Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by Karrabing Film Collective is a surreal exploration of Western toxic contamination, capitalism, and human and non-human life. Set in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism where only Aboriginals can survive long periods outdoors, the film tells the story of a young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race. He is then released back into the world to his family.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Elizabeth McAlpine’s work frequently deals with time based issues as well as the experience of watching. In The Height of the Campanile , McAlpine has calculated the height of the tower and timed her shooting of it so that the length of the film in meters is exactly that of the height of the tower. Thus the time it takes to view the film, and the pace at which the camera pans up the tower are equivalent to the height of the tower.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

16 films is a selection of David Haxton’s single-screen videos, which he began producing in the 1970s as a continuation of some of the conceptual underpinnings of his earlier film installations. As the described by Haxton, “[he] became interested in in examining the nature of the medium [of film] including light, movement, and the formation of a three-dimensional illusion of space in a flat surface.” This selection of films were produced in 16mm film between 1970 and 1982 and have been digitally mastered in high definition from the original 16mm films, which are preserved by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. Reminiscent of the paired back, low-fi quality of other conceptual video work from that period, Haxton abides to a certain criteria to restrict aspects of the medium: he does not do any editing, always fixes the camera onto a single position for the whole duration of the films, and he limits the actions of the performers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work consists of a work inside a work. The spectator is presented with a commissioned documentary on a flat-screen Tv on the subject of the production of the making of an artwork that doesn’t exist entitled The magic and the meaning (2008). The imaginary film, The magic and the meaning , is described only within the documentary, which follows parts of the making of the film, extracts from interviews with the writer and film maker Dan Fox and the artist and maker of the work Ryan Gander; as well as showing short slow-motion sections of the film that does not exist.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set to the iconic and spiritual music of Alice Coltrane’s Turiyasangitananda (1937–2007), Cauleen Smith’s film Sojourner travels across the US to visit a series of sites important to an alternative and creative narrative of black history. While the approach may appear spiritual, it is more futuristic (Afrofuturism and Radical Jazz) than religious. Smith is interested in using the individual stories of “those who have formed their own solutions” as a reconstructive and healing lens for considering the past.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009. In this film, Aiken’s allusion to “the frontier” and iconic imagery like the cowboy suggest that the American West Coast as a cultural construction. These notions are reinforced by two key elements in the film: its protagonist, the iconic West Coast artist Ed Ruscha, and its reference to the cinematic and the experience of the movie theater.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009. Included in the Kadist Collection, these works continue to explore the ontology of the image to investigate the relationship between painting, photography, and a new time-based variable: film. Reduced here to the essential function of recording the exposure of light through the apparatus of a lens, Kantor then translated these film stills into painted colored canvases that retain the 3:4 aspect ratio of the 16mm film as well as the exact size of the projected image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Inspired by the 1934 novella Duo by the French writer Colette, Sriwhana Spong’s film Beach Study explores ideas of disappearance and the ephemeral, both physically and psychologically. In the film, a female body conducts abstract dance movements on a beach, responding to the environment that surrounds her. This particular beach was one the artist loved as a child, but today it is hardly accessible because it is in the hands of a private landowner.

Painting (Painting)

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009. Included in the Kadist Collection, these works continue to explore the ontology of the image to investigate the relationship between painting, photography, and a new time-based variable: film. Reduced here to the essential function of recording the exposure of light through the apparatus of a lens, Kantor then translated these film stills into painted colored canvases that retain the 3:4 aspect ratio of the 16mm film as well as the exact size of the projected image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities. The film misuses more traditional narrative conventions -the suggestion of a story, the anchoring of actors as characters- to have the viewer constantly questioning who or what they are, and where they are located in the film’s world. Delphi Falls was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial film program.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Winter is a film installation of multiple tenses—shot in the recent past, depicting an unknown future, unfolding (and changing) in the present of the exhibition. Shot in the white-washed homes of New Zealand architect Ian Athfield, including his own communal compound high above Wellington harbor, the film suggests various temporal and cultural conditions of instability, hinting at concerns of global warming and nuclear accidents, pushing at the boundaries of science fiction, stripped of narrative explication and causal explanation.

In this film is the story of two neighboring yet philosophically opposing nations: Russia and Norway. Taken through a love-story of the main character Tanja and her newfound Norwegian husband, the film challenges cultural and social norms of both places through the format of a musical. Dealing with issues of individual in society, family and moral values, Chto Delat entices the audience to consider the nuances of these two contexts.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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. At the time of recording, like all of this films, there was no particular intent. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, this film becomes prescient and ominously prophetic.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leticia Ramos’s film DROPSPIKE is the second of a five-part film project entitled STORIES OF THE END OF THE WORLD . Each film in the series takes place in a different part of the world where climate change modifies the landscape. The short 16mm film was mostly shot during Ramos’s residency at La Bacque in Switzerland.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown . According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking . In Ming’s version, he plays all four main characters portrayed originally by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and Belinda Palmer, shooting against a backdrop of a film set reproduced as wallpaper in a gallery space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Perspective was filmed during a residence in northern Poland. The film is preceded by a series of photographs made ? ?in her studio.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program. T. Hong’s research is not only an effort to revisit a dark time that complicates certain histories, but more importantly an investigation of how violence is enacted in the name of rationality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

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Berlin Remake ( 2005) combines extracts of East German films with images filmed by the artist in Berlin. While staying in Berlin, the artist found the locations where the official films were made and she juxtaposes the two in a synchronised double projection. Therefore on one screen there is Berlin between 1945 and 1989 and on the other Berlin in 2004.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Julien Crépieux is interested in the medium of video and its confrontation with cinema. Microfilm is a video transcription of a cinematographic work. It isn’t a remake or an adaptation, but a transcription in the musical sense.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Landslides is a cinematographic essay/poem by Caroline Déodat in which fictional images are the result of research into the memories of a Mauritian dance born during colonial slavery, the Sega. In the film, the contemporary Mauritian dancer Jean-Renat Anamah crosses mythical landscapes of the Sega that merge with intimate territories. From the pixels of the digital image and the signals of electronic music, this film exhumes in layers of landscapes the spectres of a ritual erased by history through a personal genealogy: between haunting memory and deferred archive.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Embracing the conflicting negative and positive affect of the horror genre, Ho Rui An’s film Student Bodies is a self-described work of “pedagogical horror,” that organizes social, political, and economic events in Asia around the motif of the student body. Bound together by a suspenseful, eerie soundtrack, the film temporally cycles through its separate, though thematically interrelated, phenomena and events centering Asian students. Using the student body motif as a human signifier of varied connotations, the film follows phenomenon ranging from the Ch?sh?

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Baudelaire’s latest film, Also known as Jihadi (2017) tells the story of a young French boy from Parisian suburbs and his assumed journey to the Al-Nusra front in Syria to join ISIS and fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Employing the cinematographic approach known as ‘landscape theory’ — or fûkeiron — developed out of Marxist film criticism in the 1970s where the landscape of a film is read as an expression of the political climate, thus becoming a significant character, motivation or reasoning for the films development. The 101-minute follows Abdel Aziz from the socially and politically rife milieu of the Parisian suburbs, weighted by division, segregation, development and poverty to, what the viewer assumes, Syria.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people. The opening of the film presents us with a dramatic process that transforms the documentary image. The lack of human presence makes creates a strange atmosphere in the film.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Limbé by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes its inspiration and its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-creator of the negritude movement. This Creole expression, which activates the Limbo dance through language, evokes a great sadness, linked to the death of the artist’s sister. This silent film continues Abonnenc’s collaboration with dancer and choreographer Betty Tchomanga, who played the protagonist in his film Secteur IXB (2015).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Note on Multitude is a chilling black-and-white short movie recorded with a single camera in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2015. The film, beginning in an unidentifiable location, shows a large, bustling and anxious crowd. Soon, the viewer is privy to the setting: a bus station.