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Spring 2007 - Being There: Experiencing Place and Non-place Cinema, video, installation art and new media all involve different relationships between place and non-place. In the past most people's sense of place and personal space was defined in terms of location, residence and cultural traditions. Our contemporary sense of place now also includes non-places such as airports, shopping malls, interstate highway networks and the Internet. These non-places are familiar discontinuous scenes marked by experiences of waiting and transition that incorporate distancing effects of incongruity and repetition. Some of the works in Being There emphasize place while others survey conditions of both place and non-place. Several artists employ long constant shots, silence and ambient sound while exploring different experiences of seeing, knowing and immersion in relation to nature, territory and cultural space. Some works have as much in common with photography and painting as with filmmakng and video in that it is possible for the viewer to control and spatialize the temporal experience while breaking through media conditioning involving our expectations of conventional narrative continuity and timing. These works involve exceptional ways of seeing and revealing that which may have been unrecognizable, lost or concealed. Some places are discovered through close observation and spending enough time to pass through the stereotypical spectacle of place in order to get in touch with a more expansive sensory awareness and palpable sense of presence. Other works perform defamiliarizing, ironic or humorous manipulations of the frame of reference that disturb the natural, and by establishing artificial or constructed perceptions, make it possible to actually get closer to what these places are about. All of the works challenge what we think we know or recognize about the geophysical, institutional and cultural aspects of particular places, so that it is possible to experience them from fresh perspectives. April 13 Skagafjordur, Peter Hutton (USA), 2004, 33 min.,16mm film Drawing on the traditions of nineteenth century landscape painting and still photography, Hutton's contemplative, meticulously composed film of northern Iceland unfolds as a series of tableaux. Palast, Tacita Dean (UK), 2004, 10:30 min., 16mm film “For a time, when Berlin was still new to me, it was just another abandoned building of the former East, that beguiled me despite its apparent ugliness, tricking and teasing the light and flattering the sensible and solid nineteenth century cathedral opposite with its reflections. Only later did I learn that it was the Palast der Republik and former government building of the GDR, a contentious place that concealed its history in the opacity of its surface, but had now been run-down, stripped of its trimmings and was awaiting the verdict on its future.” – Tacita Dean
Shot entirely at night in deserted streets of London’s East End and Docklands, Nocturne attempts to find images of the city that reveal the presence of the past, or of the dead, hinting at a concealed history. Long exposures and time-lapse techniques give the film an intensity of color and a sense of fleeting or historical time. – Video Data Bank
“This is a precise, detailed and riotous account of eteam’s purchase of a small tract of dusty acreage through an eBay auction. eteam tracks their acquisition to a sagebrush-laden void in southwestern Utah whose indistinguishable expanse makes it the perfect foil for fantasizing. As if upon the more familiar flat screen of their computer, the artists begin to project a domesticated mirage atop their slab of high desert.” – Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive
Untitled, Anri Sala (Albania), 2004, 7 min., video shown on DVD Shot on a boat steered though the mangroves in Senegal, the video is a winding journey in which the image veers between an almost physical clarity and a transparent abstraction. – Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
“Buildings and Grounds meanders, mentally and physically, reflecting on the conditions of being human, on transience, consciousness and desire. It uses landscapes as provocations, as sites of contemplation. And between the landscape and the thought, i.e., between the radical presence of the physical world and the idea, there is, more often than not, a distance, disbelief or irony.” – Ken Kobland The Paradox of the 10 Acres Square, eteam [Franziska Lamprecht (Germany) and Hajoe Moderegger (Germany)], 2005, 50 min., video eteam acquires a plot of land in the Nevada desert near the Salt Flats. “It’s this 10 acre lot and it’s surroundings that started the search for solutions to problems, which were created by big systems that had made some small mistakes – miscalculations of land surveyors, residues of the military, the appearance of dead cows and the existence of a ‘public road’ that went right through the center of the lot. In the middle of nowhere, things added up and finally turned into an ‘artificial traffic jam.’” – eteam
13 Lakes, James Benning (USA), 2004, 133 min., 16mm film 13 Lakes is comprised of identically framed ten-minute shots from lakes across the United States. “Benning’s stated purpose is to make a film that assists his viewers in becoming artists. It impels the viewer to look and listen with greater sensitivity. The film attests to the belief that being an artist, especially in the cinema, is first a matter of being sensitive to the surrounding world.” – Michael J. Anderson |