9,17 min
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula. This bite caused various symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty to speak, delusion, excitability and agitation. The victims suffered then from convulsions and the only way to heal them was to engage in a frenzied dance, as it was believed. Called “Tarantella”, this dance, appeared during the Middle Ages and was danced all along the 19th century. To make this video, the artist asked a group of dancers to perform this uncontrolled dance in order to explore this borderline mental and physical state, close to a trance. Tarantism represents a transition in the artist’s work, who brings a story back to life simply through the movement of these completely disarticulate bodies, without referring to images extracted from reality, thus exploring a purely mental territory.
With a keen interest in the stranger corners of the long human story, and a persistent interest in the supernatural, the transcendent, and the psychedelic, Joachim Koester’s work follows the artists own undying interest in physical and psychological limits. While exploration was a matter of crossing geographies before the 19th century, the 20th century brought the mental exploration of our unconscious, hastened by the discovery of psychoanalysis. Koester is interested in visualizing specific events—those forgotten, overlooked, or suppressed by the official historical record—in order to reintroduce them into collective memory. Using 16mm documentary films, photographic series or books, his work transforms stories into images and vice versa, appearing as a quest for the invisible and the vanishing.
Created from extracts of kitsch movies or Greek soap operas from the 1960s, these videos are like audiovisual ‘postcards’ reflecting a nostalgic and melancholic approach...
Haris Epaminonda’s work questions the manipulation and the flow of images as well as their power of fascination...
Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires...
For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...
For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...
“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life...
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...
Podcast 48: Interview with Bilqis Hijjas | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints September 27, 2018 Duration: 32 min In this month’s dance podcast, host Amin Farid chats with Malaysian dance practitioner and writer Bilqis Hijjas on wide-ranging topics from her roles as president of MyDance Alliance and director of the dance programme Rimbun Dahan , to her thoughts on the dance scene in Malaysia, dance criticism, the Southeast Asian identity, and some emerging choreographers and dancers to look out for such as Fanglao Dance Company from Laos, and Malaysia’s Lee Ren Xin...
On the Indonesian Dance Festival with Maria Darmaningsih | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles October 25, 2018 As part of ArtsEquator’s series of interviews profiling festival directors in Southeast Asia, we get to learn more about Maria Darmaningsih, co-founder and current artistic director of the bi-annual Indonesian Dance Festival (IDF), which was launched in 1992...