Image: Digitalis, Sebastian Buerkner

Animate Projects, with support from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, is pleased to announce a call for proposals for animated works that – in a broad sense – explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the ‘digital’.

We are looking to commission four works, at a budget of £2000 each, including artist’s fee. The commissions are available to UK-based artists, animators and filmmakers who can craft an inventive and engagingly provocative work.

The Digitalis Commissions are a part of Digitalis, a strand of activities for 2011 that focus on the potential of the digital space as a site for artistic production.

More information on the Digitalis Commissions can be found here.

Guidelines and submission form can be downloaded here.

Deadline for submissions: 4pm, 24 August.

5050, 1997, Ruth Novaczeck

Cinenova: Reproductive Labour, an exhibition and programme of events that profiles the work of Cinenova – a volunteer-led organisation dedicated to preserving and distributing the work of women/feminist film and video makers, artists and activists. The exhibition will present film and video works and paper materials, as well as a series of screenings and events, offering a rare opportunity to watch and research pivotal works from the history of feminist, queer and experimental film and video production.

Threatened with closure since 2001, a working group of Cinenova volunteers and new supporters began collaborating with The Showroom in 2009, in order to make public and urgent Cinenova’s practical situation regarding the preservation of its materials and continued practice. In opening the collection to the public,Reproductive Labour will instigate a process of socialising Cinenova’s current struggles.

The exhibition opens at The Showroom 9 February  and runs until 26 March 2011.

Memento Park, Carey Young

Dates: 5 February – 20 March 2011 | Location: Cornerhouse, Manchester

Launching 5 February, Cornerhouse presents a major touring solo show by artist Carey Young. Using a variety of media and settings Young often uses found tools, language and training processes from the worlds of the multinational corporation and global law firm, altering them to create fictional and absurd scenarios which explore notions of performance, autonomy, criticality and imagination. Positioning herself as an insider to these predominant systems, she takes a stance between complicity and resistance as she criticises them playfully through the use of their own methods and language.

The show features new video Memento Park (2010), which has been commissioned in conjunction with Cornerhouse, Eastside Projects and mima, alongside a number of key video works and recent photographic, text and telephone works.

Lenny's Documentary, Ian Bourn, 1978

Dates: 9 September – 7 November | Location: Raven Row, London

Polytechnic is an exhibition of video, installation and tape/slide works made between the mid seventies and early eighties by a number of artists in the UK who were developing new relationships between ‘experimental’ media and ideas of narrative. The complex and hybrid works in the exhibition talk about autobiography, television, diaries, lost histories, sexuality, the communist bloc, popular culture, fictions, soap operas and murder.

Polytechnic has a particular emphasis on video work. As well as the emergence of the domestic video recorder, the period covered by the exhibition saw artists gaining increasing access to video cameras and recording decks. This engagement with technology was encouraged through the development of media departments in Art Schools and Polytechnics, where many of the artists studied and taught.

The artists featured are John Adams, Ian Bourn, Ian Breakwell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, David Critchley, Catherine Elwes, Roberta Graham, Susan Hiller, Stuart Marshall, Cordelia Swann and Graham Young. Polytechnic is curated by Richard Grayson, an artist curator and writer based in London.

The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth

“This is therapy, not a film competition with yourself. You’ve made the best film, I assume the best was the first. We are using it to go back in time, to see where we can go and examine it.” Lars von Trier, The Five Obstructions

Filmmakers: how brave are you? How pure is your quest? How true is your art? I wonder how many of us would be strong enough to stand up to the challenges of Lars von Trier, as Jorgen Leth does in The Five Obstructions.

In 1967, Leth made a short film called The Perfect Human. In 2003, Von Trier challenged him to remake the film five times, each time under certain restrictions. What ensued was an intellectual game between two very strong-willed filmmakers.

It seems at times that Von Trier is simply playing with Leth for his own amusement:  he wants to push him, to trip him up. He seems intent even upon breaking him. Leth manages to produce a beautiful and interesting film, no matter how tough the restrictions. But even though Von Trier seems impressed by the quality of Leth’s remakes he is unsatisfied, making comments such as: “I don’t think you were true to what really matters to me”. Let us ask, what does matter to Von Trier? What would satisfy him?

The Five Obstructions is, beyond anything else, a film about the creative process. A key part of the process is dealing with creative control. Filmmaking is always a battle between control and chaos; most often an attempt to impose some kind of order over chaotic elements such as money, people, weather, locations and so forth. We see in many of Von Trier’s films an apparent embrace of chaos. At the very least, it is allowed to run amok inside carefully placed boundaries. Von Trier finds a way to make it work according to the needs of the film. Control is also a personal issue for Trier who suffers from various phobias and obsessive compulsions. He seems engaged in a constant battle to gain control over himself and the world around him. His way of dealing with this within filmmaking is, “to set up limitations like we did with Dogme. By removing some options in certain areas, you’re able to focus fully on other areas and rethink how you go about things.”

Interestingly, Von Trier is attempting to get Leth to relinquish his control. But Leth, in his cool emotional detachment, is clearly a man very much in control. Von Trier sees that there is something that he has lost by taking this stance. He wants something raw and accidental to come through: something human and emotional.  He wants the experience to leave a mark on him. He says to Leth after the first ‘obstruction’: “There is a degree of perversion in maintaining a distance… I want you to move on from there, to make you empathise.”

The final ‘obstruction’ has Leth doing nothing but reading a letter that Von Trier has composed, over footage from the previous Obstructions edited by Von Trier. This is the ultimate submission to the game that is being played. It is not for the sake of amusement that Von Trier is taking this mature filmmaker and asking him to revisit a film of his youth. Von Trier has maintained something youthful in his approach to his work. Leth, much to Von Trier’s disappointment, seems to have lost something.

The film is not an exercise in how films are made. It is a lesson in the importance of breaking out of habits, of constantly keeping oneself in check and of becoming critical of oneself. It teaches that what really matters in art is the viewpoint of the artist, but that this is no easy proposition: to be true to oneself demands constant work. Creativity, to put it simply, is the discovery of new ideas. To find new ideas one must maintain something of youth – an openness that leads one to take risks and not fall into habits. Maybe Leth’s weakness as a filmmaker is his reluctance to take any real risks. This is a trait I admire in Von Trier: his constant experimentation and reinvention is what makes him such an important director. His work goes beyond mere ‘taste’ and ‘style’; instead, it is about searches, explorations, leaps of faith, self-awareness. He uses film as a tool for studying and trying to understand ourselves and all the worlds in which we live.

So: filmmakers, how brave are you? How pure is your quest? How true is your art? Will you take up the challenge constantly to experiment and to seek out new ideas – and find the strength to bring back what you discover?

“Look at your habits … are they the product of innumerable little cowardice’s and laziness or of your courage and inventive reason?” Nietzsche

About the Author: Daniel Fawcett, Writer/Director and founder of One + One, The Filmmakers Journal.

Mauricio Arango

Since 2007 Matt Roberts Arts has produced the annual Salon Art Prize exhibiting the work of 244 artists and photographers. This year saw the inclusion of a new Video Art Salon, for which 41 artists were selected by Mike Sperlinger (LUX) and artist Zineb Sedira.

The exhibition was split into two parts with works being shown through a video wall at the organisations project space in East London. Mauricio Arango was awarded the selectors prize of £800. Part two of the show is open until 18 April.

Tabaimo: Boundary Layer at Parasol Unit

Dates: 26 May – 6 August | Location: Parasol unit, London

Parasol unit presents the first solo exhibition in London devoted to the work of the Japanese artist Tabaimo. Since her graduation from art school in 1999, Tabaimo’s innovative and large-scale animated drawings have been extensively shown to major critical acclaim, both in Japan and internationally. Tabaimo is known for her skilfully drawn and disturbing animations that mix imagery from c0ntemporary Japanese life with digital video technique. The exhibition at Parasol unit will be comprised of five video installations: Japanese Kitchen, 1999; hanabi-ra, 2003; guigunorama, 2006; public conVENience, 2006; and yudangami, 2009.

There is a private view on 25 May, 6.30-9 pm. Admission is Free. For more information, visit www.parasol-unit.org.

OffOn by Scott Bartlett

Scott Bartlett made this documentary in 1980 of a recreation of OffOn that he created with a class at UCLA to use as a teaching tool. It is a wonderful insight into how the methods we take for granted today, were constructed with low-fi methods, along with snippets of what led him down the experimental video path. OffOn is a film by Bartlett made in 1967 that experiments in videographic techniques not far off the effects of music promos and vj footage today.

See the original film on YouTube.

B.Abbas and R.Abou-Rahme, Collapse (video still), single channel DV (2009), image courtesy of the artists

Palestinian artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas spoke to APEngine about their sound and video installation, Collapse, which was exhibited at The Delfina Foundation, London, earlier this year as a work-in-progress.

Can you explain what Collapse is for someone who hasn’t seen the piece?

Collapse is a sound and video installation, which uses as its starting point an assemblage of black and white film archive material to disrupt the frontier between reality and fiction, past and present. The compiled footage, including sequences from The Open Door (1964), The Battleship Potemkin (1925), and Edward Said as a young child in Jerusalem pre 1948 (In Search of Palestine), brings together imaginary and actual moments of resistance and loss, an act of excavation that illuminates the deep disjuncture that has shaped not only Palestinian lived experience and memory but shared histories of struggle.

The selected moments from the material appear as fragments embodying a sense of the ephemeral, acting in their reconstructed state as remnants from forgotten narratives and traces of a counter memory. A feeling of continual suspension and relapse, progress and deadly repetition is played out exploring the overlap between personal trajectories and multiple historical narratives.  In this re-examination of archive and fictional material, a reinterpretation of both the past and present is manifest; what appears to be absent or lost is made once more physically present and potent.

What inspired Collapse?

Collapse was largely inspired by our experience of recently moving back to Palestine, what we faced was a desolate socio-political landscape marked by multiple absences. A literal and poetic displacement resonates throughout the piece; this is in part a meditation on a contemporary Palestinian landscape ruptured by a breakdown of political community, memory and narrative. The moments of recurrent potentialities and failures of resistance are markedly repeated in a way that critically reconstructs fragments from the past to reveal the immobility and sense of absence in the present.  So it very much came out from the current conditions of living in Palestine and the difficulties of making sense of the relationship between our history and the moment we are living.    In the end, of course. we wanted the piece to build a narrative that connects to other historical moments and resonates outside the confines of Palestine. So we drew inspiration from the various footage that we were sourcing and re-interpreted those narratives as well.

Why Collapse as the title?

Well actually it’s a working title – we’re in the process of changing it! But we choose it because it seemed to articulate both the form of how we are working – which was collapsing different footage together, from fiction to real event – and correlating different spaces and times and the conceptual framework of the piece.

How did you start working together?

Well, we met at a young age in Palestine, and years later ran into each other while studying in London.  When we met we discovered that our work was really overlapping, we were both trying to find new modes of articulating the Palestinian condition and connecting it to wider experiences. We found that we were both experimenting with a combination of field recordings, scripted material and archive footage ranging from old films to news reels. It seemed perfect as one of us was working in sound and the other in image and video. Our first collaboration was through Ramallah Underground and our work together just naturally developed from there.

In both our use of video and sound, we work outside narrative structure and yet weave fragmented narratives, layering different narratives to create new labyrinths of connections and memory.  Primarily we are attempting to find a new language and practice to articulate the, at times, irreducible contradictions and ruptures of Palestinian lived history, which find a deep resonance across the Arab world.

Where did you source the archival footage and audio from?

There are a range of sources; the video is made up of old black and white films, as well as real events and specific landscapes from current day Palestine which we shot.  For the video we selected films that depicted moments of resistance and loss, we selected three Arab films, or films set in the Arab world The Open Door, Hassan and Naima, and The Battle of Algiers, we also selected two scenes from The Battleship Potemkin. For the documentary material we found great footage of Edward Said playing happily outside his old home in Jerusalem prior to the ensuing Nakba of 1948 and a young boy morosely leaving Jerusalem with his belongings in 1967, these two scenes juxtaposed wonderfully together. There is a scene of a women floating under water, this is from an infomercial made in the US in the 1930’s we believe.  That was a fantastic image because of its ambiguity, there was both something quite utopian and serene about the moment and rather sad at the same time, is the women drowning or simply floating?

For the sound we followed the same practice, we used the sound from the films and interlaced them with archives from different historical moments in Palestinian history such as the PLO training in Lebanon in the 70’s, demonstrations in the second Intifada and street recordings we collected over the past months.  The idea was to continually play with the line between fiction and non-fiction and to collapse different spaces and times into each other, so the piece sounds from the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila massacres are set against radio broadcasts from the Battle of Algiers.

How much of the film is made up of found footage and how much of the action is from real events?

If we consider the sound and video then there pretty much half and half, we were continually working to overlap both these spaces of fiction and reality whether through the video or the sound.

It’s always a boundary that we are playing with, a kind of distinction that is meant to be lost while experiencing the work.  There is this compulsion that fiction is simply fiction, and facts are reality, what we try to explore is the truth in fiction, and a reality that is more overwhelming than fiction. Our use of pre-existing material, ranging from infomercials, news reels, home videos and fictional films is an attempt to both subvert and re-narrate the material, giving it a second life or form of meaning

How did the residency at The Delfina Foundation come about and what did it entail?

The residency at the Delfina was initially for Ramallah Underground, this came about through a chance encounter between Basel and the director of the space.  While we were there we had been working on Collapse individually and shared it with them, they loved it and decided to exhibit it.

The installation that you exhibited at Delfina is a work-in-progress, how has the work moved on since the show?

The work has a series of nine images that are now finally done, the images embody a disruptive stillness, abandoned houses left to the erosions of time, rooftops filled with smoke where the traces of a city, of life beyond, are barely visible. Into this landscape, imagery fragments from the footage we used in the video are inserted and re-interpreted; consequently both visual moments are imbued with new meaning and signification. The figures appear fleeting, part of a re-enactment, a memory, a lucid dream, frozen in their motion bringing about a tense interplay between motion and stillness. For the sound and video, we have not made drastic changes; we have shortened the piece and tightened some of the transitions

Can you tell me about your piece at the Venice Biennale?

The sound installation entitled Ramallah Syndrome, a collaboration between us and Allesandro Petti and Sandi Hillal, is an attempt to both critically reflect on and articulate the socio-political and spatial suspension that defines Ramallah as a latter-day enclave. The sound-scape operates along the fault lines of this dialectical disjuncture, traversing between the lived desires of normalcy and the increasing encampment and fragmentation of Palestinian cities and towns.  Exploring the absurdities and possibilities of normalcy as resistance, escapism as defiance, consumption as agency.  The installation recreates the socio-spatial coordinates of this particular experience through the experimental use of various audio material, creating an unsettling soundscape between an appearance of normalcy and its complete suspension. It uses a series of informal conversations, field recordings, processed sounds and music to raise critical questions about the deep implications of this ‘syndrome’.

What else are you working on at the moment?

We are working on multiple projects, but one in particular is an installation entitled In Search of X, which is again a combination of image, sound and video.  In Search of X takes as its starting point real stories of multiple missing and forgotten Palestine political activists to develop a narrative in the fault lines between fact and fiction, neither archive nor fiction, a space where what was and what could have been is investigated.  Here X is both a specific set of characters and an allegorical figure for a community in absence, a city in absence, the result is a search for something that is still intangible and undetermined, so it is very much about imagining and projecting the future.  For this piece we are mostly shooting the material, partially a recreation of the past and also an imaginary for the future.

Do you have any other exhibitions coming up?

The debut show of Collapse, as a finished piece, will be at Rose Issa’s Projects in London at the beginning of next year, and we have an exhibition of Ramallah Syndrome coming up at the Jerusalem Show, and a few others hopefully in the pipeline.

You can catch Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas’s Ramallah Syndrome sound installation at the Venice Biennale until 22 November 2009, and check out APEngine’s showcase of Collapse here.

Interceptor Surf Sequence, Shaun Gladwell

Dates: 3 October-29 November 2009 | Location: Spacex, Exeter

Spacex has staged a bit of a coup is securing the first UK show by Shaun Gladwell, who was a hit representing Australia at this year’s Venice Biennale. Gladwell’s video offers everything you might want from art… beautiful, considered, political… with some skateboarding and roadkill thrown in.

Seven Year Linework presents a selection of projects that are drawn from Gladwell’s ongoing investigations of conceptual drawings rendered in video. Beginning with one of Gladwell’s earliest experiments in video, the exhibition includes a series of recorded performances from different points of view. Gladwell’s use of slow motion has become a trademark of the artist’s aesthetic style, however the video projects in this exhibition regard a sense of slowed motion in real time footage.