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For Berlin Gallery Weekend 2017
MOMENTUM AiR Presents Our New BERLIN & BEYOND Series:
IN PROCESS:
Two Parallel Solo Exhibitions by Amir Fattal & Clark Beaumont
Amir Fattal: Tristan Resurrected
&
Clark Beaumont: The O Zone
21 April – 21 May 2017
OPENING
Friday 21 April @ 6 – 10pm
@ MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
Live Performance: Premiere of The O Zone by Clark Beaumont
Sunday 30 April @ 6 – 7pm
@ Studio 2
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin
The two parallel exhibitions Tristan Resurrected and The O Zone bring together Berlin-based Israeli artist Amir Fattal with the Australian artist duo Clark Beaumont to address the process of artistic production. In Process showcases two new works still in development: Amir Fattal’s Tristan Resurrected, and Clark Beaumont’s The O Zone. In production for over three years, Tristan Resurrected is a work of many parts and iterations, having been publicly screened since 2014 in a variety of versions. To their audiences at the time, each iteration was a completed artwork. And yet the work continues to evolve to this day: re-edited, re-shot, re-imagined. Clark Beaumont are also presenting a new performance piece in a stage somewhere prior to completion. Co-mingling two great issues of our time, Climate Change and Sex, The O Zone is the new work Clark Beaumont have been developing during their Artist Residency at MOMENTUM. Re-writing, rehearsing, re-imagining are also integral steps to their process. But what sparks the moment when these works will finally be finished? How do the artists know when they’re really truly done? These parallel exhibitions delve into the process of production to ask what is a finished artwork? At which point does the process overtake the product? The artists will address these and other questions at the Artist Talk marking the Opening of the exhibitions on 30 April 2017. And The O Zone will be premiered as a live performance on Gallery Weekend, Sunday 30 April at 6-7pm.
Tristan Resurrected
In production for over three years, Amir Fattal’s Tristan Resurrected is a work of many parts and iterations. The first work in Fattal’s Wagner cycle was shown as a live performance in the Kunstquartier Bethanien in 2014, and was later re-staged as a video work From the End to the Beginning, which was shown in MOMENTUM’s exhibition Fragments of Empires in 2014-15. The next part of the cycle, ATARA, was screened at MOMENTUM in 2016, only to be re-shot, re-edited, and re-presented here by the artist in an entirely new version which manifests as a development of all these pieces.
ATARA is a 1970‘s styled sci-fi film designed as a 2-channel video installation set to contemporary opera music. The score is based on the opera Tristan and Isolde by Richard Wagner together with original music by Boris Bojadzhiev. Shot on location in Berlin, it tells the story of two buildings that used to stand at the same place: the Berliner Stadtschloss and the Palast der Republik. The video follows a ceremony that takes place in the Palace during a moment when one building is being resurrected and another building is transcending into a ghost. It deals with the collective memory of architecture and its symbolic representation in public space. The music is based on the Liebestod song from the opera Tristan and Isolde, sung by Isolde after Tristan’s death. The score was made by copying the last note as the first note and proceeding in this way until a new ‘mirrored’ piece was formed. The live recording of this piece forms the soundtrack to Fattal’s From the End to the Beginning (2014). This recording was then reversed backwards digitally, to become the soundtrack to ATARA, and forming another play on the idea of resurrection.
Amir Fattal (b. in Tel Avivi in 1978) was distinguished with the GASAG Art Prize in 2008 and graduated from Universität der Künste, Berlin, in 2009. Based in Berlin to this day, Fattal is a conceptual artist whose practice is one of historical reflection grounded in the history of aesthetics and cultural schisms. Working in the media of video, photography, sculpture, and installation, his work forms a focused response to the diverse questions raised by his adoptive city of Berlin, where the memory, culture, architecture, indeed every thread in the fabric of this city is problematised by its history.
Fattal participated in numerous international group exhibitions. Acclaimed solo exhibitions include: Mesopotopography, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, Berlin (2015); From the End to the Beginning, Kunstquerier Bethanien, Berlin (2014); Parallel Lines, Teapot Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2013); Goral Ehad, St-art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2012); Shadow of Smoke Rings on the Wall, Artitude Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); Tomorrow Gets Me Higher, Wilde Gallery, Berlin (2010).
Selected group exhibitions include: Collection Enea Righi, Museo Fortuny, Venice (2016); Interior / Exterior / Sculpture, Belenius/Nordenhake Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); A Naked Singularity, Studio Garaicoa, Madrid, Spain (2015); Fragments of Empires, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2014-15); A Letter From Dr. Faustus, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); Fundación Botín, Villa Iris, Santander, Spain (2014); Dahlstrøm & Fattal, Beers Lambert Contemporary, London (2013); III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow, Russia (2012); Body Without Body, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin (2011). Fattal was curator of Tape Modern Berlin, an acclaimed series of group exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists.
With thanks to the generous support of:
The O Zone
Developed during their Artist Residency at MOMENTUM (29 Jan – 30 April 2017), Clark Beaumont’s The O Zone unpacks two of the greatest issues of our time – Climate Change, and Sex – simultaneously. Climate Change is a controversial topic that is too big for everyday folks to understand & actively care about for a sustained period of time; our eyes fog over. Yet our planet needs collective action now, so what can we do? What keeps people’s attention? SEX! Sex sells, but sex is mostly only used & discussed in our culture in a one-dimensional way; one that’s objectifying, glossy, patriarchal. The O Zone will playfully weave between the two topics, using each subject to disarm the other, and open up the complex issues and perspectives surrounding both. Clark Beaumont will use these topics to question and analyse ourselves, our behaviour, ethics and values. They will examine the power that emotions have over logic on our brains; how we are hardwired to value short-term over long-term rewards and thinking; and how both of these attributes stop us from being able to see ourselves and our world clearly. The work will mash up written and found text – including facts, estimations, intimate thoughts, and personal stories – as well as organic and austere choreography made in collaboration with Berlin choreographer, Mirjam Soegner. Building on their recent work, also shown in this exhibition, Clark Beaumont use MOMENTUM’s facilities within the historic Kunstquartier Bethanien as a rich resource to experiment, develop and refine their use of theatrical elements within their practice. The O Zone will also be shown at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art (Victoria) group exhibition, Greater Together, later in 2017.
ALSO SHOWN IN THIS EXHIBITION:
Missing One Another (2016)
Excerpts of live performance, performed at Brisbane Festival, 7″
Written, performed, produced, and directed by Clark Beaumont
Choreographer: Grayson Millwood
Sound Composer: Denis Altschul
Script Editor: Alex Brinkworth
Lighting Designer: Alex Brinkworth
Missing One Another is a one hour live performance that takes aim at the greatest obstacle in our quest for authentic connection and mutual understanding – the assumption that we are all on the same page and that we’re experiencing the same thing. Deconstructing previous lived experiences throughout the performance, the artists delve into the murkiness of memory and multiplicity of reality; They dismantle their assured perspectives, unravel into chaos and dissolve into one-ness.
Now and Then (2016)
Performance-Video, 6″34′
Performed, produced, and directed by Clark Beaumont
Now and Then is a performance-video installation that wrestles with the largely private, and complex spaces of lived experience. In the work, the artists float in a dark bed of water, their bodies continuously drifting towards and apart from one another, as though caught in a strange orbit. Accompanied by an eerie soundtrack, their tango manically jolts between smooth, inevitable pulls, and disjointed, random collisions. Through the work, the artists’ question the belief that any relationship is predestined rather than formed through proximity, chance and circumstance; and explore the transient states of connection and disconnection.
Stay Up (2015)
Video, 22″ on loop
Stay Up shows a close-up of one of the artist’s attempting to hold a fixed smile. It is the smile that film actors are taught to develop—unnaturally wide, that shows both teeth and gums— a mimicry of joy which is achingly uncomfortable to sustain. This work wrestles with the public and private spaces of emotion and perception; the duplicity between states of welcome and discomfort, connection and disconnection, reality and pretence.
Sarah Clark (b. 1991 in Brisbane, Australia) and Nicole Beaumont (b. 1990 in Sydney, Australia), are the Australian artistic collaboration, Clark Beaumont. Using performance, video and installation, their practice explores ideas and constructs surrounding identity, interpersonal relationships, intimacy and female subjectivity. Their collaboration focuses on their individual and intersubjective experiences, using themselves as the subjects of their work and, their collaboration, as a proxy for relationships in general. Their works often explore the intersection between performativity and authenticity, as well as the shifting dynamic between performer and viewer.
Clark Beaumont have presented live performances, videos and installations, nationally and internationally since 2010. Notably, in 2013, the collaboration exhibited work in Kaldor Public Art Project’s 13 Rooms, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Klaus Biesenbach. In 2014, they held a solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, and were selected as the QAGOMA Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship recipient. Recently, they have presented live performances at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne) and Queensland University of Technology Art Museum as part of Performance Now, curated by Roselee Goldberg. In 2015, the duo participated in Marina Abramovic’s Australian artist residency and exhibited in QAGoMA’s survey exhibition ‘GOMA Q: Queensland Contemporary Art’. They are currently undertaking a series of residencies in Berlin, a project that is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
MORE ABOUT CLARK BEAUMONT’S ARTIST RESIDENCY @ MOMENTUM AiR >>
With thanks to the generous support of:
OPENING VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
PERFORMANCE BY CLARK BEAUMONT
Photo Credit: Leslie Ranzoni
