common occurrence as former low income areas become attractive to developers. In Lola Gonzàlez’s film Summer Camp (2015), we find a group of male friends in the process of transforming a country house into a training camp. They wake up, exercise, and write hundreds of people’s names unto the walls of the home. What are they preparing for? The threat of social unrest can be felt from beyond the placid appearance of the house. Whose names are they writing? The routine is only broken when the men start singing the names in chorus-like fashion, giving the low-key paramilitary feeling of the training camp the eery solemnity of honoring the dead. Waltz of the Machine Equestrians (2012) by Uudam Tran Nguyen responds to the rapid shift from an agrarian economy to a landscape of skyscrapers and contamination in his native Vietnam. In the video, the “equestrians” are multi colored poncho-wearing motorcyclists riding through the city in perfect synch to Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Suite for Variety Orchestra, Waltz no. 2.” The action presents the beauty of form, oscillating between the power of collective action and the individual freedom and desires, as they rip apart the ties that bind them at the end. The ultimate space that holds us together is Earth, and in Julieta Aranda’s video Swimming in rivers of Glue (2016), we read a definite statement: “This planet shall sustain me until it has been drained of all elemental life!” Images of nature are juxtaposed with interview clips that exacerbate feelings of anxiety regarding our future, and posing questions about the exploration of space, its colonization, and the fragility of Earth. Circling back to the original look into events in Puerto Rico, Allora & Calzadilla’s Returning a Sound (2004) harks back to a celebratory moment in the early 2000s when the people of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques successfully protested and kicked out the US Navy from their land. Marking the beginning of their foray into the relationship between sound, music and power, this video presents a man riding a modified motorcycle with a trumpet affixed to the muffler in an apparent attempt to reclaim the territory from militarization and contamination resulting from bombing and experiments. Many years later, the video can either be a nostalgic wish for a better future past, or a new call to action for unaddressed environmental and colonial injustices. Summer of ‘1 9 is an anachronistic collection of images that evoke situations that kept us busy and active in protests around the world. -Marina Reyes Franco Artwork Details Karla Claudio Betancourt 22 DE JULIO 2019: PARO NACIONAL , 2019 Single channel video, 1:26 minutes Courtesy of the artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente B-roll , 2016 Single channel video, 6:43 minutes Courtesy of the artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor SuperRio Superficções , 2016 Single channel video, 9:06 minutes Courtesy of the artist Halil Altindere Wonderland , 2013 Single channel video, 8:25 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Karla Claudio Betancourt LA FUTURA , 2019 Single channel video, 0:39 seconds Courtesy of the artist Lola Gonzàlez Summer Camp , 2015 Single channel video, 8:52 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection UuDam Tran Nguyen Waltz of the Machine Equestrians , 2012 Single channel video, 4:34 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Julieta Aranda Swimming in Rivers of Glue , 2016 Single channel video, 9:57 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Allora & Calzadilla Returning a Sound , 2004 Single channel video, 5:42 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Karla Claudio Betancourt PERREO COMBATIVO , 2019 Single channel video, 1:09 minutes Courtesy of the artist About the Curator Marina Reyes Franco (b. 1984) is a Curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. She received a BA in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico and a MA in Argentine and Latin American Art History at IDAES-UNSAM in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2010, she co-founded La Ene, an itinerant museum and collection. Some recent projects include: Resisting Paradise, at Pública, San Juan and Fonderie Darling, Montreal; Watch your step / Mind your head, ifa-Galerie Berlin; The 2nd Grand Tropical Biennial in Loíza, Puerto Rico; Calibán, MAC in San Juan; C32: Sucursal, MALBA in Buenos Aires, and numerous exhibitions at La Ene. As curator and researcher, she has focused on the work of Esteban Valdés, artistic and literary manifestations on the frontier of political action, and the impact of tourism in cultural production in the Caribbean. She received the 2017 CPPC Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean and was nominated for ICI’s 2014 Independent Vision Curatorial Award. Telegrams Curated by Monica Narula, artist and curator with Raqs Media Collective Available to stream August 1 to August 31, 2019 With works by Alexandre Arrechea Bady Dalloul Fang Lu Haroon Gunn-Salie Hayoun Kwon Click to view full program information A telegram (Greek tele: distant and gramma: letter) is a written message transmitted by using an electric device. These are usually transmissions of urgencies and anticipate a response. The urgencies could be of major or minor fluctuations, within the humdrum or delirium of living, making, and departing. To this belongs a sense of a halt, and a movement; a pause and a decision, a call, and a mobilization. In the five works here, we will sense distant and intimate worlds, who pull us towards themselves with an affectionate, yet disobedient embrace. Haroon Gunn-Salie’s short film presents a series of temporary artworks by changing the ‘Zonnebloem’ road signs in central Cape Town to read ‘District Six’. Zonnebloem renamed (2013) is an attempt by Gunn-Salie to change apartheid and colonial heritage that dominates popular memory in Cape Town and South Africa through aesthetic and social intervention. A punctuation in time and place that opens both the idea of an alternate universe, as well as a different reality to the present one. Hayoun Kwon makes an account of a Nigerian called Oscar, exiled in France, which confronts a historical and social reality with a personal and intimate testimony. The film Lack of Evidence (2011) is constructed through sequences juxtaposing different realities and then by becoming a mise en abîme of the story. The image becomes an elastic characteristic memory and recalls the process of reconstitution. From another perspective, this film questions what constitutes proof and whether this artistic reconstitution of a traumatic event could be used as evidence—whether art can even have an “objective” dimension. Fang Lu films inside an abandoned museum, creating a scenario where instructed actors gesturally mime scenes from news and journalistic images outside China. No World (2014) points to the changing roles of the camera from a device originally invented to memorialize a moment, to a tool that situationally creates an event. The performance of violence, conflicts, and human relationships in the confined space blurs the boundary between the gallery and everyday life, between staged performance and documentary footage. It also opens the question of what it is that the next generation sees in its relation with the technologically mediated ‘event’. In Scrapbook (2015), Bady Dalloul writes a letter to the viewer, imploring the witnessing of what we assume, but cannot know. In Hiroshima, Dalloul came across the story of Sadako, a young girl who suffered from leukemia as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on the city on August 6, 1945. While dying, she recalled the ancient legend that a person who makes a thousand origami cranes will have their greatest wish granted. Placed between the origami on yellowed pages in the scrapbook that makes the skin of the film, are texts and images combining reality and fantasy as they address questions of war, and political, military, and economic decisions, and their impact on the fate of individuals. And, finally, in Alexandre Arrechea’s work White Corner (2006) he seems to be unwittingly attacking himself, a poignant comment on fear and the failure to recognize similarity in “otherness”. All these works ask of us not for a simple withdrawal into introspection, but an awareness of the corners and edges of our slowly moving world. It is up to us—then—how we plan to respond. —Monica Narula Artwork Details Haroon Gunn-Salie, Zonnebloem Renamed, 2013 Single channel video, 1:30 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Hayoun Kwon, Lack of Evidence, 2011 Single channel video, 9:20 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Fang Lu, No World, 2014 Single channel video, 18 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Bady Dalloul, Scrapbook, 2015 Single channel video, 48 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Alexandre Arrechea, White Corner, 2006 Single channel video, 8 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection About the Curator Monica Narula is an artist and curator with Raqs Media Collective. She formed Raqs in 1992 with Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The word ‘raqs’ in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective takes this sense of ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and with time. The members of Raqs Media Collective live and work in New Delhi, India. Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo Curated by Erin Christovale Available to stream June 29 to July 29, 2019 With works by Adah Glenn (aka AfroPuff™) Danielle Dean Dineo Seshee Bopape Click to view full program information “I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned.” — Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo was a public access television show that aired in Los Angeles from 1997-2007. Produced by Adah Glenn (AfroPuff productions) at Time Warner Access Studios in Marina Del Rey and Hollywood, the show featured the radical musings of SnakeDoctor, an artist and philosopher based in the historically Black arts community of Leimert Park. The episodes, which totaled in seventeen, often featured SnakeDoctor in his signature top hat either flanked between his paintings of astral Black bodies swirling in adinkra symbols or pacing in front of a greenscreen mimicking the schizophrenic output of a news cycle. Public access television, which was established by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1970’s, provided a unique space of uninterrupted mass media that was created by and for local citizens around the country. SnakeDoctor utilized this platform to critique and speak on a range of topics including self-help and transformation tips, the state of Black capitalism, how to embrace the calling of being an artist, and conspiracy theories regarding politicians being replaced by aliens. In the online program, segments of various episodes are tethered together by the animated works of artists Danielle Dean and Dineo Seshee Bopape, who employ strategies of collage and sonic interventions to comment on mental frameworks, the origins of capitalism, and object-oriented ontology. Their works act as stand-ins for commercial breaks, whose textured advertisements become ambiguous, mimicking a digital scroll of images that hide political gestures in their visual folds. Danielle Dean’s hand-drawn animation, True Red (2016), features an amorphous red and black shoe modeled after what was marketed as the “Vampire sneaker,” released in 2003 by Nike. True Red is a part of a larger project called True Red Ruin that traces the origins of capitalism and objecthood to sites such as Elmina Castle, which was erected by the Portuguese in present-day Ghana and was a pivotal stop in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In the piece, The Vampire sneaker oozes of blood and oil as it shapeshifts into various objects including a castle, a Black power fist, and even a Chinese factory worker to consider the various levels of exploitation that major corporations engage in. Dineo Seshee Bopape’s video, why do you call me when you know i can’t answer the phone (2012), named after the chorus in Joan Armatrading’s love song, The Weakness in Me , features a kaleidoscopic loop of objects ranging from scientific instruments, trashcans, rotary telephones, clocks, clipboards, and a whole host of animals. The piece begins with a large, white egg that fills the screen until it is met with a sonic rupture that produces a globe from the egg’s core, prominently featuring the continent of Africa. Bopape, whose larger practice also includes sculpture, installation, and multimedia filled environments, created this video in part as a way to respond to her father’s onset of Alzheimers and to emphasize the nonsensical relationship of language and images. Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo presents a landscape of moving images housed in both the pursuit and historical underpinnings of the African Diaspora through various formats. The overall meditative quality of the program builds a bridge between SnakeDoctor’s lengthy monologues and the cyclic visuals of Dean and Bopape to invoke the loop, the remix, and the inherent rhythmic nature of an interconnected experience. —Erin Christovale Artwork Details Adah Glenn, Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo Episode 2 , 1997 Single channel video, excerpt 0:00 – 11:24, total runtime 11:24 minutes Courtesy of Adah Glenn Danielle Dean, True Red , 2016 Single channel video, 3:45 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Adah Glenn, Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo Episode 18 , 2007 Single channel video, excerpt 0:00 – 12:52, total runtime 7:07 minutes Courtesy of Adah Glenn Dineo Seshee Bopape, Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone , 2012 Single channel video, 10:42 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Adah Glenn, Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo Episode 1 , 1997 Single channel video, excerpt 22:00 – 28:28 – TRT 6:28 Courtesy of Adah Glenn About the Curator Erin Christovale is co-founder of the experimental film program, Black Radical Imagination, and Associate Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Prophecies for the Second Machine Age Curated by Erika Balsom Presented in collaboration with VIDEOCLOOP Available to stream March 11 to May 11, 2019 With works by Pedro Neves Marques Nira Pereg Mary Helena Clark Diana Fonseca Quiñones Beatriz Santiago Muñoz Click to view full program information We tend to think of violence as something fast, like the crack of a bone. In fact, it can be a wearying creep, an attrition proceeding at a pace so decelerated as to trouble apprehension. What Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’ poses a problem for representation, for it is neither punctual nor spectacular. Staying out of frame, it is prone to being forgotten or naturalized, even if its effects are everywhere. It defies the simple assignment of beginnings or endings. For Nixon, phenomena such as climate change and ocean acidification exemplify the ‘long dyings’ of slow violence, but the concept is one with a vast purchase, naming the temporal distention of insidious harm, the dull damaging of life that occurs not as emergency but as habit. The five works of ‘Prophecies for the Second Machine Age’ offer imaginative responses to the problem of confronting the nonevent of prolonged injury as it occurs at the intersection of the natural and the artificial. In an era of automation and ‘smart’ machines, when rationalization triumphs and technology causes as many problems as it solves, what futures await vulnerable bodies and environments? What catastrophic pasts have they already endured? These artists turn to poetic condensation and oblique metaphor to approach these questions, cultivating mood rather than communicating information. The programme begins in a nimbus of anxiety. In Pedro Neves Marques’ The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant , a mimosa pudica recoils from the sterile touch of a robot’s hand. Nira Pereg’s 67 Bows presents a horrific vision of flamingos, trapped in the sad enclosure of the Karlsruhe Zoo, dancing to the sound of gunshots in a choreography of fear. In both works, encounters between non-human life and manufactured artefacts figure as metonyms of a wider trauma that defies easy representation. Mary Helena Clark’s Delphi Falls gestures to the conventions of narrative cinema, but the plot has been lost, leaving in its wake only chilling hints of unknown events. A varied inventory of camera movements shifts between the impossible perspectives of machine vision and the potential of an anthropomorphic gaze. In a four-minute long take near the film’s end, the pressures lurking within this mysterious world, so suffused with intimations of danger and confusion, are made manifest on a human face, culminating in a silent scream. Diana Fonseca Quiñones’s Los Amantes proposes a moment of pause that is at once an acknowledgement of ephemerality. As two matches burn together in close-up, the elemental fascination of fire is doubled by the hallucinatory appearance of human forms, pressed against one another, bending together before final extinction. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s La cabeza mató a todos closes the programme with a gesture of repair. From within an enchanted night, the film casts a spell of resilience and contestation in the face of techno-imperialist domination. The title, literally ‘the head that killed everybody’, refers to a shooting star, understood in Puerto Rican mythology as a bodiless head, crossing the dark sky to signal the arrival of chaos. Here, against the machinery of war, in the heat of dance, time bends towards another future. — Erika Balsom Artwork Details Pedro Neves Marques, The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant , 2016 Single channel video, 2:30 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Nira Pereg, 67 Bows , 2006 Single channel video, 5:51 minutes Courtesy of the artist, Braverman Gallery (Tel Aviv) and VIDEOCLOOP Mary Helena Clark, Delphi Falls , 2017 Single channel video, 19:58 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Diana Fonseca Quiñones, Los Amantes , 2007 Single channel video, 38 seconds Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, La cabeza mató a todos , 2014 Single channel video, 7:30 minutes Courtesy of the artist, KADIST collection About the Collaboration Prophecies for the Second Machine Age is the first in a series of collaborative curated online programs that constitute the new Kadist Video Library – VIDEOCLOOP initiative. The initiative stems from broader reflection on the different modes of distribution and circulation of the moving image in the age of digital dissemination and the Internet era. Through the engagement of internationally renowned curators, researchers and artists, the initiative provides a shared space for critique on contemporary creation and wider access to works in the KADIST video collection and LOOP’s online archive. About the Curator Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, specializing in the study of the moving image in art. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2013) and Circulation: Art, Reproducibility, and the Moving Image (Columbia University Press, forthcoming), and the co-editor of the anthology Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT, 2016). A frequent contributor to Artforum, her work has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and publications including Afterall, Screen, Sight and Sound, and Cinema Journal.