Tony Cokes: Notes on Evil (and Others)
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | March 28, 2011
Thursday, March 31, 6:00 pm | Tony Cokes in person!
- #3 (Tony Cokes, 2001). Courtesy the artist.
In his incisively witty videos and installations, Tony Cokes juxtaposes familiar archival footage, Google searches, and Hollywood imagery with text and popular music to critique the media’s often reductive representations of race and class. This evening’s screening surveys Cokes’ career and includes Black Celebration (1988), selections from the Pop Manifesto project (2000-04) and his on-going Evil series (2004- ), including the US premiere of Evil.20.b.om.h (2011). The Pop Manifestos connect the history of pop with a larger, nefarious matrix of capitalist production. The Evil videos continue the biting aims of the Pop Manifestos in a more fervently politicized manner, tackling post 9/11 political flash points—Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act, and various speeches of the Bush Administration—to explore the mediated rhetoric surrounding the US’s ongoing “war on terror.” 1988-2011, Tony Cokes, USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 mins plus discussion.
TONY COKES (b. 1956, Richmond, VA) is a post-conceptualist whose practice foregrounds social critique. His video, installation, and sound works recontextualize appropriated materials to reflect upon our production as subjects under capital. His recent projects often take the form of text animations with sound functioning as a constitutive, intertextual element, complicating the visual. Cokes’ works have appeared in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, and La Cinémathèque Française, Paris. His numerous media festival screenings include International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (1993, 2005), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2001 – 2006 and 2009 – 2011), and Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin-Madrid (2003 – 2010). Cokes’s projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. In 2008-9, he was a Resident Scholar at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, CA. Cokes is currently a Professor in Media Production, Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Providence, RI.
The Disappointment: Or, The Force of Credulity
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | March 14, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 6:00 pm | Brian Springer in person!
- The Disappointment; Or, The Force of Credulity (Brian Springer, 2007). Courtesy the artist.
“An unexpected masterpiece.” — Grady Hendrix, New York Sun
Best known for his scathing news media exposé Spin (1995), Brian Springer’s latest film is a labyrinthine, semi-autobiographical documentary about the search for four disparate treasures buried on his family’s farm in Missouri. These include gold coins left behind by a 16th century Spanish explorer; silver from the Civil War; the legendary lost diary of anarchist Kate Austin, who lived on the farm in the 1890s; and a mysterious limestone sculpture of dubious origin. Springer interweaves the stories surrounding these treasures with those of his family to spin a tale of spirit possession, Napalm, Indian massacres, early American opera, fanatical obsessions, 200 tons of dirt, and the way mothers try to protect their families from wounds that never heal. At its core, The Disappointment meditates on the ways history is passed along, altered, and sometimes lost through archeological findings. Tonight’s screening will be introduced by writer Brian Holmes. Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. 2007, Brian Springer, USA, Beta SP video, 70 mins plus discussion.
BRIAN SPRINGER (b. 1959, Kansas) studied video at the State University of New York at Buffalo and received his MFA in Art from the University of California Santa Barbara. While in Buffalo, Springer worked with a group of artists to create Squeaky Wheel, a nationally respected grassroots media arts center. Springer’s work has been shown at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Whitney Museum (NYC), the Institute for Contemporary Art (London), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and has been broadcast nationally in the UK. He currently lives in Ohio, where he works in the public schools through the Ohio Arts Council’s arts residency program.
Yael Bartana: A Declaration
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | March 7, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 6:00 pm | Yael Bartana in person!
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- Mur i Wieża (Wall and Tower) (Yael Bartana, RED HD video, 15 min, 2009). Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam.
Amsterdam- and Tel Aviv-based artist Yael Bartana’s slippery, sophisticated films and videos reflect upon contemporary Israeli culture, the ideas and rituals that bind its citizens together, and its larger geopolitical context. Drawing upon ethnographic traditions, utopian Soviet-style propaganda, and historical reenactment, Bartana’s work provocatively shuttles between irony and sincerity, playfulness and dead seriousness to examine the complex historical and political relations between Israel, Europe, the Middle East and beyond. Bartana will present an overview of her practice, including the first two installments of her latest project, The Polish Trilogy (Nightmares, 2007 and Wall and Tower, 2009) and discuss her work on the third, which will premiere at this year’s Venice Biennale. Additional works include Kings of the Hill (2003), Wild Seeds (2006), and A Declaration (2006), among others. Co-presented by SAIC’s Visiting Artists Program. 2001-2010, Yael Bartana, Israel/Netherlands/Poland, multiple formats, ca. 75 mins plus discussion.
YAEL BARTANA (b. 1970, Moshav Kfar Yehezkel, Israel) splits her time between Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. The recent recipient of the prestigious Artes Mundi prize, she holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and an MFA from the New York School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), PS1 (New York), and Moderna Museet (Malmö); theatrical screenings at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Transmediale, among many others. Most recently, she participated in the 6th Media City Biennial in Seoul and the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial. Bartana is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam and Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv.
Tags: 2011 > Artist's Film > Europe > Experimental > Middle East > Non-Fiction > Performance > Political
Radical Closure
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | February 28, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 6:00 pm
- Posthumous (Ghassan Salhab, 2007). Courtesy the Video Data Bank.
Curated by Lebanese video artist Akram Zaatari (who presented a program of his own works at CATE in Fall 2006), Radical Closure brings together documentaries, independent films, and video art from the Middle East and Europe produced in response to war, territorial conflicts, division, and political tension. Originally organized as an 11-part series for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2006, this ambitious and thought-provoking program has since been released as a DVD box set by the Video Data Bank. This evening’s program celebrates the VDB release with a selection of works from the set portraying unsettling situations and a post-screening discussion with Zaatari via remote. Works include: I Soldier (Köken Ergun, 2005), Homage By Assassination (Elia Suleiman, 1992), Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects (Lisa Steele, 1974), Intensive Care (Hatice Güleryüz, 2001), The First Ones (Hatice Güleryüz, 2001), I’ve Heard Stories (Marwa Arsanios, 2008), and We Will Win (Mahmoud Hojeij, 2006). Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. 1974-2005, Canada/Lebanon/Palestine/Turkey, Beta SP video, ca. 70 mins plus discussion.
AKRAM ZAATARI (b. 1966, Saida, Lebanon) is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. He has been exploring Lebanon’s postwar condition through collecting testimonies and various documents, notably on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television, and the logic of resistance in the context of the current geographical division of the Middle East. Zaatari studied Architecture at the American University of Beirut and received an MA in Media Studies from the New School in New York. He worked as an executive producer for the daily morning show Aalam Al-Sabah at Future Television-Beirut in the early 1990s, where he also produced most of his early video pieces. He is a founding member of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, and has edited three books on photography, The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of Transition on a Modernizing Society (AIF, 1999), Portrait du Caire: Alban, Armand and Van Leo (AIF, 1999) and Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography (with C. Bassil, Z. Maasri, and W. Raad, AIF, 2005).
MORE:
Video Data Bank
Suzanne Cotter on Akram Zaatari
Tags: 2011 > Experimental > Group Programs > Middle East > Non-Fiction > Political > Video Data Bank
Andrea Geyer: Criminal Case
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 6:00 pm | Andrea Geyer in person!
- Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb (Andrea Geyer, 2009-10). Courtesy the artist.
In her striking, cerebral videos, installations, and photographs, German-born, New York-based artist Andrea Geyer mixes documentary and fiction to examine the ways historical narratives and social spaces shift over time and within larger socio-political contexts. Featured in tonight’s program is Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb (2009-10), which reenacts the 1961-62 trial of notorious Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Based on both court transcripts and Hannah Arendt’s book on the trial (Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil), Geyer’s video abstracts the trial into six equally distinct roles — Accused, Defense, Judge, Prosecution, Reporter, and Audience — all performed by the same actor, artist (and SAIC alumnus) Wu Ingrid Tsang. Together, these fractions explore the trial’s lasting relevance. Geyer, writes art historian Johanna Burton, “opens up whole pockets of forgotten history and, in so doing, remobilizes calcified, regulated understandings.” 2009-10, Andrea Geyer, USA, HD Video, ca. 60 mins plus discussion.
ANDREA GEYER (b. 1971, Freiburg, Germany) lives and works in New York. She uses both fiction and documentary strategies in her image- and text-based art. Her works are temporal translations of specific social and political situations that address larger concepts such as national identity, gender, and class in the context of the ongoing re-adjustment of cultural meanings and social memories. Recent works include Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, revisiting the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and Spiral Lands, a photographic and textual historiography of the ongoing dispossession of lands from indigenous people by colonization, governmentality, and capitalist development that constitutes one of the longest struggles for social justice in North America. Her work has been shown internationally, most notably at the 29th Sao Paulo Biennale, at UAG Gallery Irvine and documenta12 in Kassel. She is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander/Cologne.
More:
Andrea Geyer
9 Scripts from a Nation at War
Tags: 2011 > Experimental > Monographic Shows > Non-Fiction > Performance > Political > USA
Rose Lowder’s Bouquets
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 6:00 pm | Rose Lowder in person!
- Bouquets 25-27 (Rose Lowder, 2002-03). Courtesy the artist and Light Cone, Paris.
Brimming with vibrant images of blossoms, orchards, insects, and grasses, the works of celebrated French filmmaker Rose Lowder literally buzz with life. For over thirty years, she has crafted a body of stunning structuralist portraits of the pastoral environs around her home in southern France. Often shot one frame at a time and composed through elaborate, pre-designed in-camera edits, each of her films also explores the possibilities of photographic and visual perception. Viewed together, they offer a dynamic investigation into the rhythms and cycles of the natural world. This evening, in her first-ever Chicago appearance, Lowder will present a selection of old and new works, including her on-going Bouquets series, each one-minute tributes to the flora and fauna she films. 1979-2010, Rose Lowder, France, 16mm, ca. 90 mins plus discussion.
ROSE LOWDER (b. 1941, Lima, Peru) trained as a painter and sculptor in Lima, Peru, and London, England. From 1973-75, she worked as a film editor for the BBC. After moving to Avignon in the late 1970s, she began a regular exhibition series for experimental film and in 1981, founded, with Alain-Alcide Sudre, the Les Archives du Film Expérimental d’Avignon (AFEA). Lowder continues to live and work in Avignon and is currently an associate professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Tags: 2011 > Artist's Film > Diary > Europe > Experimental > Non-Fiction > Portrait > Retrospective
The Wild Triumphs of Martha Colburn
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 6:00 pm | Martha Colburn in person!
- Destiny Manifesto (Martha Colburn, 2006). Courtesy the artist.
Martha Colburn’s wickedly witty animations are assemblages of stop-motion puppetry, multi-layered glass painting, and all forms of pop cultural detritus. Drawing inspiration from the histories of the American West and more recent narratives of methamphetamine use and environmental catastrophe, Colburn’s outrageous pastiches offer incendiary commentary on our contemporary condition. Writes Jonas Mekas: “Martha Colburn’s films are naked testimonials of our times, and of her generation.” This evening, she will present a range of works from across her oeuvre—including early favorites like Evil of Dracula (1997) and Cosmetic Emergency (2005)—and the Chicago premiere of two brand-new projects, in addition to an in-depth discussion about her process. 1994-2010, Martha Colburn, Netherlands/USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 mins plus discussion.
MARTHA COLBURN (b. 1972, Pennsylvania) is an artist based in New York. A prolific self-taught filmmaker, she has completed nearly 50 animated shorts since 1994. In addition to her work in film, Colburn recorded and toured as part of the Baltimore-based rock group The Dramatics and in side projects like The Pleasant Livers. She has made music videos and art films for bands such as Deerhoof, Serj Tankian, They Might Be Giants, and the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnson. Her films, collages, and installations have been exhibited widely, most recently at the Cannes Film Festival in France, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, and the Kunstsammlung Jena in Germany.
Vivienne Dick: No Wave Films
Posted by | Kelly M Shindler | Posted on | February 24, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 6:00 pm
- She Had Her Gun Already (Vivienne Dick, 1978). Courtesy the artist and LUX, London.
“The quintessential No Wave filmmaker.” —J. Hoberman
One of the most important filmmakers to emerge from New York’s seething No Wave scene, and currently enjoying a resurgence of interest in her work, Ireland-born Vivienne Dick created a series of Super-8 films in the late 1970s that balance stripped-down narratives with visceral and moody performances by artists and musicians like Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Adele Bertei, and Ikue Mori. Writes Ed Halter in Artforum, “Obsessed with exhuming repressed traumas, voicing beaten-down identities, and generally meandering through a complex matrix of bad vibes, Dick’s works …are unapologetically messy, subjective, and political—thereby proposing that so, too, is life.” This evening’s program features a collection of her No Wave films, including the small-gauge masterpieces, She Had Her Gun Already (1978) and Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979), among others. 1978-79, Vivienne Dick, USA, Super-8mm on PAL Digibeta video, ca. 80 mins.
VIVIENNE DICK (b. 1950, Donegal, Ireland) studied Archaeology and French at the University College Dublin and received an MA in film and video at the University of Arts, London. In her early hears, she lived in France and Germany and traveled throughout India. Moving to New York City in the mid-1970s, she was part of a loose group of filmmakers, artists, and musicians. Her early films initially screened in music venues, later traveling to many independent cinemas across the US and Europe. She moved to London in 1984 and returned to the west of Ireland in 1999, where she continues to make films and videos. Her work has screened at many festivals, including New York, Edinburgh and Berlin, and museums, including the Tate Britain, MoMA, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Arts Center, and the IMMA Dublin. She was the recent subject of several large-scale retrospectives at the Tate, Crawford Art Gallery, and Artists Space in New York.
CATE Returns Feb 3!
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | January 18, 2011
Conversations at the Edge returns from the series’ winter hiatus on Thursday, February 3 with a screening of No Wave shorts by Ireland-born filmmaker Vivienne Dick. Additional season highlights include appearances by Martha Colburn, Rose Lowder, Andrea Geyer, Yael Bartana, Brian Springer, and Tony Cokes in addition to performances by the Berlin/Brisbane-based duo Botborg (Scott Sinclair and Joe Musgrove) and Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder, and Olivia Block. Details under “Current Season!”
- She Had Her Gun Already (Vivienne Dick, 1978). Courtesy the artist and LUX, London.
The Unstable Object
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 19, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 6 p.m. | Daniel Eisenberg in person!
- The Unstable Object (Daniel Eisenberg, 2010). Image courtesy the artist.
“Daniel Eisenberg’s films construct intricate webs of associations and reflections that probe consciousness, memory, and the emotional undercurrents of landscapes.” – Steve Anker
What do a luxury automobile, a wall clock, and a cymbal have in common? Daniel Eisenberg’s latest film, The Unstable Object is an elegant and visually sensual essay on contemporary models of production. Interested in the ways “things” affect both producer and consumer, Eisenberg travels to a state-of-the-art Volkswagen factory in Dresden, Germany, where shoppers look on as their individualized cars are hand-built by high-tech specialists; to Chicago Lighthouse Industries, where blind workers produce wall clocks for federal government offices; and to a deafening cymbal factory in Istanbul, Turkey, where today’s most sought-after cymbals are cast and hammered by hand, exactly as they were 400 years ago. Through a series of sequences sympathetic to each site and subject, The Unstable Object probes the relationships our global economy creates between individuals around the world. This special preview screening will be followed by a book signing for POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (Black Dog Publishing, 2010), the first major critical study of the SAIC professor’s work. Daniel Eisenberg, 2010, Germany/Turkey/USA, DigiBeta video, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
DANIEL EISENBERG (1954, Israel) has been making films for the past three decades. His films and videos examine history, memory, trauma, the contemporary urban environment, and labor, as well as their manifold representation and mediation. His work has been shown throughout Europe and North America, with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; De Unie, Rotterdam; and Kino Arsenal, Berlin; and at film festivals in Berlin, Sydney, London, and Jerusalem. Eisenberg has also edited numerous television documentaries, including Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, and Vietnam: A Television History. Eisenberg has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. His films are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, and the Australian Film and Television School, among others. He is currently Professor of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Tags: Asia > Essay > Europe > Experimental > Non-Fiction > Political > SAIC Faculty > USA
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
