Installation (Installation)

Lifesize Draft is the second of two sculptures on a similar theme, the first one being Utopia Battery, (2008). The latter is also in an edition of 3, one of which is in the collection of the Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest. Although Lifesize Draft was made after Utopia Battery, Kisspal conceived it more or less at the same time and sees the two works as closely related.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier river in the period of American colonisation, is here a cable of data transmission, and the 7 Sultans Casino is a virtual destination, one of the three hundred online casinos hosted by the servers located in Kahnawake, a small native american indian reserve to the south of Montreal. Incorporating poker, challenges to the law, a struggle for the control of a new territory where the stakes are high, our film ‘La Nouvelle Kahnawake’, between fiction and documentary, pushes these analogies with the Western to explore both our relationship to the figure of the ‘Indian’ and the confusion of our perception of space that new information technology has brought about. As the artists state: “We are neither anthropologists nor journalists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Make down is a 34 minute sequence shot that shows the artist removing make-up in front of a mirror. The peculiarity of the scene consists in two symbolic details: first, the make-up itself, covering his face, hair and torso – a thick kaki layer, reminding of military camouflage – and second, the paper used to remove the make-up – black and white prints of stills taken from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film, “La bataille d’Alger” ( The Battle of Algiers). These still images put together recreate a sequence in which a young Algerian woman takes off her veil and puts on Western make-up.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape. Cortright’s backgrounds are made seedy by the appearance of digitally-rendered strippers, while various layers of internet escapism collide together in an infinite loop. The dancing girls are sourced from VirtuaGirl, a software that makes footage of strippers available for download.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Artist Wong Ping’s madcap video, Wong Ping’s Fables 1 , might at first appear to resemble a crazy screensaver. Grid-like patterns allude to the work’s deep digital structure, while comic-book imagery illustrates a set of curious moral parables. The video tells the story of three flawed characters named Elephant, Chicken, and Tree.