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Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again. It wasn’t the same thing. That thing. Was nice.’ But to her it seems to represent some imaginative narrative connected to the peeling back of the plastic wrapper. The viewer of the film feels as though he has been admitted to her innermost mind, the unconscious. The informal documentary nature of Auder’s films has had wide repercussions in terms of contemporary film making. This kind of low-tech practice informs the work of such artists as Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing and ran parallel to the fly on the wall practices of documentary filmmakers in the 1970s such as Ken Loach. The acquisition of works by Auder provides a reference point for a number of works in the Kadist collection (Laumann, McAlpine, Menick etc).
Michel Auder was born in 1945 in Soissons, France. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Although at first the work Sounds of War presents itself with a degree of playfulness and humour, a close inspection reveals its painful undertone...
The piece consists of sculpture of 10 elements, among them: a globe, a picture of a gorilla, a chair, scrabble letters, 3 glasses of black ink, a book whose title is illuminated by the beam of a 8mm projector, a pair of boots, etc...
In Stong Sory Vegetables , Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling...
The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings...
This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
The short film I Can Only Dance to One Song by Arash Fayez features a series of people from the migrant community in Barcelona singing along or dancing to songs of their choosing...
The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings...
Artist, filmmaker, and writer John Menick will screen his short video “The Secret Life of Things” (2006), a work in which an unidentified man describes his fixation with “last person on earth” films — films in which a single person awakens to find that he or she is the sole living inhabitant of a city...
Screening at 5pm at Little Roxie In connection to his exhibition, Evidence of Things Not Seen at KADIST , photo-conceptual artist, Hank Willis Thomas selected these films as a homage to innovative and influential creators in the medium of film whose work supports social justice as well as explores contemporary notions of identity, race, history and a national legacy of resistance...
Exploring The End Of The Golden Era Of Singapore Cinema Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Film February 24, 2022 By ArtsEquator (1,001 words, 3-minute read) Films as a medium and art form have always possessed great potential to convey crucial messages and influence the cultural zeitgeist of their times...