Idir

2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

30 min

Carole Douillard & Babette Mangolte

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Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria. Idir continues the artist’s previous work on ‘hittistes’, which translates as someone who spends their day with their back to the wall, the city’s unemployed and the gestures proper to them. In collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Carole Douillard’s performance takes place across three emblematic sites within the city: Bab El Oued, Les Sablettes and Diar Es Saâda. Drawing on the history of performance, the film interrogates the gendered codes of navigating public space as well as the ways in which the performer is observed and scrutinised by passers by.

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Carole Douillard Kabyle-French artist Carole Douillard uses the presence of figures, be it her own, or of performers, to produce sculptural works within space. She describes her work as being on the ‘edge of the spectacular’ all the while avoiding a descent into spectacularization. She analyses the power relations at play in the performative space, between object and contemplation, spectator and performer. Supplemented with documents, photographs and videos, her performance work interrogates the ways in which bodies navigate different spaces and the various forces of freedom and oppression that operate on them. Babette Mangolte Born in France and based in New York since 1970, filmmaker Babette Mangolte has been documenting performative and choreographic works throughout her career. A key figure in experimental filmmaking, she collaborated with filmmaker Chantal Ackerman throughout the 1970s and has produced photographic and film records of performances with Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and others connected with the Judson Dance Theater as well as the opera of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass Einstein on the Beach.

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Colors:

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• motion.n.03
• gender.n.01
• performance.n.01
• urban.a.01
• topographic_point.n.01
• duration.n.01