Mariana Hahn – ARTIST STATEMENT

Mariana Hahn was born in the mid 1980s in Schwaebisch Hall in the south of Germany. She did Theatre Studies at ETI in Berlin, and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London. Her work has been described like an itch under the skin. The itch of something that is there but cannot be caught, be laid finger on. Subtle movements of what lays beneath the surface that carries us, moves us back and fro. Transparent and yet hidden, isolated and yet profoundly prominent, like the voices of an oracle. Voice becomes a palpable medium in Hahn’s performance. The poetry inflected cadence becomes the action, the performance of the body’s stillness, draped in plastic, like a defunct statue.

Jarik Jongman – ARTIST STATEMENT

A former assistant of Anselm Kiefer, Jarik Jongman uses both his own photographs and anonymous pictures found in flea markets, books, magazines and the internet as a starting point for his work, which often deals with archetypical imagery. Dutch born, he studied in Arnhem and has had numerous exhibitions in London, Berlin, Switzerland, Amsterdam and at the 53rd (2009) and current 54th Venice Biennale in a collateral event. He lives and works in Amsterdam. In ABOUT FACE, Jongman will be showing a series of ten painted portraits of icons of the contemporary art world; some of the richest and most influential players of our time, which he will subsequently, with the help of the audience, deface. The result will be a series of mutilated images, reminiscent of the damaged murals and toppled statues of ousted dictators across the world.

Sarah Lüdemann – ARTIST STATEMENT

Sarah Lüdemann continuously disassembles her body and identity, explores psychological states, concepts of self, social roles and ways of perception and (re)presentation. It is all a self portrait and yet generally relevant and open to identification and interpretation. Repetition and proximity, seduction and repulsion, love and hate, destruction and resurection. The birth of poetic brutality. As a woman and as a being with tender harshness. Visuality and sensuality play a vital role in Lüdemann’s works as she aspires to create experiences that are at once sensuously engaging and thought provoking. Sarah Lüdemann finished an MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins/Byam Shaw in September 2011. In 2009 she was selected for an influential residency with Mona Hatoum. She has been awarded the South Square Trust Award and was shortlisted for the Arts & Humanities Research Council BGP Award in 2010.

ARTIST’S BIO

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VIDEO INTERVIEW

 

Chen Chieh Jen, Lingchi – Echoes of a Historical Photograph (video, 25 mins), 2002

Artist’s Statement:

“History has been lingchi-ed, that is, chopped and severed as human bodies. Violence is also gradually internalized, institutionalized and hidden. We do not see where we are and what was before us. We do not see the violence of history or that of the State either. That is the reason why we need to gaze at the images of horror and penetrate through them. Is the dark abyss of wounds not the very crack that we need to pass through so as to arrive at the state of full-realization and self-abandonment. In the early age of so called “history of photography” regions outside the western world played the role of “shooting objects”….I focus on how to reverse the subject of colonial photography history from people in front of a lens to the behind…”

This film is based on the famous 1905 photograph of a man being punished the Manchu way, by being cut into pieces for the crime of murder. His ecstatic expression is attributed to opium, which was administered to prolong the torture. Philosopher Georges Bataille discussed this photo extensively in his book The Tears of Eros and noted the correlations between the beauty of religious eroticism, divine ecstasy and the shocking horror of cruel torture. Chen’s cinematic close-ups of the victim’s face bring to mind images of blissful euphoria, homoeroticism, and religious crucifixion. Slow motion close-ups of a hand holding a knife, the grim expressions of the crowd of ponytailed bystanders, blood dripping down the crowd’s legs and flowing into the ground are eerie, but surprisingly not as violent as what one might expect considering Chen’s topic. …By linking the historical with the contemporary social and economic situation in Taiwan, Chen has created an extremely powerful work that links the past with the present, the fictive with the documentary. He is also specific to the local situation, while remaining universal.” (Susan Kendzulak)

Chen Chieh-jen (b. 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan) currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan.
 He has held solo exhibitions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; REDCAT art center in Los Angeles; the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Asia Society in New York; and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Group exhibitions include: the Venice Biennale, Biennale de Lyon, São Paulo Art Biennial, Liverpool Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane. Chen has also participated in photography festivals in Spain, Lisbon and Arles; and film festivals in London, Vancouver, Edinburgh and Rotterdam. Chen Chieh-jen was also the recipient of the Taiwan National Culture and Arts Foundation’s National Award for Arts in 2009, and the Korean Gwangju Biennale Special Award in 2000.

ARTIST’S BIO

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Zhang Peili, Just For You (video installation, 10 monitors) 1999

Artist’s Statement:

“This is a song nearly everyone knows how to sing, but very few people know, nor care who, in which year, in what country, composed it. It is a pop, an international symbol, a sign of happiness and a mark of time.”

As a central figure of the historical avant-garde 85 New Wave movement, Zhang Peili (b. 1957, Hangzhou) played a role in the founding of the Pond Society collective and became a core advocate of the school known as “rational painting.” In 1988 he completed what is commonly known as the first piece of video art created in China with 30 x 30, the infamous onscreen performance in which he smashed and repaired a square mirror, thus entering into a sustained investigation of video and related media including photography, installation, and electronic art. Typically adopting a minimal or reductive position that constructs an essential relationship between the aesthetics of video playback technology and the moving image itself, his video installation focuses on questions of perceived reality, media convention, individual agency, and spatial structure. In the years between 1988 and 2011 his video practice has undergone a number of significant shifts, beginning with the cool and contained painting of the mid-1980s and then moving into the aesthetics of boredom and control in his first video projects, including Document on Hygiene No. 3 (1991), in which the artist subdues and washes a chicken at the center of the frame. The mid-1990s saw classical reworkings of the relationship between content and spatial form, as withUncertain Pleasure II (1996), in which a hand scratches every corner of a naked body depicted only in fragmentary close-up shots across 10 channels, or Water: Standard Edition of Cihai (1991), for which a television announcer reads a dictionary entry as if it were the evening news. And then there are the appropriation and remix works, including not only Last Words but also Actors’ Lines, in which the gestures of revolutionary fervor depicted in a militaristic propaganda film are reframed to read almost romantically. Finally, more recent works involve interactive closed-loop systems like Hard Evidence No. 1 (2009) and theatrical scenes like A Gust of Wind (2008).

Zhang Peili was trained at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, graduating from the oil painting department in 1984 on the cusp of the aesthetic upheavals of that decade, and returned to the China Academy of Art as a professor in 2002, where he is currently responsible for the Embodied Media Studio of the School of Intermedia Art. His work is held by the collections of major global institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.

ARTIST’S BIO

ARTIST’S WEBSITE

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Jiang Zhi, Post Pause (video, 10 mins) 2004

Artist’s Statement:

“Paused moments of city life in Shenzhen. Faces and faces of twisted bodies humanity line up the streets and bridges of the city mark the cost of desires and consumerism in our contemporary culture. A Kafkaesque dreamscape of labyrinths and maze.”

…”In Shenzhen, the rapidly evolving city where I currently live, there is perhaps the highest proportion of dreamers in the whole country. Many came penniless and destitute, having brought with them only the determination to savagely scrape together a fast buck in a few short years. As the Deng Xiaoping saying goes: “The most virtuous ethic is the virtue to pursue development.” At any moment, the dreamers are ready to bring their dreams to fruition, and apparently willing to do so for any price.”… “In the city streets, I might encounter many strange and wonderful things. Those people we see are like actors on a stage. Those sets and scenes look no different from a directed play in progress. It was only much later that I become conscious of the fact that this is reality in its true form. That one individual with that group of people over there, with the motions they are acting out, are all controlled by a hand. This may originate from organizational leaders behind the scene, their bosses, their husbands, mistresses, or perhaps it might be the factory, the company, or even these people themselves… However, I am only directing a small segment in this short film. I would like to suggest this is a response to the issues brought forth by the characters. In those embarrassing realities yet to receive people’s attention there is also the fantasy world that we are so insistently infatuated with – only when I can examine these two worlds in parallel may the prying curiosity in me be satisfied.”

Jiang Zhi was born in Yuanjiang, Hunan in 1971. Graduated from China Academy of Fine Art in 1995, now he is living and working in Shenzhen and Beijin, China. Jiang Zhi’s works concern contemporary social reality in China. His works have an insight into human civilization and China society, bringing the public the introspection in an amusing form.

One just has to think of Kafka’s novels, where the floor often serves as a symbol of institutional power and intransparency in which the individual is helpless and at the mercy of higher powers. Even stronger the floor metaphor is used by the director David Lynch, who stages it is as the dark side of an ‘intact’ society. As a place of indirect and unofficial communication, the floor is not only a connecting element between official rooms, but also an inner architectural market place, where information is exchanged quickly and concisely. Therefore, the exhibition stages and performs the floor as a psychological and social phenomenon. In so doing, its functional ambivalence also reflects the position of performance and new media art as peripheral species in the current art business.

Performance by Nadja Verena Marcin and video works by Kathryn Garcia, Nadja Verena Marcin, and Prinz Gholam.

Sivanesan’s recent activities include: What’s Eating Gilberto Gil – a performance/lecture that proposes cannibalism as a strategy to counter neo–colonial violence, Jump Ship – an endurance/performance in collaboration with acclaimed tattoo artist WT Norbert that interrogates a history of South Asians at sea; Nice Dreams – a major installation with Gustavo Böke exploring what many regard to be the first act of terrorism in Australia; The Trouble with TJ – a series of installations, videos and text, marking 5 years since the death of aboriginal teenager TJ Hickey and the subsequent “Redfern Riots” ; a major installation at Cockatoo Island for the Biennale of Sydney, 2008 as part of theweathergroup_U; Gang 2008 – Australia/Indonesia cultural exchange. He is also active with media/art gang boat-people.org. He has exhibited at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney 2010), MOMENTUM (Sydney 2010), Black and Blue Gallery (Sydney, 2009), Sydney Underground Film Festival (2009), OK Video Festival (Jakarta, Indonesia 2009), Filmer la musique (France 2009) Transit Lounge (Berlin/Australia, 2006 & 2008), Transmediale (Germany 2006), Videobrasil (Brasil 2005), Gang (Indonesia/Australia 2005), Electrofringe (Australia 2003), Abstraction Now (Vienna 2003), New Forms (Canada 2003), The International Symposium for Electronic Art (Japan 2002), d>ART (Australia 2002 & 2004), Liquid Architecture (Australia 2002 & 2004 – 05). Sivanesan lectures in experimental video at COFA (College of Fine Art at the university of New South Wales).

For Sivanesan, such an emphasis on research and story-telling has meant an increasing use of written and spoken language as an element in his work. Yet in these pieces, the move toward using language is a complex one. On the one hand, these newer works are very much about the crucial role of language in oral and written histories as a breeding ground for myth. At the same time, however, in addressing its untrustworthy tendency toward mythmaking Sivanesan has not tried to pin language down, to force language to behave as a faithful servant and perfect transmitter of meaning in his own work. Rather, he chooses to go with it, telling stories rather than sticking to strict argumentation, jumping back and forth in time to make outlandish (but compelling) connections, letting far-flung examples rub up against each other to beget illegitimate offspring – and all the while seeming perfectly happy to fight myth on its own turf.” (Excerpted from Brendan Phelan’s essay for Last Words, Summar Hippworth and Aaron Seeto (ed) 2010, courtesy of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art).

Focusing solely on Sumugan Sivanesan’s video works, M O M E N T U M | Berlin brings together a selection of 8 videos created over the last decade. The Anticolonials performance-lecture will be documented and shown alongside the videos for the duration of the exhibition.

SHONAH TRESCOTT

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Born in 1982, Australian artist Shohan Trescott graduated with a degree in painting from the National Art School in Sydney, subsequently moving to Leipzig and Berlin. Her work focuses on how humans create, interact with and impact the material and cultural landscapes we inhabit. She uses painting as a medium of communication of desires to explore the nature of the appearance of things and the capacities of vision between narrative and abstraction. Here Shonah questions beauty and terror; hope and disaster; serenity and unease; and what lies beneath. Her intention through painting is to highlight contradictions and connections, continuities and breaks. The tactile and rich quality of the surfaces she creates are often a contradictory experience to the harsh reality of the stories she seeks to evoke. In 2012 Shonah was invited by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Researchas as Artist in residence to the high Arctic where she lived and worked with the scientific community at the German/ French AWIPEV Koldeway Station, Ny-Alesund, Svalbard. Probing the meeting places of art, science, imagination and memory, here in the most northerly settlement of the world she observed the ecological and human impact caused by anthropogenic environmental negligence and climate disruption. Works shown courtesy of Eigen + Art (Berlin/Leipzig).

MARIANA HAHN

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Mariana Hahn was born in the mid 1980s in Schwaebisch Hall in the south of Germany. She did Theatre Studies at ETI in Berlin, and has a degree in Fine Art from Central St. Martins in London. The work “burn my love, burn” (2013) is a series of stills, artifacts, and a video artwork created from the footage collected during a live performance enacted outside of Oslo. Inscribing text upon a shroud which burns on the frozen ice, the artist consumes and covers herself with the ashes of her words. “burn my love, burn” positions the body as the carrier of historical signature. The body does so by will: it inscribes, devours the story, becoming a container that vibrates and lives within a narrative. The shroud becomes the elementary signifier of such a historical narrative; it has been impregnated by the story, acting as the monument, the burning of which can become part of an organic form in motion. The ritual becomes the form through which this transformation can be made, the body eats the body, destroys and paints again, another image. Again this is done by the word, it creates the flesh, gives it differentiating coloration, its plausible point of view. The body acts as a paper, it is inscribed by those murmurs of history, becoming a living artifact of its own history.

MOMENTUM’s major exhibitions include MOMENTUM Sydney (2010, Sydney Australia); A Wake: Still Lives and Moving Images (2011, MOMENTUM Berlin); (the Works On Paper Performance Series (2013, 2014, 2015, MOMENTUM, Berlin); Thresholds (2013, Collegium Hungaricum, Berlin; 2014, TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin, Poland); The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Revisited (2014, Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China); PANDAMONIUM: Media Art from Shanghai (2014, MOMENTUM, Berlin); Fragments of Empires (2014-2015, MOMENTUM, Berlin); BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places (2015, MOMENTUM / Külhaus, / Stiftung Brandenburger Tor at Max Liebermann Haus, Berlin); Ganz Grosses Kino (2016, Kino Internationale, Berlin); HERO MOTHER: Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women Rethinking Heroism (2016, MOMENTUM, Berlin); Landscapes of Loss (2017, Ministry of Environment, Berlin); Focus Kazakhstan: Bread & Roses (2018, MOMENTUM, Berlin); Bonum et Malum (2019, Villa Erxleben, Berlin); Shiryaevo Biennale: Central Russian Zen (2019, MOMENTUM, Berlin); Water(Proof) (2019, MOMENTUM, Berlin); COVIDecameron: 19 Artists from the MOMENTUM Collection (2020, MOMENTUM Online; 2021 IkonoTV); amongst many others. Please follow the links on the icons at the top of this page to see Past, Current, and Upcoming Exhibitions.

At once an artistic critique of cinema and an exposure of the technology behind video imagery, Smith’s practice integrates sculptural form and moving image. He is interested in the capacity of film and video installation to distort our sense of time and space through the manipulation of filmic narratives. True to MOMENTUM’s mission to interrogate what we define by time-based art, Sam Smith’s layering of analog film, digital media, and physical sculpture self-referrentially and lyrically addresses the manipulations of time from both the point of view of artist, and viewer.

RUNSCAPE (2010) is a film that depicts several young male figures sprinting through public spaces of Hong Kong, almost invariably via the visual mode of the long shot, while a narrator describes this action through the rhetoric of post-structuralist urban theory. This narration makes repeated reference to a range of texts from the psychogeographical dérive of urbanism in Guy Debord and the Situationists to the biopolitical machines of Gilles Deleuze and the literary styles of Jean-Luc Nancy. The runners both follow existing paths and establish new ones, moving in straight lines through crowds and across rooftops while also using exterior walls as springboards for less-likely forms of motion. This is, however, far from parkour; it is a much more purposeful action that claims a certain territory or at least trajectory described within the narration through the image of the body as a “bullet that needs no gun.” A soundtrack contributed by Hong Kong rock band A Roller Control complements this aesthetic violence, guiding the eye and ear of the viewer across this novel interpretation of the definition and uses of public space. In this action, invisible facades are constructed across a grid that spans the area between the codified signs of polished facades, an open-ended and performative notion of being-in-transit. (Robin Peckham)

As they make a point to cross as many land borders in central and eastern Europe as possible on their way to Italy, this situation remains much the same. Driving through checkpoint after checkpoint, they are asked to remove their masks for identification purposes (because, as the viewer is reminded, covering the face is illegal, as is the continued video documentation of these exchanges). As in other projects like Maskbook and Second Line, the mask functions as an over-determined signifier of identity and desire; in this case, however, it becomes a visual clue to a condition that does not actually exist; using this simple mechanism to test the durability of the European dream, it becomes clear that the body and the border are an enabling pair as much as they are political combatants.

[Robin Peckham]

Runscape was shown along with “Viral Project” (2003) at MOMENTUM’s exhibition during Berlin’s 2011 Gallery Weekend, with Runscape subsequently gifted to the MOMENTUM Collection. In collaboration with MOMENTUM, MAP OFFICE returned to Berlin the following year to gather footage for Runscape Berlin, a work comprised of video and photography mapping the city of Berlin through its cinematic history.

“Why running in Berlin? Runscape Berlin proposes to break through historical lines and building blocs, to bypass new political borders and barricades, to be naked in the ruins of the gigantic worksite of the city. Running activates a new form of intensity in a city lacking of density. In Berlin, the urban substance opens on undefined fields where new personal histories can be written.”

[MAP OFFICE]

The runner becomes also a performer, as he leaps and jumps, sprinting through the city, catching the eye of the strolling pedestrians as he breaks out of conventional modes of behavior, putting his body in action, moving faster than the city, as if internally pushed forward, as if fleeing or listening to a voice that was slowly speaking outside of everyone else’s sound register. The culture of the walking figure derived from the French Flaneur, the American Beat Poets, all contextualized and used in exploring and connecting the city streets. Runscape explores the liminal notions between film as public art with the city as landscape and cartography. The film knits the city together in a geography intersecting private and public space. The runner acts as artistic intervention creating an impact on the space itself. This is a creation of an unexplained inexplicable artwork on the street as it blurs the line between performance, a happening, fear, trauma, physical exercise, and rebellion.

American cartographer, Arthur H Robinson stated that a map not properly designed “will be a cartographic failure.” Robinson also stated, when considering all aspects of cartography that “map design is perhaps the most complex. A map must be fit to its audience. Map Office’s Runscape is a new kind of map that explores the history of running, forms of mapping, data, space and time, multiple dimensions, language and the body. Runscape uncovers the influence and possibilities of mapping in our world today. Maps have become easier to create, change, develop collaboratively and share. Depicting geographical areas, mindscapes and digital realms alike, these multidimensional maps express endlessly interconnected ideas and issues.

Going back to the beginning of his “postmodern” phase, Baudrillard begins his important essay “The Precession of the Simulacra” by recounting the feat of imperial map-makers in a story by Jorge Luis Borges who make a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire, existing in a one-to-one relationship with the territory underlying it. It is a perfect replica of the empire. After a while the map begins to fray and tatter, the citizens of the empire mourning its loss (having long taken the map – the simulacrum of the empire – for the real empire). Under the map the real territory has turned into a desert, a “desert of the real.” In its place, a simulacrum of reality – the frayed mega-map – is all that’s left.

Runscape is a bravura performance by Map Office in which they use the figure of a boy to stitch the city together in a mapping that creates a territorial relationship between the runner who runs, and the territory or terras that is beneath his feet. The city map does not exist without his performance. The runner, nor does his physical running exist outside of the map. When the runner stops, the city (like Borge’s map) will leave us in tattered ruins, and dissemble into nothing so much as a simulacrum of it’s former self.

In Andy Goldsworthy’s practice, icicles melt and dry leaves crumble in a matter of minutes. But Andrew Rogers’ Geoglyphs erode over hundreds of years to form both traces and monuments of the cultures that imagined them. In his consideration of time Rogers is working on a scale usually only considered by Geologists, Astronomers, Mathematicians and Physicists, or perhaps by the ancient peoples who built structures such as Stonehenge.

Land art is not easily transferable into a gallery setting. In dealing with works on this scale, MOMENTUM is showing digital documentations of vast building projects across remote and inaccessible global settings. Along with photographs of the works themselves, the process of their creation has been documented in several television series that will be screened in sequence during the exhibition. This show is timed to coincide with the September opening in Cappadocia, Turkey of Time and Space, the largest land art park in the world and the current culmination of Rogers’ Rhythms of Life project. Located in Kunstquartier Bethanien at the heart of Berlin’s Turkish community, MOMENTUM is happy to brings these monumental interventions in Turkey’s most beautiful landscape to Berlin.

This show opened with a Salon discussion amongst art professionals, including Eleanor Heartney (art critic and writer for Art in America) whose essay on Rogers’ work can be read on this site, Adam Nankervis (a Berlin-based Australian artist and curator), Mark Gisbourne (internationally acclaimed writer and curator), David Elliott (writer, curator, director of the previous Biennale of Sydney, and of many museums across the globe), Anne Maier (of Berlin’s Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt), Caroline Stummel (art consultant), Mamoru Tsukada (artist and curator, also with Berlin’s Tokyo Wondersite), Norbert Palz (professor of digital architecture at UDK), Kirsten Palz (conceptual artist), Yishay Garbasz (photography and mixed media artist), Larry Litt (NY-based performance artist), Shonah Trescott (painter), Osvaldo Budet (video artist and documentary filmmaker), Mariana Vassileva (video and mixed media artist), Johann Nowak (gallerist, DNA Gallery), Cassandra Bird (of Duve Gallery and MOMENTUM), Maxime van Haeren (researcher, art and culture), and Rachel Rits-Volloch (director, MOMENTUM). This Salon showed that the question of what is time-based art, and Rogers work addressed in this context, both give rise to heated debate. This discussion will be available on this website in due course, but in the meantime we invite you to come and experience for yourselves this wide ranging documentation of Andrew Rogers’ drawings on the earth.

The works in this show all use video, digital media, and film to address the mediation of death; where media itself becomes the vale/veil through which we pass, the translucent surface between observer and observed, between now and the hereafter. All the works in this show manipulate media forms in some way, whether in mobilizing still images into motion, or in bringing together past and present, fiction and reality, re-editing found footage, re-visiting rituals, or re-living the horrors of war.

All cultures acknowledge the Day of the Dead. Some celebrate, others mourn, but the ineluctable culmination of life is a part of every belief system, and of every personal journey. Opening the weekend of All Saints Day, Los Dios des Muertes (The Day of the Dead), A Wake is held in the once upon a time infirmary within the former cloisters of Bethanien House Berlin. Originally built as a hospital, a space both battling and housing death, Bethanien has long been transformed into a place where art through the process of creation manifests the victory of life over death. We fill this space with a labyrinth of screens which illuminate still lives and moving images. A Wake is a passage through time, a processional which is our “offerenda”, an offering to visiting souls awakened on this day every year.

In this city responsible for making so many ghosts, through the translucent veil of time-based media, past, present and future meld into one in this metaphysical meditation on the passing of being into representation.

OSVALDO BUDET

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“Creative Wakes” (2011), dig video, 10 mins. Puerto Rico – In the fall of 2008, Angel Luis Pantojas told his family that in the case of his death, he wanted to be presented at his wake in a standing position. Two weeks later, he was fatally shot. His family fulfilled his death wish, and this triggered the beginning of a movement of themed and theatrical wakes in Puerto Rico. Osvaldo Budet explores the possibilities that this new trend has awoken. With his documentary-based practice, Osvaldo Budet consistently blurs the line between reality and representation.

YISHAY GARBASZ | CV

NIKOLA LUTZ | CV

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

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“N 37° 25′ 20″, E 141° 1′ 58″” (2011), dig video. This piece comes out of the reactions of the artists to the Fukushima nuclear disaster and devastation. The piece invokes elements of life and death via the sounds and visuals of surgery as well as fire and the human body. The risk involved in the actions depicted helps set the scene. There were no special effects used in doing the fire performance. This is the first collaboration between Yishay Garbasz, a photographer working with the body and the mobilization of images, and Nikola Lutz, a musician and sound artist. The piece is dedicated in gratitude to the memory of Dr. Johannes D. Lutz, who passed during the making of this work.

STEPHAN HALTER

ARTIST’S BIO

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“Schlaflied” dig. 720p HD-Video, 3:54min. (Berlin, 2011). Premier. Schlaflied is a German lullaby sung to children at bed time. Projecting a diapositive on the backyard walls of Wedding, the most war ravaged area of Berlin in World War II, the slide shows a cemetery of soldiers in France. Halter, through this performative action explores a futility. A futility in the loss of life. The futilities of war.

BETTY LEIRNER

ARTIST’S TEXT

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“The Testimony of Hiroshima a Fotofilm” (1999) 1:54min.
Among other atomic bomb survivors, Matsushige Yoshito continuously tells his story at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. In 1945, at the time of the dropping of the atomic bomb, the 32 year old journalist was at home at a distance of 2.7 kilometers from the bomb hypocenter. ‘The Testimony of Hiroshima’ is an hommage an Matsushige-san, who passed away in 1995. The film describes the three hour lapse of time in his life when he was unable to photograph death and pain.

TRACEY MOFFATT

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

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“Doomed” (2007) video, (Tracey Moffatt collaboration with Gary Hillberg), 10mins. This fast-paced montage of film clips takes Hollywood’s fixation with death and disaster to its ultimate cinematic end. “Doomed” comprises cut-and paste editing techniques in a highly entertaining and blackly-humorous take on the bleak side of our current psychological landscape. Moffatt’s film looks at both entirely fictional and reconstructed disastrous events. Each scene carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory – the poignant, sublime and epic, the tragic, the B-grade and downright trashy. The accumulation of scenes creates a narrative whole comprised of parts. Moffatt plays with the ‘disaster’ genre, re-presenting representations. Looking at the forms of filmic entertainment, as well as ‘art as entertainment’, she addresses what it is about death and destruction that we invariably find so entertaining. Music manipulates. The soundtrack builds and peaks – emotive, and a central device in journeying through the sequence to climactic effect. It is important that the title ‘Doomed’ has the quality of the not yet destroyed. It is a description that is applied to individuals, families, lovers, politics, and nations – an observation made from the outside and yet containing the possibility (read hope) that situations can be salvaged.

POLYNOID

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“Loom” (2010) dig animation, 5:30mins.
Loom tells the story of a successful catch. A moth being caught in a spiders web. Struggling for an escape, the moth’s panic movements only result in less chance of survival. What follows is the type of causality everyone is expecting. The spider appears, claims its prey and feeds on it. The way nature works. But it’s the point of view that creates an intense relationship between the hunter and its victim. There is much more to explore, much more to feel if one takes the time to really experience the content of a split second. Polynoid uses digital animation to heighten the senses, turning the natural into the hyper-real with a virtuosity of technique blurring the line between the digital and the science of life and death.

ALAIN RESNAIS

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“Night and Fog” (Nuit et brouillard) 1955, 32 minutes
Knowledge and memory change with time – this is one of Resnais’ thematic concerns, in this film and elsewhere. “Nuit et brouillard” is a remarkable documentary made 10 years after the end of WWII, constructed and reconstructed out of a blending of archival footage and then-contempoary sequences. The contemporary (colour) sequences were shot at Auschwitz and Maïdanek, authorised and financially supported by the Polish government. The past, in black and white, was reconstructed from documentary material and stills gathered from concentration camp museums. It is precisely Resnais’ obsession with and mastery of form that gives Nuit et brouillard an emotional power unequalled by any fictional reconstruction of the Holocaust. The near-digressions of the subtly orchestrated and edited filmic narration and the ironies of the commentary capture and focus the viewer’s attention, ensuring that the most horrible images (those shots of corpses, for example, that the censors objected to) are seen with clear eyes, and that therefore their human meaning cannot be avoided. The juxtaposition of past and present ensures that the final question (“Alors, qui est responsable?”/”Well, then, who is responsible?”) is directed at the viewer, any viewer, the viewer of 1956 (when, Resnais admits, the growing war in Algeria was much on his mind) and the viewer today, living in an era of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and state violence differing perhaps on target but not in effect from those that came before. West Germany became the first country to purchase and distribute “Nuit et brouillard” when it came out. In the context of this show, it is important to bring it back.

JAN SVANKMAJER

ARTIST’S TEXT

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Known as a forefather of both Czeck surrealism and animation, it is ironic that this is perhaps Svankmajer’s only documentary, yet it could so readily be misconstrued as one of his elaborately constructed fictions. One of the masterpieces produced during Švankmajer’s early career, Kostnice (The Ossuary, 1970), is shot in one of his country’s most unique and bleakest monuments, the Sedlec Monastery Ossuary. The Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of some 50 to 70 thousand people buried there since the Middle Ages. Over a period of a decade, they were fashioned by the Czech artist František Rint with his wife and two children into fascinating displays of shapes and objects, including skull pyramids, crosses, a monstrance and a chandelier containing every bone of the human body. Their work was completed in 1870, and these artifacts have been placed in the crypt of the Cistercian chapel as a memento mori for the contemplation of visitors. Well-known for his appreciation of the macabre, Švankmajer found in Sedlec a subject sufficiently grim not to have to add very much to it. The theme of ageing, ruin and death appears right from the beginning. yet we are saved from morbidity by the elaborate, contrast-rich editing, alternating static images and leisurely camera pans with bursts of rapid-montage, swish-pans and tilts reminiscent of the impressionist technique of the pioneer of early French film Abel Gance. At other times, a long shot of the chapel’s interior, a sculpture or a camera pan is intercut with close-ups of a skull or another poignant detail, producing an atmosphere of nervous tension. A subtle detail in the concluding images of the film links the macabre atmosphere of death with the oblivion of the living: adolescent initials scratched into the skulls and bones by anonymous visiting vandals. A silent commentary on the eternal forgetting of humans—or perhaps their effort to laugh at death?