Special Issue
C o n t e m p o r a r y
A still from Nothing, 2012 a film by Tracey Snelling
A r t
R e v i e w
C o n t e m p o r a r y
A r t
Brenda Bullock United Kingdom
Tracey Snelling
Charlotte Seegers
USA
France
My work derives from voyeurism, film noir, and geographical and architectural location. I create new realities that change with the viewer’s perception. Through video, sound, and manipulation of size, I am not trying to replicate a place; rather I give my impression of a place, its people and their experience, and allow the viewer to extrapolate his or her own meaning.
Since I discovered anthropology, I became passionate about this discipline for a particular aspect of it. What interested me the most, is that in revealing cultural aspects of ways of acting, thinking and feelings, anthropology “denormalises” the commonness, it subverts conventional ways of thinking. It is this “dislocating” effect that I am looking for when conducting my research.
R e v i e w
Caroline Monnet
Gabriella Sonabend
Canada
United Kingdom
Monnet uses cinema, painting, sculpture and installation to demonstrate a keen interest in communicating complex ideas around Indigenous identity and bicultural living through the examination of cultural histories. Her work is often minimalistic while emotionally charged and speaks to the beautifully intricate limbo of indigenous peoples today.
Tabassom Habibzadeh Iran
I chose a classic typical modeling’s story, something like a well-known tale about slim models. I wanted to make an experimentalfiction film, this simple story was enough for my type of work because I didn't want my viewer to be distracted by both the story and the form. I wanted to follow my favorite cinema, a fiction film with experimental attitudes.
My work is an investigation, I am a watcher, a listener and a recorder, who lives somewhere between fiction and fact. My practice involves interviewing, filming and finding ways of presenting new stories to the public through video and writing. I often work in collaboration with other artists, musicians and designers and enjoy challenging my practice through concept and medium.
In this issue
Tracey Snelling Lives and works in Oakland, California Video, Photography, Installation
Caroline Monnet Lives and works in MontrĂŠal, Canada Video, Mixed media, Installation
Charlotte Seegers Lives and works in London, UK Mixed Media, Video
Gabriella Sonabend Lives and works in London, UK Mixed Media, Video, Documentary
Tabassom Habibzadeh Lives and works in Teheran, Iran Video
Brenda Bullock Christopher Marsh Adam Popli
United Kingdom
USA
Christopher Marsh is a multi-award winning filmmaker, video artist, lecturer and photographer from the North West UK. His past work is a fusion of narrative and video art that began in 2010, focusing largely on isolation and nihilism using various media formats within his productions. He currently runs the corporate video production company the film production company Asmodeus Films.
The Age of Animals is a somewhat different beast (pun intended) in that it features not found footage but rather contemporary video footage Biermann himself shot in the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the Vatican, and the Bronx Zoo. However, Biermann applies similar manipulations to this footage, producing a complex three-dimensional illusion in which foreground and background are forever trading places.
United Kingdom
My work has a way of taking charge, in the sense that I allow my ideas to gradually develop and process before deciding what the final visual outcome might be. Both intuition and structure play into each other throughout my creative process. It’s important to balance both elements in order to end up with a final piece that resonates with my audience.
Gregg Biermann
Lives and works in London, UK VIdeo, Fine Art Photography, Mixed media
Christopher Marsh Lives and works in Manchester Video, Installation, Mixed media
Adam Popli Lives and works in London, UK Mixed media, Video, Installation
Gregg Biermann Lives and works in Bergen, USA Mixed Media, Video, Installation
4 26 50 88 104 104 122 148 170
Special thanks to: Charlotte Seeges, Martin Gantman, Krzysztof Kaczmar, Tracey Snelling, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Christopher Marsh, Adam Popli, Marilyn Wylder, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Maria Osuna, Hannah Hiaseen and Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Edgar Askelovic, Kelsey Sheaffer and Robert Gschwantner.
On the cover: Andy Warhol, 83 years old by Edgar Askelovic
Tracey Snelling Snelling Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and installation,Tracey Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people and their experience. Often, the cinematic image stands in for real life as it plays out behind windows in the buildings, sometimes creating a sense of mystery, other times stressing the mundane. Snelling has shown work in museums such as Gemeentemuseum Helmond, the Netherlands; Shanghai Zendai MOMA, China; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota; and Stenersen Museet, Oslo. She has had solo exhibitions throughout the US as well as in China, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and London, and has been awarded residencies in Beijing and Shanghai. Her large-scale installation Woman on the Run was originally commissioned by Selfridges, London during Frieze 2008, and has traveled to Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; 21c Museum, Louisville; Frist, Nashville; SECCA, Winston-Salem; and the Virginia MOCA, Virginia Beach. Her first short film "Nothing" premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2012, and showed at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, Circuito Off in Venice, and the AC Institute in New York. Snelling recently had solo exhibitions at Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels, Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and Krupic Kersting in Cologne. Her most recent installation was commissioned for an exhibit at the Negev Museum in Israel. Snelling recently had solo exhibitions at Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels and Krupic Kersting in Cologne. Her recent commissions include and installation for exhibit at the Negev Museum in Israel and a sculptural commission for the Historical Museum of Frankfurt. Snelling's newest film The Stranger will be showing at the Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa in Portugal, and her work will be in forthcoming exhibits in Germany, Brussels, the Netherlands, and the US.
Summer 2015
film still from Nothing, 2012 short film, 15:00, with Elizabeth Guest as Jane
44 2
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
video, 2013
2 45
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 Summer 2015
Tracey Snelling
03 4
Tracey Snelling
An interview with An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
Naturalistic and moving in its simplicity, Nothing is psychologically penetrating film by Tracey Snelling. Via a succession of static shots, we come to see Jane's emotional and physical detachment from the world. Nothing relies on domestic routines and simple gestures: the first time we watched it, we immediately thought of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce: Tracey's elegant use of temps mort gives the viewer a strong sense of emptiness, rather than the manipulative approach of Hollywood productions. What mostly impressed us of Snelling's work is the way her careful gaze on contemporary age unveils the creative role of the spectator, discovering unsuspected but ubiquitous connections between art producing and the audience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Tracey and welcome to ART Habens: multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice and you seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between video, sculpture and photography: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
Tracey Snelling
(photo by Rebecca Brown George)
watch the film. This added installation and participation dimension lets the viewers become part of the film, and allows them the opportunity to imagine they are guests at the motel.
Yes, sometimes I feel that showing a subject and/or idea in multiple physical manifestations can be the most comprehensive, ideal way to get an idea across. For example: the film Nothing stands on its own. Yet, my ideal installment of the film would have the film projected to fill a large wall in the space, still photographs that I took on location of the film hung on a different wall, and installations of motel room beds, nightstands, and dimly lit lamps spaced unevenly throughout the space, so that the viewers could lay on the bed and
We would like to focus on your artistic production beginning from Nothing: an extremely interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to visit
47
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
https://vimeo.com/40554380 in order to get a wider idea of it. In the meanwhile, want to take a closer look at the genesis of this interesting project: in particular, how did you come up with the idea for Nothing?
I've been fascinated by motels, desert, and travel since I was young, so when I began to write my ideas for a film, I naturally leaned towards this setting. A few films that, in hindsight, influenced this work include Badlands, written and directed by Terrance Malick; Paris, Texas, written by LM Kit Carson and Sam Shepard and directed by Wim Wenders; Wild at Heart written and directed by David Lynch; and See the Sea written and directed by Francois Ozon, among other films. I was interested in presenting the desert as a character in the film, with quiet shots of large expanses of the landscape. I wanted to capture the feeling of the desert, of a small rundown town and being lost. I was most interested in presenting the exact moment when someone goes from denial or ennui, and being stuck in a situation without the energy to act, to the point of action and change. How does this come about? What causes the actual propulsion? I could have easily presented this using a male or female character, but I chose a woman, perhaps because I am a woman. Nothing features an unconventional narrative structure. What’s your writing process like?
I had the rough story idea in my head, so I sat down and wrote it out on three sheets of paper in an hour or so. I still have the papers somewhere here... I wrote a description of the feeling and mood, and what one would see-waking up in the trailer, Jane driving, the hum of the air conditioner in the motel room, the heat causing everything to move so slow, the three motel rooms, the drive and gas station stop. I don't remember if the title came first or the the title came while writing the story, but I wanted the film to follow the meaning of the title. While things actually happen in the film,
Summer 2015
film still from Nothing, 2012, short film, 15:00, with Elizabe
it's a very slow, methodical timeline, where seemingly nothing happens. Form following function. On another level, Jane's life at the beginning of the film is really nothing--she goes through the motions of life and does the bare
4 23 8
Naim El Hajj
ART Habens
th Guest as Jane, Idan Levin as the lump
weighing it down. It's so hot that even the film can barely move! And the end, or the anticlimax after the climax, is an example of the mundanity of everyday life. In Hollywood, The movie ends when the hero rides off into the sunset. In my film, my heroine needs to
minimum. Her decision in life is to make as few decisions as possible. She's stuck. Influenced by the sometimes quiet and contemplative scenes in the films listed above, I wanted the film to trudge along, feeling like the heat of the desert was
21 49
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
Trailer, 2011, 101.5 x 101.5 cm, chromogenic print; also a film still from Nothing
stop to fill up her gas tank. This type of anticlimax is often found in French and other European films, or in some of the great
Summer 2015
American films from the 1970's. I find this a much more thought provoking ending, which echoes the continuity of life, going from
4 23 1 0
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
Doorway, 2011, 101.5 x 101.5 cm, chromogenic print; also a film still from Nothing
dramatic events to the general, everyday acts that everyone must do. Another interesting aside is that I had
originally written the character of Jane to be a much harder, tougher, worn-down young woman: someone who is much older than they
21 11 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
film still from Nothing, 2012, short film, 15:00
really are from rough life experiences. But while casting, this one actress, Elizabeth Guest, was so captivating and engrossing. We weren't able to look away from her.
listlessness. After seeing her, I realized that my character Jane would have to change to a more lost, less hardened character. The film elevates to another level because of Guest's talent and the contrast between not being able to look away from Jane, and Jane being so passive and almost invisible.
She had something that was so interesting, but she also had an innocence and
Summer 2015
4 23 1 2
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
elaborate, I like having the time to see a place, a room, a landscape. With no dialogue in the film, everything is shown through movement, the lack of movement, and mood. In a way, I'm taking what I do with my photographs and expanding upon the idea. When I make a sculpture, such as a sculpture of a roadside motel, there are lights, video and sound in it. The sculpture acts almost like a three dimensional film without a timeline. Then, if I take the motel sculpture out to an abandoned desert roadside location and shoot a still image of it in the evening, I'm placing the motel in a particular setting and evoking a certain mood. I'm giving the motel context which didn't exist, or wasn't limited, when it was a sculpture. Now I've set parameters. So, in Nothing, when I have the long static shots and temp morts I am placing the motel and Jane into more of a context. On another level, the desert and the motel become additional characters in the film. Nothing is elegantly shot. Did you rehearse a lot with the shots you prepared in advance?
I initially had ideas of what the shots would be in my head, wrote them down, and sketched out a few. Many of the ideas were worked out during a location scouting trip that the cinematographer Todd Banhazl, the producer Idan Levin, and myself made down to Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree. All three of us had input on what would be interesting and could add to the film. We also came up with new ideas at this time on some shots, and added or changed some shots during the actual shooting. We shot the film over three days, did the initial editing in four days, and I worked with the sound editor for a few days over the internet while I was in Greece for an exhibition. The entire film was made in a month, from scouting and casting to color correction and completion, in order to reach a deadline. It was intense, but also interesting to see what can be done in one month.
We have been impressed by your peculiar use of temps mort and static shots reminding us of Antonioni's early films. Could you comment this peculiar aspect of your cinema?
Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on us and on which we
I spoke somewhat of that above, but to
21 13 4
Summer 2015
film still from Nothing, 2012, short film, 15:00, with Elizabeth Guest as Jane
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
would like to spend some words is entitled Stranger: your insightful investigation about the concepts of belonging and identity as well as the ambiance created by your careful juxtaposition between audio and video has reminded us the concept of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugĂŠ. What has mostly impacted on us is the way you have been capable of providing the viewers of an Ariadne's Thread, inviting them to challenge the common way we relate ourselves with the outside world in order to extract personal interpretations... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need in a way to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
When making The Stranger, I collaborated with the producer of Nothing, Idan Levin. We directed the film and both acted as cinematographer. I wrote the two poems that alternate during the film. One poem is about being alone, and is narrated in English and Spanish, and subtitled in Arabic And Hebrew. The other poem, which echoes the first poem line for line, is about us all being similar and at times, all being one, and is narrated in Arabic and Hebrew and subtitled in English and Spanish. The multiple layers of the poems, their meanings, the languages and the relations between the locations of these languages (both border places--the US and Mexico; Israel and Gaza Strip), in addition to the visuals and ambient audio, give multiple clues and associations that are layered and must be extracted by the viewer, making a kind of Adrian's thread. When editing the film and figuring out the placement of poems, narration and subtitles, we worked as both mathematicians and detectives--on one hand following a formula or structure that we came up with to piece the film together; the other aspect was figuring out which scenes went best with the lines from the poem, and how these scenes
Summer 2015
film still from The Stranger, 2014, short film, 4:42, by
interacted together. The many layers of the film, poems, narration, subtitles, and sounds make The Stranger a film that asks to be viewed multiple times, in order to pick up on the different nuances.
4 23 1 6
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling and Idan Levin, with Homero Hidalgo as The Stranger
The concept of non lieu is an interesting one, and I find these places to be of more interest that notable locations. When traveling, I always try to find a local grocery store and corner shop. One can tell a lot about a
particular culture from the grocery store, what's on the shelves, what people are buying, and who is shopping there. What these non places do is to bring together groups of people from the place.
21 17 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
film still from The Stranger, 2014, short film, 4:42, by Tracey Snelling and Idan Levin
The people and their characters become more important than the location or building. By presenting these places in The Stranger, the idea of being nowhere and everywhere, and of the global world being smaller and more
Summer 2015
similar than one might initially think, is emphasized. By definition video is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity. In your videos you
4 23 1 8
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?
Time is so relative. In film it can be used to present one minute of time happening in various ways, a lifetime happening in an hour, time being long and lasting seemingly forever, or time being so quick and then it's over. For Nothing, the tempo was so important, and was part of my original idea from the conception of the film. For most of the film, time drags on and the day seems to last forever. Then, upon Jane's realization that she is stuck in a dead-end life and must get out, the pace picks up quickly, and the sound follows. Once there has been the dramatic climax and and is free, driving on the road, things slow down to a regular pace as she stops to get gas. Regular, everyday life enters the picture and the mundanity of the many unexciting life tasks brings the time back to an undramatic, more contemplative pace. In The Stranger, the pace is not as slow, but there is a point at which the pace picks up and then returns to a more regular timing. This is done through length of clips and sound. The general pace is methodical and constant, with the exception of the faster section. The Stranger's relation to time should be timeless in a way, as the film is addressing universal ideas of belonging and loneliness. The idea of time and pace in my sculptures is interesting to think about. They function as capturing my idea of a place or culture. In many of my sculptures, the videos loop the same scenes, such as a woman unloading her groceries in a kitchen or a couple having sex or sleeping in a bedroom. In these cases, the pace of a sculpture stays the same, and reinforces the idea of the day-to-day banality of life. Other times the video in a piece might go from day to night, quiet and slow to loud. In this case the sculpture both has a pace on one hand and is timeless on the other, depending
create time based works that induce the viewers to abandon themselves to free associations, looking at time in spatial terms and I daresay, rethinking the concept of time in such a static way: this seems to remove
21 19 4
Summer 2015
film still from The Stranger, 2014, short film, 4:42, by Tracey Snelling and Idan Levin, with Homero Hidalgo as Th
e Stranger
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
if you are viewing it more from a static view or a viewing the sculpture in the round. Your works are strictly connected to the chance to establish a deep involvement with the viewers and as you have remarked in your artist's statement, at the core of your work resides the intersection of place and experience: especially in your installations, you offer a set of "fruible" symbols that comes from both from a variety of cultural substratums and a common environmental imagery. This approach urges the viewers to relate with your work in a more absolute way, removing any historical gaze from the reality you refer to and highlighting an effective combination between experience and imagination. German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand once state that: "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about this? And in particular, I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
I don't agree with what Demand said about symbolism. Art can rely on all of the above. Many of my sculptures are of iconic places, whether it be a motel, liquor store or bridge. These places are kinds of symbols with ideas connected to them, such as a motel as being a place of travel, liaisons, seediness, and often Route 66 or the southwest. When I add the additional details--peeling paint, a door open with a pair of high heeled shoes strewn on the carpet, a video of a couple tangled under the covers, the psychological narrative develops. Often, I leave this open ended enough so that the viewer can bring his or her personal experiences to their interpretation of my work. Other times, my work is about a specific place, such as the huge city Chongqing in China. Wandering the streets alone several days for many hours, with my cameras and
Summer 2015
film still from The Stranger, 2014, short film, 4:42, by
tripod, I captured my experience as an outsider looking in. Though I might try to remain as neutral as possible at times, my interests and attractions lead me to document certain aspects of a place and ignore others. So, my personal experience is an integral part
2 2 4 23
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling and Idan Levin
Over your career you have showcased your
of my creative process. Even when I make a work that's inspired by a film or literary work from another, I still bring my ideas and interests to the work. I can't imagine how one would separate their personal experiences from art.
works in several occasions around the world including exhibitions at the Oakland Underground Film Festival and at the Circuito Off in Venice.
21 23 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tracey Snelling
LA Street, 2013 63.5 x 101.5 cm, chromogenic print; also a detail of the mixed media sculpture Los Angeles (Smog)
So before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-
Summer 2015
making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
I try not to think of an audience when I'm making my work, whether it be film, sculpture, or photo. I want the work to be as pure as
4 23 2 4
Tracey Snelling
ART Habens
has been a completely different experience. When a film or video is shown in a museum or art space, viewers can wander in and out as they choose. At a film festival, short films are viewed in sequence in one sitting, and it's a captured audience. It's a new and sometimes uncomfortable feeling for me to sit with an audience in a dark room and watch my film. The one time I do focus more on the viewer while creating is in an installation. I often want my installations to immerse the viewer, and for this reason I take many considerations towards the viewer, such as lights, placement, flow of the space, and sound. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Tracey. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Presently, I'm working on a large scale installation called One Thousand Shacks. Addressing the immense issue of extreme global poverty, the installation will be a 5 meter high x 3 meter wide wall of small scale shacks and favelas, with lights, video and sound. I will be presenting part of the sculpture and speaking about it at a conference on poverty in New York this fall, and the installation will possibly show at Art Basel Miami or Frieze NY. I am partnering up with an organization that builds houses in poverty stricken areas, and will donate part of the proceeds from the sales to this cause. I would like to start exploring the presentation and installation of my work in unusual outdoor spaces, such as a lake or a freeway underpass. I like the idea of coming across unexpected experiences. I'm also in the beginning stages of developing an idea for a feature length film with my collaborator on The Stranger, Idan Levin.
possible, and to follow my vision. I've been showing my art for many years and I'm used to the second act of it being presented and viewed by others (after the first act of creation). Sitting in a dark theater at a film festival watching my film with an audience
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
21 25 4
Summer 2015
Caroline Monnet Monnet A self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Outaouais, QuÈbec, Monnet uses cinema, painting, sculpture and installation to demonstrate a keen interest in communicating complex ideas around Indigenous identity and bicultural living through the examination of cultural histories. Her work is often minimalistic while emotionally charged and speaks to the beautifully intricate limbo of indigenous peoples today. Monnet has made a signature for working with industrial materials, combining the vocabulary of popular and traditional visualcultures with the tropes of modernist abstraction to create unique hybrid forms. Monnet is always in the stage on experimentation and invention, both for herself and for the work. Monnet has exhibited in Canada and internationally in such venues as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Haus der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin) for the Rencontres Internationales, Toronto International Film Festival, Aesthetica (UK), Cannes Film Festival (not short on talent), Smithsonian Institute (NYC), Museum of Contemporary Art and Arsenal (Montréal). Monnet lives in Montréal where she is the artist in residence at Arsenal Contemporary Art Gallery. Summer 2015
Gephyrophobia, 16mm, 2012 (film still) © Eric Cinq-Mars
021 4
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
03 4 Gephyrophobia, Summer 2015 16mm, 2012 (film still) Š Eric Cinq-Mars Summer 2015
Caroline Monne
An interview with
Caroline Monnet (photo by Eric Cinq-Mars)
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
Multidisciplinary artist Caroline Monnet work accomplishes the difficult task of providing the viewers of an Ariadne's thread that unveils the hidden but ubiquitous relationships between oral histories, ancient life ways, and generational legacy. Her evocative storytelling urges the viewers to investigate about the relation between reality and the way we perceive it: capturing the ephemeral nature of experience, she materializes it into a coherent and permanent unity. One of the most convincing aspect of Monnet's practice is the way she creates an area of intellectual interplay between perception and memory, that invites the viewers to explore unstability in the contemporary age. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production.
Hello Caroline and welcome to ART Habens: ranging from painting, sculpture and installation to film and video, multidisciplinary is a crucial feature of your work, that shows an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints you convey into a consistent unity. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for producing your works? In particular, have you ever happened to realize that such synergy is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
The way I produce my work depends on the project itself. I usually don’t approach a film the same ways I approach a sculpture let say. But I agree that there is always a form of personal interaction with the work. I am interested in
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
creating works that have meaning and evoke feelings. This is why most often I research intensively before I actually start making the work. It is part of the process and acts as the foundations of the works. I became a multidisciplinary artist out of necessity really, because film and video was just not enough for me to express certain ideas and concepts. I believe it is the idea that dictates the medium chosen, not the other way around. I explore whatever medium best serves my expressive needs. Each medium is a world in itself and has great potential for storytelling. It is also quiet liberating to explore different mediums, different avenues of my own personality and to truly embrace the history that comes with a particular medium. It’s almost a way of educating myself in terms of techniques while striving to choose the perfect medium for the perfect story. Lately I’ve been working at making concrete sculptures. They explore ideas of monument, architecture and minimalism. I try to challenge this industrial material to bring poetry and synergy. My interests do not necessarily vary from one medium to the next. I believe each works influence each other and constitute a larger plunge into the thematic I have been exploring since the beginning of my art production. As an artist you are basically self-taught, however you hold a B.A in Communications and Sociology that you received from the University of Ottawa and the University of Granada. How did these experiences inform your evolution as an artist? Do they influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
It’s true that I studied Sociology and Communications. I think it is difficult to know what you really want to do in life when you are asked at 17. I have always been interested in art, in people and society in general. Because I don’t come from an artistic family and I did not have artist friends as a teenager, I never really thought I could make a career doing art. It is only later, in my early twenties that I started seeing things differently and knew I wanted to work in film and visual arts. However, I believe
Summer 2015
Gephyrophobia, 16mm, 2012 (film still) © Eric Cinq-Mars
my sociology background has had a huge influence in the work I do. I think it is nice to arrive to the art world from a different angle. My
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
interest in society and in people is engraved in the work I do still today. Art for me is a powerful tool for education and empowerment. I still
ART Habens
believe the artist or the filmmaker has somewhat of a responsibility in our society. The artist expresses a point of view on the world and
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
Gephyrophobia, 16mm, 2012 (film still) Š Eric Cinq-Mars
can therefore help in sparking debates, sharing ideas and challenge our own ways of organizing our communities. Making art is a constant study
Summer 2015
of the world, others and myself within that. In the end, it is not so different from any sociological endeavors.
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
Corporation as well as a documentary television series. I made my first film Ikwé in 2009. I was living in Winnipeg at that time and came across a small grant opportunity to direct and produce my first film. It completely changed my life as I had finally found something that I was passionate about. Filmmaking to me is a way of encompassing all forms of art. It speaks to performance, music, painting, photography and sound. It is collaborative, creative and challenging. As a self-taught filmmaker, I think I just try to do my own thing. I don't encompass myself into a style or a box. Because I have no formal training, I tend to follow my instincts and figure things as I go. Each film for me is a new challenge, a new opportunity to get better and refine my own style. Concepts and story often dictate the style of the film but I believe each film is filled with the same sensibilities, vulnerability and esthetic. As I grow as filmmakers, so do the films. I am more ambitious now than I was five years ago, but it’s because I am always up for new challenges in creating narratives. I also believe that my dual practice in visual arts has a huge influence in the way I envision my films. I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from Gephyrophobia, an interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What mostly appeals to me of this work is the way you blend a minimalistic gaze on urban spaces and a suggestive composition: I find truly engaging the way you subvert our perceptual parameters and I have to confess that it suddenly forced me to relate myself to your works in a different way. Would you walk our readers through the genesis of this interesting work? What was your initial inspiration and how did you develop it? Gephyrophobia is an experimental film, shot on a bolex 16mm that was commissioned by the WNDX festival of moving image in Winnipeg (Canada). At first, it was supposed to be a silent film, but when the images came back from the lab, there was no way they could remain without
I became a filmmaker without really expecting it. I had studied sociology and communications and worked briefly for the National Broadcasting
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
a soundtrack. I truly believe that sound is crucial in creating a mood and therefore an experience. With Gephyrophobia, I was asked to capture the pulse of the city of Ottawa, which is the capital of Canada, in a way that resembled the first experimental documentaries of the 1930’s. This is why I approached the project as a kind of city symphony. I grew up in the Outaouais region, which is just on the other side of a river from Ottawa. For me, to capture Ottawa on screen is to talk about that river, or let say that border, that separates Ottawa from Outaouais. That river separates the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, therefore the Anglophones from the Francophones. It separates two identities, two languages, and two realities. The incredible Frères Lumières composed the soundtrack. This was our first collaboration and they have been composing most of my films since then. I love how they captured the essence of what I was trying to do with sound. On one end, the more government run city of Ottawa, more square, desolate, and on the other end the more catholic lower class driven reality that exist on the other side of the river. They played with multiple layers of instruments, which fits perfectly with the minimalist black and white look of the film. The film might be minimalist and elegant in form, but encapsulates layers of meaning that you have to understand for yourself. Gephyrophobia accomplishes a subtle but insightful socio-political analysis: it can be also considered as an allegory of tension between the two very distinct identities that shares the Outaouais River as their common border: many contemporary artists, such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Michael Light, use to include socio-political criticism and sometimes even convey explicit messages in their works, that often goes beyond a mere descriptive point of view on the issues they face. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach?
on the world. In the case of Gephyrophobia, I wanted to really look at what makes this city interesting. What is my take on it and how do I
I don’t purposely create work that is political, but I guess it comes out this way. I do feel a responsibility as an artist to have a perspective
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
Gephyrophobia, 16mm, 2012 (film still) Š Eric Cinq-Mars
fit in as somebody who grew up in that region. The Outaouais river, for me, is so interesting in the sense that it a border. Borders are always
an interesting concept and often a limit hard to cross. Borders are like a grey zone filled with tensions. That for me is where my interest
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
Gephyrophobia, 16mm, 2012 (film still) Š Eric Cinq-Mars
resides and often those grey zones and tensions are filled with political and sociological potentials.
Summer 2015
Gephyrophobia means the fear of crossing bridges. I like this metaphor to engage in a sociological conversation. It’s a lead way into
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
differences as a potential for learning and growth, as something that makes us rich. From a more personal point of view, my father is French from Brittany and my mother is Algonquin from Outaouais. I grew up between France and Canada and because of this, I’ve always been fascinated by bi-cultural living. I am interested in tensions that can actually co-exist. I have appreciated the way you play with the notion that images tend to exist in continuum, residing somewhere in memory, whereas sound tends to evoke the present moment: to quote Jonas Mekas's words "when I am filming everything is determined by my memory, my past, so that this "direct" filmming becomes also a mode of reflection". In your work, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process? What is the role of memory in your work?
My work is most often rooted in things I know such as family stories, memory and observations. I work from a very visceral and instinctive place. My work will often start with a flash of an image or the spark of an idea. Visuals are often what drive my work. It’s like I see just one image and then start compositing around that first spark. That first flash must come from a place of memory and then the brain starts making its own connections. I often view the work as a puzzle that slowly reveals itself in front of me. I am always confident it will lead to interesting discoveries and that I’ll end up figuring out how to make it work. Another interesting project of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Portrait Of An Indigenous Woman, that can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/113858061. As most of your works, this piece is open to various interpretations: in particular, your exploration of indigenous identity allows you to capture from small gestures a peculiar beauty and communicates me a process of deconstruction and recontextualization both
talking about identities that collide and don’t mix. Sometimes differences separate us where really it should not. We should embrace
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
on a formal and on a semantic level. What is it specifically about indigenous identity, which fascinates you and makes you want to center your artistic style around it?
For me, Identity is an endless topic. It is all around us and often the most interesting thing in the world. My earlier work was narrated from a first person perspective and identity was at the center of the work. More recently, I’ve moved away from a personal specific identity obsession, but the work is still grounded in documentary foundations to evoke different realities. With Portrait of An Indigenous Woman, I wanted to portray the reality of being an Indigenous woman from various perspectives. Too often as indigenous woman, we are put in categories. I wanted to challenge these perceptions by letting a group of women speak for themselves themselves. The project started in December 2014 during a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. There I was surrounded by a fascinating group of young and talented indigenous women from Canada, the US and Sweden. It was so unlikely that we would all find ourselves in the same place at the same time that I felt a necessity to catalogue it. I wanted to catalogue us maybe for ourselves, but also for the rest of the world to see. We all come from different indigenous background, different walks of life, but we all breath and represent indigenous in our own right. This diversity was essential to the piece and allows for discussions around what it means to be an indigenous woman today. We can talk about mixicity, queerness, traditional versus urban lifestyle and responsibility as women in general. The video is very simple and the camera acts as an observatory eye onto someone’s personality. I wanted the approach to be as simple as possible to really let the characters express themselves. I thrive to create authentic representations of who we are as indigenous people. For me and many other indigenous people it is no longer a simplistic reality, there is now a multiplicity of worlds we walk between. We navigate between realities and this is essential to my practice.
Summer 2015
Cassie Packham and Nicole Kelly Westman in Portrait of an
Your exploration of the psychological nature of the collective imagery and the attempt to materialize the relationship
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
Indigenous Woman, video, 2014 (still) Š Caroline Monnet
between elements of the collective unconscious and life as individual provides the viewers of an Ariadne's Thread,
inviting them to challenge the common way we perceive not only the outside world, but our inner landscape.
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
Alison Bremner in Portrait of an Indigenous Woman, video, 2014 (still) Š Caroline Monnet
As Gerhard Richter once remarked, "my concern is never art, but always what art can be used for"...
Summer 2015
I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in,
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
Nature, especially of our inner Nature: what's your point about this? Yes, I agree with you. As artists, we tend to dig under the surface to bring some information and ideas out in the world. I am also interested in what art can do. I mean, I think this is why most artists do the work they do. It’s about leaving something behind that would energize people. Our job as artist and intellectuals is to be different from the common perceptions. We have to make our art as intelligent as possible to fight stupidity. I like this idea of revealing unexpected sides of human nature and constantly re-evaluating how we engage with the world around us. I think in general, my work is aimed at creating an emotion. I subtly work on the brain to make the audience response physically to the work. I never want to spoon-feed what the work is about. I’d rather assume the public is smart and will have their own personal interaction with the work. I am confortable with people making their own interpretation of the work. We have already examinated the way your work investigates about social issues from an identitarian aspect: in Roberta, that I have to admit is one of my favorite work of yours, you focus on the osmosis between social conformism and the intimate sphere: but rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations. The nature your investigation has reminded me of the idea behind Thomas Demand's works, when he stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". While conceiving Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative
so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015
Naim El Hajj
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Roberta, 2014 ŠSummer Davide Di2015 Saro
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
process could be disconnected from direct experience? I am a firm believer that I can only speak about the things I know. My own personal reality is always intrinsically weaved into my work. Personal experience is a stepping-stone in creating the work I do. Roberta is a fiction film, but it is also based on the memories I have of my grandmother when I used to spend time with her during the holidays. I wanted the main character (Roberta) to be beautiful, eccentric and likable. I remember thinking that my grandmother was the most amazing and exciting woman. Only later I realized her eccentricity was hiding something deeper. She was hurt and displaced. Memories also feed imagination in my opinion. The authenticity of the story comes from a direct experience, but the fiction behind it allows for further possibilities in storytelling. The film tells the story of Roberta who left her native reserve to follow her husband in a suburban area in hopes of a better life. There she finds herself alone, far from her family and friends, and turns to amphetamines to cure her boredom. I used humor in order to talk about a dramatic subject and to make fun of a conformist lifestyle. My character is an indigenous character, but any woman of that age could probably identify with her. This helps in braking conventions and stereotypes. By showing this reality, I believe I’ve created a new story in the world of indigenous cinema. Roberta is not a conventional fiction film and retains some of my esthetics and ways of telling a story seen in Gephyrophobia. It is heavy on visual esthetics and composition. Again, I used sound and visuals to work on the audience brain, suggesting rather than showing, in order to make people feel a certain emotion. It’s like I want people to be there with the character, be active observer rather than simply passive. I have been creating films that don’t quite fit in a conventional filmmaking tradition, between art and film, between fiction and experimental. Over your career you have exhibited internationally, showcasing your
Summer 2015
Caroline Monnet © Davide Di Saro
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Caroline Monnet
Roberta, 2014 ŠDavide Di Saro
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Caroline Monnet
ART Habens
work in several occasions. So before leaving this conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? I do not set up to create works thinking of my audience. This would be counter productive in my opinion because then the work comes from the wrong place. I respect and honor the process in making art. Once the work is completed, then it is really interesting to see how people react to the piece. I often find international crowds hungry to know more about indigenous esthetics. I don’t create work to educate audiences, but it’s nice when people have questions, comments and are surprised by the information in the works. On an international level (especially in Europe), I find myself being an advocate for Indigenous issues. In Canada, it can be the same with nonindigenous audiences, but it’s more a reminder that this is our common history. I’ve said this before, but for me, screening my films at ImagineNATIVE film + video festival in Toronto is always my most challenging screenings. This is where I screen the films for my friends, family and larger indigenous community. If the film is not accepted there, then I failed in the authenticity of my intentions. It is often easier to show a film to an audience filled with strangers than people close to you. The Black Case is the perfect example of this as it speaks of residential schools. I was nervous the first time I showed it in Toronto, but I’m glad people understood that co-director Daniel Watchorn and I were trying to honor someone’s story to the best of our abilities. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Caroline. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? Presently, I am artist in residence at the ARSENAL gallery of contemporary art in
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART ARTHabens Habens
Caroline Monnet
Unlikely Process; Installation view at Raw Gallery of Architecture and Design ©Jacqueline Young
Montréal. It’s a great space showcasing amazing artists. I feel very lucky to be there and have the chance to be part of it. I have been producing sculptures that revolve around personal materiality. These works are somewhere between architecture, installation and sculpture.
I hope my work can continue to sustain itself and evolve as much as it has been evolving in the last recent years. I am always on the look out for new opportunities and I hope I can start reaching bigger audiences with both my film and visual art practice.
On the filmmaking level, I am developing a few new projects, including my first feature film, in collaboration with Daniel Watchorn. I don’t want to talk too much about it as it is still in the very first stages of development, but promises to be challenging and exciting ride. Once again, I feel like this project will aim at challenging preconceptions of indigenous realities while trying to establish understanding between different communities.
Summer 2015
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
4 23 0 5
Unlikely Process; Installation view at Raw Gallery of Architecture and Design ŠJacqueline Young
Charlotte Seegers Seegers Immediate Response is a hybrid documentary film project standing at the crossroad between art and anthropology. It includes a 20 minutes film “Immediate response”, and a 5000 words essay “Sex and Self” unveiling the role of sexuality in the constitution of the self. The film portrays James’ disinhibited narrative together with footage documenting various aspects of London’s daily life. James is a student escort. He went into prostitution to finance his studies. Sharing his experience in his everyday London, he reveals striking insights about the role of sexuality in our individualized society, bringing the film to explore the quest of self-definition from an unusual angle. James’ view on immediate pleasure in our modern time is an eye opener: everything we want, we want it now no matter the means. The film takes a voice as the main subject guiding a poetic imagery to let the story emerge and cohere. The intimate narration is the result of conversations led for a year between James and the filmmaker. His narrative works as a mirror effect on the filmmaker’s own understanding of self-realization and sexuality. Hours of interviews are cut down into a script of 20 minutes and juxtaposed against the filmmaker’s observations around London. It composes an imagery lying in accordance and discordance with the text, sometimes emphasing the contrast between what is said and what is seen. With inspiration from the free camera of Dziga Vertov, documentaries of Gary Tarn, and Carolee Shneemann, the film gives rise to an unusual vision of everyday London life. Immediate Response comes with an anthropological essay. From a range of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, Sex and Self: an immediate Response draws James narrative into the relationship we create between sex and the “truth of our being” and sex and intimacy. James’ atypical profile reveals a sexuality engaged as a consumerist project. Caught between the desire to relate but the fear of enclosure it might bring, James finds an immediate response to his quest for self-definition throughout the use of sexuality. Blending ethnographic research together with everyday life processing imagery, Immediate Response attempts to capture a world of shifting values. A still from Immediate response
http://www.kaleidofilm.co.uk/
Summer 2015
021 4
Charlotte Seegers
ART Habens
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
A still from Immediate response
Summer 2015
03 4
An interview with
Charlotte Seegers
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator arthabens@mail.com
Hello Charlotte, and welcome to ART Habens: to start this interview, would you like to tell our readers something about your background? You have a solid formal training and hold an MA in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths University and a BA in anthropology from Bordeaux II, France. How have these experiences influenced your evolution as an artists and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
Hi Dario, thank you for inviting me to discuss my work. I think it is important to mention that I come from this solid anthropological background and decided to add the visual art into the discipline, not the other way around. I don’t really consider myself as an artist. I would rather say that an experimental approach in film allows me to go outside rigid canons of conventional filmmaking and conduct my ethnographic research in critical and creative way.
Charlotte Seegers
Since I discovered anthropology, I became passionate about this discipline for a particular aspect of it. What interested me the most, is that in revealing cultural aspects of ways of acting, thinking and feelings, anthropology “denormalises” the commonness, it subverts conventional ways of thinking. It is this “dislocating” effect that I am looking for when conducting my research. And I suppose that this quest for subversion and dislocation enables me to embrace a more artistic approach in the way I conceive and produce my work. My current life situation also influences my hybrid approach and especially the choice of my subjects. I come from France and came to London five years ago. The reality is that despite this MA, to make a living I am working as a waitress and invigilator in galleries, alternating with freelance researcher jobs for
art exhibition and video-maker from time to time. The people I meet and the life I lead influence the choice of my subjects and the way I conduct my work. I don’t see myself belonging to the academic or art world. Like many people I suppose, I consider myself inbetween these social, professional and cultural circles - and I use it. I like to play in the interstices, put them in relation, juxtapose, coordinate, dis-coordinate them, showing other point of references. Multidisciplinarity is a crucial feature of your work, that reveals an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between art and anthropology: before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
something about your process and set up for producing your works? In particular, have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
reach a wider audience, outside the academic word. Writing is an interesting medium, but I find more suitable the complexity of the visual: playing with expectations behind images and the unexpected structures of the society.
In my case, I suppose the symbiosis is obvious. I have an abstract and intellectual background and I feel the need to find a practical tool and a medium to conduct and communicate my research. Without it, I feel that my research isn’t complete and can’t
In my practice, multidisciplinarity is inherent to the process of the making itself. Dealing with human experience and the making of films, I am inevitably dealing with different types of knowledge to express some concepts. But I also believe that art and
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Charlotte Seegers
ART Habens
onetwo, from the series inside/out
social sciences complement each other. Diversity, fusion of approaches and point of views, is fundamental and fruitful to innovate and make us attentive to the intricacy and complexity of one’s reality. For me, art resolves the ethical and political concerns of anthropology . It gives the tools to develop a well informed and creative research, taking into account the aesthetic, experience of human life but also anthropology’s ability to subvert.
To say a few words about the process of my work, I would say that I use ethnographic fieldwork to situate my inquiry; often using singular stories, unheard voices and drawing them in the structural world we inhabit. For the choice of the aesthetic and the type of language I want to use, there is no clear methodology. I think about representational issues, the relationship between the subject and my understanding, trying to grasp what I want to subvert, almost like attempting to portray the actual experience of the
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
ethnography itself. For Immediate Response, I was much influenced by the descriptive and poetic aesthetic of Gary Tarn, Carol Sheeman with Fuses, and the hyperrealist and antiillusionist aesthetic of Chantal Akerman’s films - I don’t hesitate to take examples from diverse disciplines, film genres, for me they are all worth getting inspired from.
Summer 2015
I really enjoy the research phase of the work but I am aware of this huge gap between theory and practice, all of your thoughts can be reformulated in the making, so better not to be stuck in this phase of the process. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from your Immediate response, an interesting work that our
4 23 0 7
Charlotte Seegers
ART Habens
Immediate response was first a project about student prostitution; it became more orientated towards sexual addiction at the end. My Inspiration came from a lucky meeting I suppose. I was interested, and I am still are, about taboo and shame around sexuality. I was a student at the time, working as a waitress and keeping in mind what my teacher once said: “Why are you working of the side? Here people don’t work”. Student prostitution was everywhere in magazines, films, drama for mainstream media. Obviously the economical issue probed by them seemed to me a bit naïve, I was curious to know what was behind that, so I started to interview independent student escorts in London, just to find out who they were. What I found interesting is that some students were proud of being sex workers and of belonging to the Sex Worker Open University with badges and all of that. I thought that, it might represent a glimpse of feminist revolution, new values, new relationships models and innovative ideas. I led few interviews but I didn’t manage to grasp them fully. All seemed too constructed, not genuine at all. But, to be honest, I didn’t try too hard to get to know them because I had met the protagonist of my film already, a man. I hadn’t even thought about a man at first. I was soon fascinated by his honesty, his stories and the way he himself did a retrospective on them. I was also fascinated by his dual character, student, in a relationship for years, straight and male prostitute. Sometimes he saw me as his counselor but most of the time he attempted to destabilise me, I think, with graphic and exciting stories, trying sometimes to convince me to work with him, while keeping a reserved attitude somehow. This situation made me think about a film I had watched months before, which had inspired me I think, Elles, from the Polish
readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit https://vimeo.com/user23341191 in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production... In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
21 08 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
director Małgorzata Szumowska. This film is a fiction drama about student prostitution in Paris; the lens is progressively turned toward the first character of the story, Juliette Binoche, who plays a feminist journalist. She first appears as a coherent and confident woman, intelligent, independent, following a healthy diet, working from home in her apartment with balcony in Paris. But soon she encounters these two student escorts. They begin to tell their stories, explain their point of views, and in doing so they challenge her own understanding of sexuality. She soon realizes that she is the one trapped in her own conventional, sexist and bourgeois sexual norms. I found this film great, well done, and I really enjoyed this mirror effect that you also get in ethnography. I thought it was a clever way to pass on this dislocating effect to the audience. I remember James asking me at the end of each interview: “Why you don’t do it? Is it wrong?” I decided to make a film about our dialogues and especially the part I could relate the most due to my personal experience: sex and self realization. Our conversations led me in this direction: the relationship we create between sex and self in our consumerist and individualist society. A society which stresses us to maximize our chance of self realization, where settlement and failure is not an option, and where desires need to be fulfilled immediately, almost before we happen to know them. James alludes to this anxiety and the immediate character of his pursuit. I thought that it was a great issue I myself experience combining psychological, social, cultural issues along with physical needs and pleasures. Filling holes in his self-identity with the gratification he would get from sex: a good and tangible metaphor.
not portraying his face was the key of my film, I didn’t want people to exteriorize him: to give him a face, a shape, even a name, but I wanted them to identify to him, like I did. So I took the challenge.
I wanted to tell his story but I couldn’t portray his face to keep his anonymity. My teachers told me to leave it to a radio program, but I wanted to turn this obstacle into its advantage. I thought that actually
Summer 2015
When I first happened to get to know Immediate response I tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. But
09
Charlotte Seegers
I soon realized that I had to fit into the visual rhythm suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its content: in your videos, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?
ART Habens
Well, I didn’t really think about it when I made it but I think it is systematic, because of the type of films I get my inspiration from and probably because of my scientific background. I prefer to open the viewer to an issue rather than give him a univocal understanding of it, and I appreciate films featuring complex and
21 10 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
multifaceted characters with conflicting motivation and internal conflicts. We all are full of contradictions and I like the viewer to identify with the character, even if such character first appears alien to him. There is a reason behind the idea of juxtaposing collective imagery and James narrative- to emphasize the identification and let the
Summer 2015
viewer enter in direct relation with him, to make his own sense of it. While many contemporary artists as Michael Light and Edward Burtynsky use to convey in an explicit way sociopolitical messages in their works, you seem to maintain a more neutral, almost scientific approach: rather, and you seem to invite
11
Charlotte Seegers
ART Habens
defining context for our lives and experience... do you agree with this analysys? Moreover, what could be in your opinon the role that Art could play in sociopolitical questions?
Thank you, I am very happy with this reception of my work. This is what I attempted to do I suppose, but I wouldn’t say that my work is neutral. I am proposing to look at an issue through a particular spectrum; an issue embedded in one, amongst many, self-defining contexts. I understand why you say a “neutral” and “scientific approach”. I try to be as “objective” as possible because I find a work more interesting when it leaves room for the viewers to make their own interpretations. But my work is totally subjective. I would say, it is more “honest” than neutral (it is the word used by the protagonist of my film after watching it). “Honest” when I try, as you said, to share my experience of the ethnographic process embedded in our own social and cultural frameworks which define him, me and us. As regards art and sociopolitical questions, I have never really been comfortable with activism because of the nihilist deconstructive turn of the discipline, I suppose. But in the actual social and political context, I try to move away from this attitude because I think we need to be engaged more than ever. Here art can help to bring life to our curiosity and make us attentive to some issues, give other point of references. Some choose to convey an explicit sociopolitical message, some use sensationalist strategy. To my personal taste, I don’t think a sensationalist language is that much effective. On the contrary, it dismisses the ability of the viewers to make their own investigations, their self-critiques, which nowadays is indispensable in our current socio-political environment. We need to regain our ability to make our own mind. Art is also a good way to highlight an issue when the access is restricted because of
the viewers to a personal investigation about the themes you touch on. Maybe that the following assumption is stretching the point a little bit, but I think that Immediate response reveals the connection between different cultural spheres which describes such a real-time aesthetic ethnography: you seem to be drawn to the structured worlds we inhabit and how they produce a self-
21 1 42
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
power relations and ideologies and there is a certain pleasure at playing around “the rules of constraining places” (as said De-Certeau) like when I turned the anonymity obstacle into its advantage in Immediate Response. Your hybrid approach is intrinsically connected to the chance of creating an area of intellectual interplay with the viewers, that are urged to evolve from the condition of a merely passive audience. In particular, when unveiling the role of sexuality in the constitution of the self, your work has reminded me of the ideas behind Thomas Demand's works, when he stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". While conceiving Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a
Summer 2015
I guess it could but it would miss out the point. In reality things are imparted with meaning by perception, touch, looking and feelings. It can be easier sometimes, especially here when talking about sex, to neutralize the affect in comprehensible signs, to distance oneself from the burden of emotion. The sensory disturbs, unsettles and confuses us, but when life addresses its materiality, its presence why should we limit ourselves to
13
Charlotte Seegers
ART Habens
a question on the role of the viewers' viewpoint, forcing us to going beyond the common way we perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... I'm personally convinced that some information are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the society we inhabit, so we need to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
explanatory and “anaesthetic” discourses? Also art is made by an artist: an artist with his social and cultural background, his personal and sensorial experiences of life and the subject he explores. These underlayers are manifest in diverse degrees in any artist’s work. For my case, it is even more, personal experience is actually fundamental because anthropology plays with this relation between the self and the other. By immersion, when you conduct your research, you become a performer, an actor in the concept you explores. Personal and direct experience become part of the process of creating itself.
This question makes me think about Detournement strategies and surrealist attempts to disrupt inscribed images. I believe, like you, that there are encrypted messages, and some artists find a certain pleasure at reversing and displacing them. But when you say, “revealing an inner nature”, I am skeptical about it. I think it would be too ambitious to attempt to
Your aesthetic style is heavily influenced by a straight, realistic approach and I have appreciated the way you question the ephemeral nature of perception that raises
21 14 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
decipher “our inner nature”, to distill some essential elements of truth. I don’t think we have the tools and abilities to do that. However, what an artist can do, one of his roles if he wishesso , is probably to overthrow our aesthetic and cultural representations, trying to get to this fundamental questions, which is: how is reality constructed, rather than transparently representing it; asking ourselves, how are we made?; how are we becoming who we are? Which gaze subjects us? I guess this vision of art is strongly influenced by my readings about the relationship between surrealism and ethnography. Art and anthropology here had this common role of disenchanting, demystifying our artificial and constructed collective imaginary: playing with perceptions and showing how exotic our constitution of reality is. Before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
Yes, it does influences my decision-making process. It is actually very difficult for me to start a creative process without having clues about the audience. I think about the audience while producing and conducting my work. For example, Immediate Response was made at university and I had a clear vision of what I wanted to subvert, the conventional categorizations I wanted to address: the academic world and the gap between theory and practice, rigid canons of documentary films, but also British selective university system, western obsession with self realization, the word “ambition”, this amalgam between sex and relationship, prostitution and its stereotypes of “girls in
Summer 2015
high heals and fish nets diving into cars”,... I had many things in mind while doing it. Addressing to someone or something actually drives my creative process. Speaking about the reception of my film, It’s great that my film has been awarded at Goldsmiths University but knowing the subject, its sort of ironic as well. I find that interesting.
15
Charlotte Seegers
ART Habens
anthropologists sharing similar views. I am also doing my best to make a living as a video-maker and as a researcher for art exhibitions giving story-lines and contents for exhibitions.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts, Charlotte. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
What I would like to do now is to develop my hybrid filmmaking practice. I have much to learn in order to combine art and
At the moment I am working on a collective film (Kaleido film collective) gathering visual
21 16 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Charlotte Seegers
anthropology. I am now thinking about diverse topics with my film collective, which make sense to us in our everyday. € I am also
Summer 2015
looking for a film project in Morocco. Also, I come from this anthropological background and I think it is very present in
13
Charlotte Seegers
the way I conceive and produce my work. I want to work in collaboration with visuals artists and filmmakers to explore wider and
ART Habens
innovative possibilities to communicate and conduct my research. €I think there is a lot to do here and huge space for creativity.
21 14 4
Summer 2015
Gabriella Sonabend Sonabend I am a story-teller, whose work is concerned entirely with people and the way they relate to one another and see the world. I am interested in the small gestures that make up ordinary lives as well as the great archetypal themes, which resonates throughout literature and art as long as history can remember. I search for magic in the mundane and spectacle in the quotidian, my work seeks to expose the peculiar beauties of the world, whilst frequently taking on a social role and seeking to engage with the political. My fascination with stories has taken me across the world to work in Israel, India, Peru, Colombia, and Italy but it has also taken me into the heart of my own home city to investigate the cracks and corners of London. In London I have followed the lives of house clearers, recycling and waste management workers, hoarders, DIY fanatics, new immigrants and many more people with fascinating interior lives, searching for stories and trying to better understand the infinite collage, which makes up our world. In India I made a documentary about road workers, in South America I spent 6 months researching mythologies, folklore and the traumatic history of Colombia working alongside sculptor (Sol Bailey Barker) to write new myths, which integrate views of contemporary society with the old. My work is an investigation, I am a watcher, a listener and a recorder, who lives somewhere between fiction and fact. My practice involves interviewing, filming and finding ways of presenting new stories to the public through video and writing. I often work in collaboration with other artists, musicians and designers and enjoy challenging my practice through concept and medium.
Summer 2015
Thirty Over Ten video still
021 4
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
untitled 2013 collage
Nine Tales of Portico screening in Italy Summer 2015
03 4
An interview with
Gabriella Gabriella Sonabend
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator with the collaboration of Catherine M. Morris arthabens@mail.com
Ranging from filmmaking to painting, Gabriella Sonabend's work accomplishes the difficult task of providing the viewers of an Ariadne's thread that unveils the hidden but ubiquitous relationships between perceptual dimension and the realm of memory. Her evocative storytelling invites us to investigate about the relation between reality and the way we perceive it and shows a suggestive attempt to capture the ephemeral of experience, materializing it into a coherent unity. One of the most convincing aspect of Sonabend's practice is the way she creates an area of intellectual interplay between perception and memory, that invites the viewers to explore unstability in the contemporary age. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production. Hello Gabriella and welcome to ART Habens: a crucial feature of your work is an incessant search for an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints, which you convey into a coherent unity. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for producing your works? In particular, have you ever happened to realize that such synergy is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
Gabriella Sonabend
My work is a direct response to the complex environments, which I am drawn to explore. These are always places where a notion of ‘reality’ and ‘history’ are fractured and ambiguous truths begin to reveal. Although my work may ultimately focus on the viewpoint of one or a small number of individuals, in terms of process it begins with a thorough investigation of place and its surrounding literature. Many works begin with walking, through cities, landscapes or individual dwellings. I must establish a physical and sensory connection to an environment before I begin to start asking questions or scratching into a surface. Conversation is crucial; I find individuals who can act as guides, facilitators or even adversaries. Each work begins with a question answered by other questions
continuously until an artistic solution is revealed. It is a dialectic process, which is as much about symbiosis as it is about contradiction. I use filming, sound recording, writing and painting as a way of collating information and forming an aesthetic for a work. As the work develops it becomes clear, which medium is most appropriate for expressing the idea. The idea always comes first and the medium is chosen to fit, never the other way around. You have a solid formal training: you graduated from the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art with a first class degree and you had an experience of study at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design : how did formal
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
training impact on your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does it inform the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
The Slade was a rigorous environment where no student escaped criticism and there was a need for constant evaluation of one’s practice. It taught a very particular type of discipline and a way of endlessly challenging process and concepts. The Bezalel was a very different environment; there people created more socially engaged works and dialogue felt more political and socially aware. One tutor Adina Baron was particularly influential. Adina is a performance artist whose sensitivity to environment and use of the body inspired a new way of thinking about language and gestures within my work. Whilst at the Slade I studied Tibetan Buddhism for a year at SOAS and this taught me a more academic discipline and developed my interest in ethnography. I think a combination of these studies has had a strong impact on my evolution as an artist leading me to develop a cross disciplinary practice. What I feel has informed my work more than anything is traveling and living in a number of extremely varied environments. My work has taken me to live in Varanasi (India), Colombia, Peru, Israel, Italy and France. In each country I have met people who have shared unique insights into their lives and history. For example in Varanasi I met Constance Breton an artist, minister and doctor who had lived in Varanasi for 15 years giving free medical care to the ‘untouchable’ peoples. Constance guided me into the heart of the cities issues revealing insights normally restricted from foreign eyes. Thirty Over Ten video still
Living in artist residencies I engaged in a multinational art dialogue with artists such as Phyllis Galembo (who with many years of experience taught me a lot about the practical aspects of creating logistically complicated and sometimes dangerous works) and Ivan Castillo (a Colombian artist who provided a very informative insight into his country and its ongoing conflict).
an interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. You have filmed it in Varanasi, India, when the local government ordered the population of one main road to move their homes back off the roads. What mostly appeals to me of this work is the way you blend a documentary gaze on social
I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from Thirty Over Ten,
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
onetwo, from the series inside/out
and economic marginality with the great dignity that seem to spring from the personal stories you have captured: I find truly engaging the way you subvert our perceptual parameters and I have to confess that it suddenly forced me to relate myself to your works in a different way. What is the role of memory in your process? And in
particular, do you try to achieve a faithful visual translation of the feelings you receive?
Memory is always an interesting subject and something that often sits at the centre of my works. In memory I find merging of facts, emotional projections, optimistic re-writing of history, pessimistic notions of personal misfortune. The recollections of memory allow
21 06 4
Summer 2015
Safe House image by Jeremy Herbert ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
From "Gaol" 2013 Photography
Thirty Over Ten video still
me to explore the complexity of personal realities. Personal stories become like fables and truth disappears. What remains is a sign of what the storyteller wishes to be truthful. It is this sign that I want to present, explore and translate.
Ten’ for example begins ‘You know, to me Banares (Varanasi) is like a mirror, and what is inside me I see in that mirror’ inviting the viewer from the beginning to understand that the visual aspects of the work are not only a social commentary but also the interior reflection of one individual. His recollections and emotions allow us to navigate the crumbling labyrinthine
My works seek to be truthful if not at least faithful to those that they focus on. ‘Thirty Over
Summer 2015
4 23 0 7
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
artists to explore their own connection to memory and past through the exploration of a deceased stranger’s life. I set two rules for the exhibition: the first was that each artist had to chose a room in which to place a work or build an installation. The second was that each artist was only allowed to use materials found inside the house. The artists were allowed to look through every possession; there were no restrictions on what they could see. The exhibition was fascinating, each artist found something they personally related to within the house and created works, which not only tenderly remembered my grandfather but also spoke of their own memories, insights and feelings connected to mortality. This exhibition had a huge impact on my practice and led to traveling to India to explore notions of mortality and memory in Varanasi and later to ‘Safe House’ a collaboration with set-designer Jeremy Herbert at the Young Vic Theatre. ‘Safe House’ was an immersive theatre installation, a four roomed house constructed inside a theatre where each room represented a different archetypal space. In each room there was a place to sit and an audio narrative played through speakers, I wrote four narratives, which spoke of people with intense and secretive, interior worlds. Only 3 people were allowed to enter the ‘Safe House’ at any time so each person experienced each room on their own and had the freedom to choose another door to enter. This installation was almost like a memory house, where people were invited for a short while to disappear into the recollections of others. The nature your investigation about the liminal area in which between fiction and fact find an unexpected convergence has reminded me of the idea behind Thomas Demand's works, when he stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". While conceiving Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely
city, which the camera spans. ‘Thirty Over Ten’ is one man’s truth but in its very nature it is also a manipulation and subversion of this truth, visually translated through the camera lens. In 2012 after the death of my late grandfather I invited 8 artists into his home to create works that responded to the building, its contents and what remained of the man who inhabited it. ‘In The Way of Being’ was an invitation for other
21 08 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
Safe House image by Jeremy Herbert
Summer 2015
09
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Personal experience is crucial to my own creative process. Each of my works begins with a visceral reaction to an environment. I explore in both an academic and a sensory way, which can often feel very physical and sometimes even performative. Although my presence within my work is not always literal or visible and I often strive to conceal my own voice and speak through others it is my direct experience that informs my viewpoint. This experience can be nuanced and reduced to minutia, sometimes it relates to a tiny detail or fleeting feeling I want to convey and sometimes it is vast and complex relating to socio-political frustrations and confusion. I am completely involved with my work and the research that goes into it pervades my daily life. When I am making work about a place I read its corresponding authors and history but read knowledge is no substitute for existing within an environment. Another interesting project of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Nine Tales of Portico, that you have produced during your artist's residence in Italy. As most of your works, this piece is open to various interpretations: in particular, the effective combination between references to classic literature and stories from ordinary life and the way you extract from small gestures a peculiar beauty communicates me a process of deconstruction, recontextualization and assemblage both on a semantic and on a formal aspect. What is it specifically about deconstruction, which fascinates you and makes you want to center your artistic style around it?
I would not say that I necessary centre my style on deconstruction. Deconstruction is simply a tool for isolating elements of an immensely complex tapestry and trying to locate the significance of an individual moment. It is a way of cutting through the layers of faรงade and insincerity, the slogans and signs, which distract us from the truth of an experience. If I can isolate a profound and individual moment, or rather, if I can find clarity in
21 10 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
something seemingly chaotic and present that to an audience in a way that is effective and requires no further explanation, then I have achieved what I am aiming for. In other words I deconstruct because I am hoping to discover and relate truth. ‘Nine Tales of Portico’ was a process of deconstruction, re-writing fables and appropriating fragments of half-remembered stories in order to reconstruct a series of folklore to give back to the town of Portico. The affect of the piece was immediate. The people of Portico claimed the stories as if they were factual and one elderly woman asked ‘how did you find out the long lost tale of the witches?’ to, which I smiled and did not mention fiction. In other works for example ‘Regis Road’ (a video piece about three men working in a recycling and waste management centre) and ‘Flask Walk’ (a video about house clearers) deconstruction was a means of inviting the viewer into a perspective they would not normally discover. Through the eyes of the recycling workers we discover the peculiar beauty of refuse and tenderness towards the discarded. Through the words of the house clearers and the images of their found objects we discover the custodians who hold the secrets of objects and entrust them to others. I do believe that interdisciplinary collaboration as the one that you have established with Sol Bailey Barker for From Myth to Earth is today an ever growing force in Art and that that most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, the artist Peter Tabor once said that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists?
Nine Tales of Portico video still
working alone allows them to indulge. When an artist collaborates that interior world is called into question and met by another equally strong contradictory force, which arrives with its own personal truth. These forces battle until they reach a conclusion, which can vary between a new truth greater than the sum of its parts or an abject failure, which destroys the existence of all.
In my experience collaboration can be either a nurturing or a destructive process. Sometimes it feels symbiotic and working with another artist is a clear journey to realize a shared vision but sometimes it is more of a battle and a process of discovering what can be created when artists fight to alter and challenge each other’s perspective. Each artist has their own interior world, which
Summer 2015
11
Gabriella Sonabend
Working with Sol Bailey Barker was a very nurturing process and one of discovering through journeying and researching together. From the beginning of our project we had a clear idea of the language and aesthetic we wanted to use and people and places we wanted to engage with. It was a process of encouraging each other to hone our crafts and best articulate our responses to surrounding
ART Habens
environments. Despite the nurturing nature of our process working with Sol was particularly challenging because during our period of research in Colombia we strictly defined the terms of our collaboration. Sol created physical works, which responded to the landscapes we traveled across and the stories and histories we discovered on the way. I restricted myself to writing (creating short
21 1 42
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Š Sol Bailey Barker
Gabriella Sonabend
http://www.solbaileybarker.com/
Sandra Hunter
ART Habens
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
Š Sol Bailey Barker http://www.solbaileybarker.com/
stories that correspond to Sol’s sculptures) and did not capture any video footage. This was a very frustrating limitation; I did not feel I could articulate my thoughts with enough knowledge or clarity. Without my camera I felt disabled and was faced difficult questions: Was what I was
Summer 2015
writing true? Did I have a right to be commenting? I found myself feeling jealous of Sol who had the clarity of visual language to express his own response to our journey. Since returning from
15
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
collaboration continues. One of the interesting and unexpected results of this project was that it made me turn back to painting. As I struggled to tell the right stories I found myself capturing a feeling on canvas, which I could not convey in words. Storytelling reconnected me with painting. This was an unplanned byproduct of our collaboration. Another result of this project is a new connection with two Colombian artists who have been guides throughout this project and are in frequent communication via Skype. Speaking to these people has opened a new doorway and led to my next upcoming work, a collaborative video project between England and Colombia assembled over the Internet. Personally collaborate because I seek to be continuously challenged, I want to learn from other people’s practices and ideas and never allow my practice to stagnate. Your exploration of the psychological nature of the collective imagery and the attempt to materialise the relationship between elements of the collective unconscious and life as individual provides the viewers of an Ariadne's Thread, inviting them to challenge the common way we perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension: as Gerhard Richter once remarked, "my concern is never art, but always what art can be used for"... I'm sort of convinced that some information & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature: what's your point about this?
I would definitely agree that information and ideas are encrypted. I often like to think of myself as a detective who is trawling through the clues of everyday life trying to discover their true significance. We live in a world where we are so over-saturated with imagery and ideas. Advertisement follows us everywhere we go, our cities are filled with signs and slogans that tell us what is ‘normal’ these endless images seek to define our reality through a consumerist lens but in truth they are mostly meaningless layers
Colombia and spending six months researching further into its history and politics we are currently working to create a book of Sol's sculpture in situ in Colombia beside my stories, two of which will be featured in the Nomadic Press Annual Journal this winter. The
21 16 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
Diego's Sister, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
of façade. It is hard to look at life honestly and to not be thrown off track by what claims to be ‘new’ and desirable. It is so easy to lose sight of simple notions of wellbeing and integrity when we are constantly being made to feel we need more and more. As an artist I feel a personal
Summer 2015
responsible to say things that are meaningful and find ways of inviting people into reexamining the worlds they accept as normal. Another interesting project from your multidisciplinary production that I would like to mention is Back in the Jungle, a series of 13
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
At the end of the day, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
paintings in which you capture epiphanic moments of life in the Amazon jungle. I would dwell on a particular aspect: you seem to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. In this sense, I daresay that the semantic juxtaposition between sign and matter that marks out your art, allows you to go beyond any dichotomy between Tradition and Contemporariness, as in the interesting Inextricable, establishing a stimulating osmosis between materials from contingent era and an absolute perception of the images and the symbols you convey on your canvas: do you recognize any contrast between Tradition and Contemporariness?
non-tropical norms. In the jungle the words ‘tradition’ and ‘contemporariness’ are irrelevant as time does not feel linear. There the lack of seasons, the constant sunshine and the fact that everything is always growing, erodes a sense of change, so that when you encounter something in the jungle it feels context-less, almost like a vision. In the heart of the jungle history does not appear to exist in the same way and often the spread of deforestation can feel like the only true marker of passing time. The faces of the jungle tell a different story, they carry a complex history of relentless daily life, generations of enslavement to rubber barrens, fading indigenous traditions and much more. While exhibiting a captivating vibrancy, the works from Back in the Jungle sometimes seem to reject an explicit
Back in the Jungle depicts a very specific world where the rhythms of time and place are alien to 21 14 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gabriella Sonabend
Storyteller, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
recognize the desire to enable us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?
explanatory strategy: rather, you seem to offer to the viewer a key to find personal interpretations to the concepts you communicate through your works: this quality marks out a considerable part of your production in which, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can
Spring 2015
I would definitely that I ‘reject an explicit explanatory strategy’. It is very important to me
13
Gabriella Sonabend
ART Habens
work is made for or about a specific place I want it to be understood in that context. Sometimes that means working with a translator or creating works that communicate visually or through action. In ‘Nine Tales of Portico’ it was necessary to make the work in both English and Italian as it was being created for the direct benefit of the people of Portico Di Romagna. That piece was in many ways a gift to a community and has helped to reinvigorated tourism in a place, which is unspoiled by contemporary culture. ‘Thirty Over Ten’ was narrated in English and is not yet subtitled but will be subtitled in Spanish soon after requests from a number of interested people. I would also like to create a version with Hindi subtitles and bring the work to an Indian audience. ‘Thirty Over Ten’ will be shown in the Art Nova award exhibition in Beijing this summer. I am looking forward to seeing the reception of an Indian video, narrated in English, awarded in Italy and shown in China.
Voto Waldo, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
that my audience has the space to interpret my works. If a work is successful then somehow it has its own life force and can morph to reveal different solutions to each viewer. Sometimes the process of conveying this is incredibly systematic and I can agonize over a detail, trying to work out whether or not it will enhance or undermine the clarity or ambiguity of a work. Other times it is entirely intuitive and a work guides itself to its own solution, which ultimately depends on the reaction of the viewer.
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Gabriella. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Thank you for your interesting questions! At the moment I am still painting and working on the Back in the Jungle series, which I hope to exhibit in September. As I mentioned earlier I am beginning to work with two Colombian artists and am currently in the process of defining the terms of our collaborations. Each work I create always seems to lead to the next, the evolution of my work is a very natural process, pulled by the people I meet and the stories I hear. I will continue to make socially engaged works and hope to have many more opportunities to work with different communities across the world.
Over your career you have exhibited internationally, showcasing your work in several occasions. So before leaving this conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?
All of my new projects are posted on my website www.gabriellasonabend.com and I am interested in responding to specific places and communities if people wish to collaborate.
My works are all created with consideration of their audience. As I am trying to convey specific messages and ideas it is important that they are related with clarity. I aim to make works that are accessible and do not necessarily need prior knowledge to understand but lead people to further questioning. As for use of language this is always important when working abroad. If a
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator with the collaboration of Catherine M. Morris arthabens@mail.com
21 14 4
Spring 2015
Tabassom Habibzadeh Habibzadeh “Semiotics Of a Model” is a film about body image and the beauty standards of these days. Little girls grow up. They read fashion magazines. They watch movies of famous stars. They follow super models Instagrams, They adore their idols, then suddenly they find out that they are not skinny, tall and blonde and their clothes seem so cheap, because they shop from a local boutique, not a luxury brand. They are imperfect. They start thinking that the only way to get rid of their misfortunes is “Modeling”. They don’t eat, they don’t study, they lose their communications. They just obey the fashion rules, so they start killing themselves. It’s officially say hello to “Anorexia”. These are from a small part of my thoughts about women and this film is my first feature short which I could show one of my concerns with a cinematic language. I chose a classic typical modeling’s story, something like a wellknown tale about slim models. I wanted to make an experimental-fiction film, this simple story was enough for my type of work because I didn't want my viewer to be distracted by both the story and the form. I wanted to follow my favorite cinema, a fiction film with experimental attitudes. Not just telling a story in a common way nor an absolute experimental style. I prefer a combination, at least for my work. I have some issues that they always have ruled my life. Some of them are related to me and some of them are from the people that I’ve lived with. Some issues stick in my memory and they've changed my whole destiny and personality and since I’m a woman, so they are all very feminine, a femininity of my own definition, which can be considered very personal. They've made me a character so I'm going to live the rest of my life for telling them.
A still from Semiotic of A Model
Tabassom Habibzadeh
Summer 2015
021 4
Tabassom Habibzadeh
ART Habens
video, 2013
Fame, Luxury, Elegance... Are those the things that a model reaches?
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 Summer 2015
Tabassom Habibzadeh
03 4
Tabassom Hab
An interview with An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
Drawing inspiration from the well-known “Semiotics of a kitchen” by Martha Rosler, Tabassom Habibzadeh carries out an insightful investigation about the pervading influence of beatuy standards in contemporary age. Through a straight approach, she urges the viewers to question the prefabricated dogmas that pervades modern societies. One of the most convincing aspect of Habibzadeh's practice is the way her refined juxtaposition creates a vivid intellectual interplay that urges us to explore the boundaries of identity in the contemporary world: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production. Hello Tabassom and a warm welcome to ART Habens: to start this interview, would you like to tell our readers something about your background? How did you get started in experimental filmmaking? And in particular, how do your studies in Filmmaking at the filmmaking at Soore Art University inform the way you currently conceive your works?
Tabassom Habibzadeh
Hello to ART Habens staff and readers, It’s such a pleasure for me to be a part of this edition. If I’d like to talk about my background, it goes back to my childhood. I’ve started with writing. When I was an elementary school, I used to write short stories for children magazines but things changed and when I got older, I’ve become interested in filmmaking, so I decided to learn cinema in an academic way.
schools in Tehran, I had no choice. By the way, I don’t belong to the school that I’ve studied and my interest to experimental cinema goes back to watching the films of different new waves and a friend who familiarized me with this type of cinema and now we work together and we have co-projects.
I started my studies at Soore Art University and I chose film-editing as my major and It’s going to be finished. The university that I go is really not a good place to study cinema. We pass very basic amateur courses and it’s not even equipped by technical cinematic equipment but since there is just two film
Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from Semiotics of a Model an extremely interesting film that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest our readers to visit directly https://vimeo.com/126438020 in order to get
04 4
Summer 2015
A still from Semiotic of A Model
ART Habens
Tabassom Habibzadeh
a wider idea of it. As you have remarked once, the first idea of this film has taken from the well-known video art piece entitled “Semiotics of a kitchen” by Martha Rosler. Would you tell us something about the genesis of this stimulating work? What was your initial inspiration?
As you mentioned the first idea has taken from Martha Rosler’s “Semiotics Of The Kitchen”. She has made this video in 1975, the period of commercializing women in the kitchens as happy housewives like they are in their original position. I thought I could make a short film about an important pressure of nowadays on women based on this video. I have always thought if kitchen was the yesterday’s prison of women and the warder was their husbands, today’s prison is fashion and media and the heads of their companies are new warders. The society says women can take serious responsibilities, but the media says if you don’t have media based beauties you are not even a female, so taking a social position seems to be so far but they have a new suggestion for every women: being skinny and glamorous, then you can have it all. I chose the modeling thing, because I think it’s a very big deal now. Most women, especially young girls, want to be a model and they act like them. Each place seems like a runway for them, they walk it as they obey media’s rules. And I believe the role of women as beautiful loyal housewives has never lost, but it became worse. For example, I live in Iran and I see young beautiful housewives in advertisements like 1950’s American advertising style. So like the past, we have a woman and a kitchen and the only different thing is the new standards of beauty and fashion. So I thought I can’t change the location of Rosler’s video, but instead of an ordinary woman, I should replace it with a girl model with housewife custome.
A still from Semiotic of A Model
nowadays Art could play an important role not only in debunking such constructed truth, but also in making people more aware of contemporary condition? Moreover, do you think that artists and filmmakers could play a social role in the contemporary age?
Your insightful investigation about beauty standards develops an effective social criticism not only about the stereotypized idea of female beauty itself, but also about the way modern societies impose prefabricated dogmas: do you think that
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Tabassom Habibzadeh
The answer would be yes or no. It’s obvious that every artist comes from the society .Not all of them wants to play a social role in their works, but every artist tries to show her/his concerns or just a simple concept, anyway. I think there is always an awareness in every concern, so this can be effective.
ART Habens
But there is an important thing. The efficacy of contemporary art depends on external factors like Marketing. Media and marketing make the needs and wants, so people is under the influence of them. Art often debunks but mass media owns the market. it decides about the
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tabassom Habibzadeh
A still from Semiotic of A Model
translation of the issues that pervades the reality you inhabit in. While conceiving Art could be considered a purely abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the ephemeral nature of the concepts you capture. So I would take this occasion to ask
influences and with this condition, pop culture has more chance to be the winner. So I’m saying it’s not a choice of the creators of artworks, It will be done by something else. I like the way your careful approach offers a rigorous but at the same time lively visual
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Tabassom Habibzadeh
ART Habens
for my work, hasn’t come from my country. We don’t have a real modeling agency or fashion industry like the others have. So I’ve never seen a runway show or even a real model, I mean as physical and concrete experience. But I’ve started watching “Fashion TV” since I was 12-13 years old. Soon I had become a fashion addict. When I became older, I figured out something is wrong with these shows. I became more curious. It made me to know more, to discover every aspect of it. This is my type of personal experience for making this film. Involvement in an issue is something inseparable for an artist, because it shows enthusiasm. I think someone can have a lot of information about a subject, but it’s not enough for presenting an artwork, that work can’t go further than a research. Your cinematography is marked by the choice of rarefied spaces and courageous shot composition as well: you frame your subject allowing the viewer to catch details he normally couldn't see from the seat of the audience. How did you develop your shooting style?
I started my script with the kitchen scene, then I added other parts. But actually it was not a script, It was more like a play. I wrote the narrations with a few short phrases to explain the scene. So it was the narrations and scene design, almost nothing as guidance for my actress. I tried to create the sense of the scenes according to narrations with using minimum amount of accessories. The accessories aren’t representing the reality and they are some chosen pieces from it. I was very impressed by Chantal Akerman’s “I, You, He, She” and it helped me with every aspect of my work, especially with narrations and cinematography. The subject matter of every shot of her films is a woman, So I tried to make a space as a combination of my impressions and my own style. As you see, Lily is the main emphasis in every composition and seeing her in those spaces signifies a mortal silence. She never talks and we hear her voice as narration and even when she talks to someone, we don’t see her head or the scene is just like a hallucination. So the cinematography
you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Obviously yes. The subject that has been chosen
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tabassom Habibzadeh
A still from Semiotic of A Model
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tabassom Habibzadeh
style very depends on showing the inner feelings and thoughts. Your insightful exploration about relationships between body and the depersonalization in the contemporary age has reminded us of the words by Gilles Deleuze in his famous essay "L'imagemouvement", where he analyzes the Nouvelle Vague cinema. The suggestive ambience you created in Semiotics of a Model invites the viewer to a progressive discovery, that seems to urge our perception in order to challenge the common way to perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" as microscopic grains of sand in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
The character of my film is one-dimensional that it’s representing is by the body. Her body is the only identity that she has and when it has been deprived from her, the body starts to depersonalize. The tragic way of storytelling forces a mortal silence to the character that indicates an inevitable fate, so any kind of turning point or suspensive ending will be meaningless here. Because this means entering the other path apart from sympathy for the character. This path needs a rational approach with her and the condition that she lives within. And every career gives a personality to any person. The successful model is the one who presents him/herself in a cold direct look with gazed eyes so the personality of a model becomes her career. Here I have to add, the direct camera angles give more focus to this feature.
A still from Semiotic of A Model
And about the hidden ideas, I can talk about some parts of my work as examples. I really tried to rebuild the fashion photography studios in my film. I mean it’s obvious that you can’t see any studio except the last part, but I got a lot of items as inspiration and that they can’t be recognized easily. Because the decoding keys
Summer 2015
refer to fashion industry, especially fashion photography and advertisings. For this part, as we talked in another question, the director is not the only one who needs direct experience and sometime it’s necessary for the viewers, too. Without the knowledge about those issues,
4 23 0 5
Tabassom Habibzadeh
everything seems to be a meaningless mischief. As an example, using models as disabled persons or corpses is very common in nowadays fashion photography and in the last sequence I referred to it directly. The model doesn’t need to act like a disabled girl or a corpse. Life has made
ART Habens
her to act this role in a very realistic way and without any conscious. Indeed the main idea is the opportunism of fashion industry. You have you have investigated about the thorny issue of non-existence and loss of
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Tabassom Habibzadeh
A still from Semiotic of A Model
identity. Although I'm aware that this might sound a bit naïf, I have to admit that I'm sort of convinced that Art -especially nowadayscould play an effective role in sociopolitical questions: not only just by offering to people a generic platform for expression... I would go as far as to state that Art could even steer
Summer 2015
people's behaviour... what's your point about this? Does it sound a bit exaggerated?
I can’t say it’s exaggerated but it’s a bit optimistically. Because people’s behavior has not been developed by art then it’s not expected to guide them by it. In my opinion,
4 23 0 5
Tabassom Habibzadeh
ART Habens
films before this time, I mean some of the intellectual filmmakers did it, but after 70s and currency of porn in American society, showing nudity in normal cinema became a common matter. Your work is strictly connected to the chance to create a lively intellectual interaction with the viewers, so before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
With my own coding style and direct and indirect referrals to fashion industry, I can say I’ve already chosen my viewers, so the perception would be harder for some of them and easier for the rest. I think my next projects would be like this, too. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Tabassom. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
I’m about to finish the university this winter and I hope to continue my studies in Europe. For this year, I have to make a short film as my final project. It’s about a young school girl who tries to deal with her society, I wrote it based on my childhood characteristic. I also have a co-project and some other thoughts but since they are not complete yet, I prefer not to talk about them. All I can say about my works is my main idea is about categorizing the society according to my sex, particularly the categories of minorities. I consider the society that I have been grown up in and some parts of the world out there that I think I know about. Thanks for your challenging questions and all your compliments, I really enjoyed the interview.
media and Hollywood plays the starring role also for here. This is the thing which brings lots of unwritten laws for people’s lives. The pop icons, who can’t be counted as artists, are the ones who have the most influences on people, not the real artists. Like what happened in 70s, it was never easy to show nude bodies in the
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
21 06 4
Summer 2015
Brenda Bullock Bullock My practice has been to explores the aesthetic veneer which occupy our towns and villages. while interacting with individuals I capture aspects of their lives which reflect facets of the uncanny. It is essentially the mundane with a twist. My work has been, a varied exploration of this uniting theme. What it means to capture 'unheimlich' in a picture, remains an elusive, uncompromising criteria, through which I have strived to capture and preserve its essence. Essentially what my work portrays, is a glimpse into the human condition, it's facets infinite, disconnected and often inharmonious. Notions of social isolation, the d efu n ctpsyche, and community spirit, have a LL been prevalent themes affecting both the technical process, as well as the direction of her research. My work impresses upon the viewer a sense of self, mirrored through the picture. The images she has chosen are a tribute to this endeavour, all taken of the person in a way which denies a caricature and rather implores depth and intrigue. Brenda has been meeting, talking with local people which allows her to get a real glimpse into their world. The answers are not always obvious, and some of the pictures remain purposefully enigmatic. My work is portraiture in the landscape, a focus on the aspect which allows the individuals' surroundings to speak about, and for them. I exhibit the layers that exist within a shot, taking pictures through windows, broken, stained or reflected as a means of diffracting the obvious and encouraging the uncanny. My film is called "inside out". It is the development of her pictures into film, the focal point, being the individual, a film portrait which takes the voyeur into their environment to see their personal effects or workspace, with layers of rich details, giving an altered sense of place, and blurring of boundaries.
Summer 2015
unheimlich unhomely uncanny, 2011 021 4
Brenda Bullock
ART Habens
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 Summer 2015
Brenda Bullock
03 4
Brenda Bullock
An interview with An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
Brenda Bullock works in the liminal area in which memory and emotions trascend perceptual dimension and converge into a multilayered unity that connect subconscious and a conscious level. Bullock's multidisciplinary approach conveys symbolic and surrealist elements into a coherent consistency and reveals unexpected viewpoints about the way we relate to the reality we inhabit in, deleting the frontiers between the artist and the viewers. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Brenda and welcome to ART Habens: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background Are there any experiences that have particularly influenced your evolution as an artist and that inform the way you conceive your works? Well, I'm mostly self taught. Even as an adolescent I knew that a kind of artistry was inside me, and I needed to express it. I'm always conscious of that word, 'need' in that many artists throw around the idea of imploding if they don't project their experiances, but it's funny because it's often true. A life/career without learning the trade would have left me unourished, and I'm just glad I discovered that early on.
Brenda Bullock
To summerise, I embarked on graphic design, which was a good career in itself, however I ultimately began evolving my work after completing my masters.
Brenda Bullock (BA in Media and Production Design) worked in London publishing houses as a book & web designer, completing a computing HNC.
Ranging from sculpture and photography to video and installation, your approach is marked out with a deep multidisciplinary symbiosis between several practices and I would like to invite our readers to visit http://www.brendabullock.com in order to
Having attained her Fine Art Masters and winning the Royal Photographic Bursary award, Brenda now combines her work as a fine artist with lecturing in Digital Photography at Coleg Powys and running a successful photography business.www.brendabullock.com
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Brenda Bullock
get a wide idea of your recent artistic production: in particular, I like the way your suggestive exploration of experential concepts as memory, perception and the relationship between Man and Nature, wisely combines to a rational gaze on the contemporary age. While crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different viewpoints is the only way to achieve some results, to express specific concepts? A concept is subjective, it's only as full of depth and meaning as the viewer sees it/is encouraged/accomidated to seeing it. Intigrating multi diciplines in my work comes naturally, simply because it's the most enjoyable, and unpredictable. I would shy away from the idea that any 'one' result is unobtainable if an artist limits themselves to a single dicipline. For me anyway it's more like a carnival, if there's fireworks, you know you're having a good time. If there's a carasole, you're certain. If there's toffee apples, it's no question. Multi dicipline helps cement my intention. I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from "The Space Between", an interesting work featured in the introductory pages of this article. As you have remarked once, it aims to unravel the rich cultural resonance of an ancient pagan tradition: when I first happened to get to know it I tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. But I soon realized that I had to fit into the visual rhythm suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its content. In "The Space Between", rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize an attempt to enabling us to establish direct relations, reminding us of our shared being and unveiling the connection between different cultural spheres which describes such a real-time aesthetic ethnography... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive
Summer 2015
The Space Between, mixed media
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Brenda Bullock
The Space Between, mixed media
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
ART Habens
or a systematic process? A topic so linked to memory is wholly intuative. It's about capturing the feeling of a cultural time when life was a slower pace and there were different rules. What one sees can be interurped so many ways but an emotion from a piece is lasting and unchangable. It's that kind of crosshistorical empathy which the piece was intended to instill. I daresay that the surrealistic qualities that mark out your works are in a certain sense representative of the relationship between emotion and memory. I find it truly poetically engaging and I have to confess that it suddenly forced me to relate myself to your works in a different way. What is the role of memory in your process? And in particular, do you try to achieve a faithful visual translation of your feelings? This question would have me unfold a large array of definitions about source-energy and the like, but suffice to say, I liken memory to the wind. It's intangible nature becomes in a sense the powerful component, it's what gusts, blows and howls our present selves into action. We are all riding with the wind of our personal history on our backs. What's important is never turning to face it too often, you'll get leaves and all sorts in your eyes. Instead, let the wind tend you on, and even warm the nape below your collar. This metaphor carries into my work process without alteration. While it is often tempting to conjure up emotion into a physical art, I find those projects tend to frustrate me because the memory isn't pure. What I try to stick to, is conjuring the physicality of my present self, with the emotions therein relating - but not immitating - a past emotional state. Essentially, memory's role is to give me the kite of an idea, but not hold my hand while I fly it. I like the way your "Ice sculptures" series investigates about the way the intrinsic ephemeral nature of memory can acquire a permanent existence, being re-absorbed into the ocean of our experience has reminded me of the idea behind Thomas
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015
Brenda Bullock
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015
Brenda Bullock
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
ART Habens
Demand's works, when he stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". While conceiving Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
absolute approach to Art: do you recognize any contrast between Tradition and Contemporariness?
A disconnect is possible in regards to the production of work, of course, it's the mechanical artistry after all. As far as the process goes, I cannot imagine the same to be true. After all, if the artist has no experiance from which to draw, he is embarking on an empty tank. The emotive and sensory nature of the creative process demands fuel, demands feeding.
I believe in some instances that backward glance can labour a piece of art, where it would be served better being orphaned to the eyes of it's audience and viewers. Denuded of the responsibility of expectation, a piece of art can for lack of a better term 'be itself' when not foreshadowed by it;'s lienage.
I do not neccesarily believe the contrast has to be an overt one. Of course, the old and the new are binaries, but there's crossover, and intermingling and flashbacks and old-in-the-new and vintage etc...it all goes in circles. Regarding my work, I delibrately remove the historic gaze for a reason. Whereas some works rely on that tool, the backward glance to effectivly draw up a range of effect by recognising brazenly the work that has come before.
As most of the pieces from your recent production, "Inside Out" is open to various interpretations: in particular, it communicates me a process of deconstruction, recontextualization and assemblage. What is it specifically about deconstruction which fascinates you and make you want to center your artistic style around it? In particular would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting work?
Any artist who attempts to do so without the experiance would - I believe - draw out something from themselves they were not expecting. It may not be the direct experiance appllicable to the title of the piece, or the intention of the project, but this would then morph the work into something else. It's hard to cheat your mind in that way, to enlist a kind of emotional automation. The recurrent reference to an emotional but at the same time universal imagery dued to the fruitful juxtaposition between the reference to elements from universal imagery and a lively approach, seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. In this sense, I daresay that the semantic juxtaposition between sign and matter that marks out your art, allows you to go beyond any dichotomy between Tradition and Contemporariness, establishing a stimulating osmosis between materials from contingent era and an
Rather than taking a portrait of the man, I took a portrait of the enviroment in which like a finger print, his existence had imprinted on. The idea was to capture something on the other end of the spectrum from the images daily presented to us. The munipulation of portraiture is commonplace, and increasingly effective. Devoiding the scene of it's host/subject gave me freedom to poke fun a bit, but also show how much depth can be gained from a man/woman's shadow. Through the video and the overlapping soundscape, I intended the viewer to 'know' this man without ever seeing his face properly. Interesting to me
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015
Brenda Bullock
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Brenda Bullock
unheimlich unhomely uncanny, 2011
is the bounds to which this kind of portrait is capped, the periphery where it comes into contact with vanity and is enveloped by it. I don't think we will be seeing adolescence posting pictures of their desk contents/wardrobe collections any time soon.
would like to spend some words is entitled "unheimlich unhomely uncanny": I like the way its dynamic life stimulates the viewer’s psyche and consequently works on both a subconscious and a conscious level. How did you decide to focus on this form of illustration? Do you conceive these composition on an instinctive way or do you rather structure
Another interesting body of works that has particularly impacted on me and on which I
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
ART Habens
unheimlich unhomely uncanny, 2011
your process in order to reach the right balance? For me ,my work is instinctive and surreal, I wanted to create beauty but at the essance of my subjects, the beauty that is sublime and, as you may have guessed, uncanny.
My process was to work with integrety and the genuine. For this series so much relied upon the subjects feeling unwatched, going about their lives, that after sitting by while a welder went about his work, he half-flinched on hearing the shutter snap, havbing forgotten I was there!
I allowed my subjects time and space to do and what they were confortable with.
Your works are strictly connected to the chance to establish a deep invovement with
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART ARTHabens Habens
Brenda Bullock
unheimlich unhomely uncanny, 2011
the viewers and you seem to aim to delete the frontiers between the artist and the people. So before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
Comission portraits require a more conscious effort to be mindful of another persons view, their preferences, their opinions of themselves. That's something you can't really get away from, nor do you need to. When it comes to my own work, or indeed community projects in which my audience are more open, then it is a different notion. Any artist in any profession or medium will always produce the best results when adhearing to their heart, and their passion. Perhaps some
The key word there is obviously context.
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Brenda Bullock
ART Habens
unheimlich unhomely uncanny, 2011
people produce art with a feverish worry over what critiques and the public will think, but that's just not for me. Life's too short!
A big collaberation will result in a projection onto the ellan valley dam around November 2015, and I'm also working on a number of persopnal projects which I will be posting updates for on my website. http://www.brendabullock.com
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Brenda. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator
And thank you as well!
arthabens@mail.com
This following year is actually a pretty busy one.
21 06 4
Summer 2015
Christopher Marsh Christopher Marsh (B.A & M.A) is a multi-award winning filmmaker, video artist, lecturer and photographer from the North West UK. His past work is a fusion of narrative and video art that began in 2010, focusing largely on isolation and nihilism using various media formats within his productions, from super 8mm, 35mm photography, VHS, Lomokino and HD. Christopher Marsh runs the film production company Asmodeus Films Marsh is currently working on the video art project ‘The Conet Video Project’, 2 International collaborative projects, the horror web series ‘Phantoms’ and the literary adaptation of a Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel re-entitled ‘Journal of my other self’, and has started the five year multi media platform project ‘Sensory Dimensional Gulf’ with various international and national artists.
Irdial-Discs & Christopher Marsh Video Project: A series of single shot 1 minute videos. Rather than to deal with the number subject of the recordings or the oddity of the musical accompaniments the video artist attempts to create a vacuum of location, allowing the sound to create the environment around the video subject matter. The Conet Project collection was released by England’s Irdial-Discs record label in 1997, based on the work of numbers station enthusiast Akin Fernandez. irdial.com/conet.htm
Summer 2015
021 4
Christopher Marsh
ART Habens
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
An interview with
ART Habens
Summer 2015 Summer 2015
03 4
Christopher Marsh An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator
ART Habens
music, but sound as an entity. Think about it, if you heard the rattle of snake, even without seeing it, it would induce a heightened sense of fear or panic. Certain sounds elicit our emotions, feelings and responses, and all sounds cause a reaction within the brain, such as evaluative conditioning, episodic memory, visual imagery, emotional contagion etc. Sounds show us what the eye cannot see. However, sound is but 1 of the traditional five recognised senses.
and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
Christopher Marsh accomplishes the difficult task of communicating dystopian idealism and solitude in a poetic style: his multidisciplinary works are capable of offering to the viewer a multilayered experience, urging to rethink about the ambiguous dichotomy between the perception of space and time. While reorganizing motion in an attempt to look at time in spatial terms, his unconventional approach creates an unexplored area of interplay where we are invited to explore unexpected relationships with reality and the way we perceive it. I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production.
With video visuals you can the tap into the area of sight which allows you to manipulate the human condition somewhat. For example if you take that sound of a rattle snake, or of a distant scream and place that over a video image of a child eating an ice cream you can start to create a whole new temporary universe for the viewing human to enter. This is where the use of both forms of art start to create that intimate relationship, and it can be tender and loving or brutal and nasty. It is this marriage between forms that is all to often not fully utilised by large members of the video fraternity.
Hello Christopher and welcome to ART Habens: multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice and you seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several disciplines, taking advantage of the creative and expressive potential of Video as well as of Sound: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
Whilst taste and smell are somewhat more prone to gimmicks from large money obsessed multiplex’s there is the deep desire within me to further explore the relationship between sound, vision and touch, to truly touch video/vision/cinema or whatever you desire to label it, but to a mass audience, possibly over the internet, is a step worth looking into. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from The Conet Video Project, an extremely interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to visit http://theconetvideoproject.co.uk/ in order to get a wider idea of it. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
Hello and thank you for having me! Intimate, that's an interesting word to use alongside symbiosis. Intimate to me creates the image of sexual relationship, I know it has other translations, but to me its sexual. A sexual relationship between 2 or more forms of art to create something, then the answer is yes, it has to be. You see, to me, video is unlike most other art forms, and sometimes the least taken seriously, in that it can have this intimate sexual relationship with other forms and through this it can create a more aggressive or passive assault on the human sense.
Thats an odd one, as by the time I have normally started a project I have almost forgotten what drew me to it in the first place, possibly because the inspiration wasn’t technically by me, it was from someone else, then i’ve taken it and changed it to suit my
With sound you have an extremely powerful impact on the brain, I’m not talking about just
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
needs and then the memory has gone. Saying that, I think the inspiration has always been there, through my love of sound and the science behind it. Spending spare time trawling through the internet, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, and listening to some of the various oddities from the internet archive for example. I think that is where I discovered number stations, and from there I started to look at various other outlets into what this strange phenomenon was. The world is full of the strange, and thankfully it is not always easy to find (google ‘gene ray time cube’ for example), and there is a connection between the strange, the weird, the sciencefiction and video art, a believe that has had in the past some furrowed brows aimed my way, but its true, science-fiction and video art are cousins, more so than video art and a rom-com for example. I know I contacted Akin Fernandez shortly after with a posing question to see if he and Irdial would allow me to take their collection of number station recordings (titled ‘The Conet Project’) to then create a series of 1 minute videos using each sound recording that they had made. After finding out there are nearly 200 recordings I am in the process of shortening it, especially for immediate exhibition and showcasing, but maybe in the future all 200+ will be created. From there I felt the best thing to do, seeing as there are 5/6 discs currently holding the recordings, was to break each disc down to a various meaning. The first being that of isolation, the second is currently aimed at military gestures, the other disc meanings are currently locked inside my mind, waiting for free time to complete. Will I ever complete the whole thing? I don’t know, I rather like leaving some projects unfinished, that feeling that I have something out there waiting for me to return to acts like a drug for me. I also have to mention something else regarding the genesis of the project, which i suppose is systematic of how I work. In that the 1st disc, the 1st collection of videos was shot in 1 night in Liverpool during a prolonged period of fog induced mornings. I grabbed my camera during one of those dark foggy mornings and rushed
Summer 2015
out to capture all those streets, all those sights that I pass every day, but now were shrouded in a form of mystery, that they no longer belonged
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
where they normally are, in amongst the cosmopolitan hustle and bustle, everything was silent and still and it was during this wander that
ART Habens
I could hear those recordings playing out, and through that spontaneity The Conet Video Project was born. To then contrast that with the
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
The ambience created by your careful juxtaposition between Audio and Video has reminded me the concept of Heterotopia
2nd disc which I paused for reasons that will be later mentioned and has been sat still for about 8 months, but a return is coming.
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
ART Habens
Ariadne's Thread, inviting them to challenge the common way we relate ourselves with the outside world... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
I am by no means a spiritualist, or religious person in any way, but I do believe that in an odd way we are all connected, not just human to human, but with nature, our surroundings and with the cosmos. My statement of saying I am not spiritual yet almost describing the exact opposite is that a spiritualist connects, or desires to, for me there is no spirit to connect through or with. Rather I see it as a thread, a reaction and action. For example, if you see a wall, that wall is part of your environment, it is inside your nature, and if you go over to that wall and mark it with something only you know then you have a duality in play. You have both altered the nature / environment of those around you as they to will see it, but you have added a layer of code, one that will remain unseen to most… its that that I want to bring to my work, all my work. I suppose what I am trying to say is that I cannot show you, the viewer, your inner nature, as I don’t know anything about you, I only know about me, and I don’t want to show you my inner nature, or at least not in an obvious way, what I do want to do is to show you the codes around you, the secrets, the marks etc. and have you decipher them, then, you might start to see your own inner nature, which I do believe again most people are oblivious to. All these secrets, all these hidden meanings seem to have been lost in an age where information is so easily accessible but so easily taken for granted. I teach, I did teach until recently, and I found that even the simplest forms of gathering information were a real struggle for young people. A fellow lecturer, and wonderful person in the world of vision Diane Gregory has always said that people desire the big PINK button. To press that button and
elaborated by Michel Foucault and what has mostly impacted on me is the way you have been capable of providing the viewers of an
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
everything you need comes at you, in an information sense, and that is what I don’t want in my work. I don’t want the obvious and I want you to sit down and look into yourself and maybe see something that you did not realise was there. I can’t show it you, but I can maybe point in the right direction. Another interesting work of yours on which I would like to spend some words is the Sensory Dimensional Gulf project: would you like to introduce our readers to it? In particular, your exploration of isolation and nihilism in contemporary age is marked out with a subtle but effective social criticism: do you think that Art could nowadays play a role in investigating and even facing social issues?
Yes of course. Sensory Dimensional Gulf (www.sensorydimensionalgulf.com) is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I just didn’t realise I wanted to do. I think a bit of backstory here would help. I had just finished working on Rhombus (2013), and whilst praise came and a couple of awards and festivals I was never satisfied with it. I felt it was lacking something and that either maybe I had done too much or not done enough. It took a year for me to see that it wasn’t really the individual piece that was the problem, more the fact it was an individual. During that year I signed up to a couple of other projects, collaborations with some good folk spread across the globe and things stuttered and stopped and it gave me the chance to take a look at my own work, and whilst not always being what I wanted in the end I could see that I was moving towards something, honing my skills and improving both visually and in meaning, but they were all individuals. After a few projects were shelved I decided to look into my own interests more, so I read again and went through old note books and sketchpads looking for ideas. I think its also important for me to say that at that time and almost up until now I stopped watching films, and by films I don’t mean
Summer 2015
hollywood blockbusters, I mean great artistic works, for example, by the European masters. I feel that when in that process of creating something you are best served to be alone in a room with only yourself to find, if you cloud yourself with works of others then you stop being authentic and start being a thief.
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
I found a short film idea I had penciled down when I lived in Cardiff, called ‘Liquid City’, and that got me thinking, about the state of Britain, the industrial revolution, the churning of the working classes and the utter misery and hopelessness of it all, and it was then when I realised I didn’t want to make another
ART Habens
individual, I wanted to make a world, a universe for all this shit to live in, and thats when I created the concept of SDG. A fusion of theory, social issues, folklore, art and narrative. So I have given myself a rough time span to complete this all, around 5 years, and inside
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
SDG I will throw everything I want into it, and in whatever way I want. I am becoming what Directors want to be, a God. Working with other artists as well, it is about creating a Universe of many media formats, telling many different stories (even video artists tell stories, and if they don’t then they’re not doing it right) and the
Summer 2015
only frame work to go with is Erik Erikson’s theory of Psychosocial Development. Through Erikson you can chart the various pathways of a human through its life cycle, but only in a theoretical way, it is my job to bring that theory and manifest it into black stench ridden liquid flesh, because at the heart of SDG is my belief
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
ART Habens
£700 and PHASE II (KIDS GOT THE BLUES) is being created with a zero budget. All this will keep building up and moving forward till the final phase, which is when LIQUID CITY finally is created. Coming all the way back round to your question is that of Art playing a role in social issues. For me, it has to, if it doesn’t then it simply does not belong. When i was researching into how to carry out some of SDG, and being a resident of both Manchester and Liverpool, modern cities with an underbelly of heavy industrial revolution, I found that a lot of work in the 80s was extremely important. Not just in creating fiction, but in creating a visual historical document about issues that needed to be addressed. I think of My Beautiful Laundrette, Boys from the Blackstuff, the Cement Garden and Jarmans The Garden, and all these tell a story of what was happening in Britain at that moment in time. Its something that I feel we have again lost, where the angry young artist has been replaced by a content middle class London urbanite. That Art has gone safe, and that nobody wants to see or be shown misery anymore. I flick between an artist and a filmmaker, and therefore I also get to see film festivals, and see what is popular and what isn’t, and I always find the hipster screen burn summer esq green fields and quirky characters win the day. Why? Because for me that isn’t what is happening right now, and then I look at the other Directors, the other Filmmakers and Artists and they look fake. They’re not real, they’re not human, they have been born out of comfort and want to remain in comfort and therefore anything they make is comfortable. Art should absolutely not be comfortable, it should be in constant agony, screaming and writhing on the floor trying to spit on the bankers and suits walking past. It is so important for Art that it remains relevant, and in doing so it must address issues, correctly of course, but it should also be more aggressive and more in your face as we seem to be heading towards another period of deception between countries, hostilities thrown back and forward from East to West and vice versa, and with this
in the black liquid, the primordial ooze from which my new human kind has evolved from. Current SDG is on PHASE II after the completion of the Prologue (HUM) and PHASE I (WORM). All this is being made with little to no money, so far HUM and WORM combined have cost around
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015
Christopher Marsh
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
current UK government, who do seem to be wanting to stamp on anything that creates a negative towards them then it is up to those who sometimes have little to lose, the Artist, to kick back. I recently read an article about John Waters, as he has a exhibit currently in London, and whilst I don’t adhere to idols I have to admit that he is a great influence on me, his relative carefree attitude and his desire to shock still stands. Oddly enough my only criticism or possible comment to this recent exhibition is that it is in London, which is becoming more of an artistic vacuum than ever before! He should come to the North and show his work, Manchester, Liverpool or even Bolton! That would be fun to see his style playing out in front of a hard up working class audience. Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". Your approach seems to give a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the dystopian idealism you communicate: so I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
No, never. You, as an Artist, need that element of direct experience to draw out the psychological. It has to come from somewhere, and if you don’t have that direct experience with it then you are lying, to yourself and to your audience, and that in theory could be a dangerous practice. Now obviously you might not have direct experience with everything you deal with, take me and The Conet Video Project for example. I have no direct experience of number stations or having ever owned a ham radio, or been a spy for that matter, so I’ve had to do 2 things, one being to look inside myself and see what I know, what I feel and what I think when I listen to those tracks and the second is to immerse myself, briefly, in that world, by research. All
Summer 2015
this brings experience, and from that you can start to create, with confidence the world in which you want to create. You see I’ve been told a few times that video artists are not storytellers, and filmmakers are not artists, I refute that, they are in effect both
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
the same, but using different methods and with different end desires, but they are in essence the same. They, we, you and I are creators, and in every creation there is a story, and where does that story come from? It comes from us, from the direct experiences we have and hold. I can see
ART Habens
that to try to disconnect from the physical might have it benefits, to be free in mind and then reach a form of nirvana, but I don’t see that being possible, as we are creatures, animals, that respond to direct contact and experience and we should never lose that, and neither should our work.
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
By definition video is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity. In your videos you create time-based works that induce the viewer to abandon himself to his associations, looking at time in spatial terms and I daresay, rethinking the concept of space in such a static way: this seems to
Summer 2015
remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?
First off I think you are right in your assertion of my work, in that I try to remove history and
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
ART Habens
My rhythm, is a hard one, as I am not always one for looking at my work once it is finished, or near to finish. There are long moments of inactivity followed by a whirlwind of getting things done, and during those long moments I reflect more on myself and whats around me rather than then work I am currently working on. I don’t like the idea of forcing my own pattern or rhythm on my work, it will come if it comes and if it doesn’t then there was a reason for that. My job then is to not try to force my desire on that work, but to analyse why it did or didn’t happen the way I originally wanted and then take that onto my next piece. I see what you mean though, and whilst I do not force a rhythm on myself I do try my hardest to create a place where nothing means anything other than what you are seeing. Bar one video in the first Conet series there is nothing really to distinguish the actual location I shot these videos at in an historical sense. I did have video of those and removed them. Its my thought that if you show something of a historical nature or a geographical nature within your work then it will add an extra layer to your message, a layer that might not be desired. If I shoot in Cardiff, or Liverpool or Manchester then I do not want the audience to shown anything of any significance in terms of history or geography from those locations. Why? Because it will immediately give the audience a notion of place, and with place comes experience, and finally with experience we have memories and with memories that are so powerful they will glaze over my video and all those hidden meanings will be lost. So i try to be everywhere, and nowhere at the same time, and I suppose from that comes a rhythm? I do believe that interdisciplinary collaboration as the ones that you have established during these years is today an ever growing force in Art and that that most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, the artist Peter Tabor once said that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of
create a place where only the space something resides in is required. It is not something I set out to do by the way, it just seems to have happened, and it is something I have looked, and am looking into constantly.
21 06 4
Summer 2015
From Kids got the Blues
ART Habens
Christopher Marsh
two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists?
I think you can thank the internet for that! Whilst it may have been the downfall in desires to acquire information it has enabled some of us to cast ourselves over vast areas and seek other artists in other disciplines to help us. I think the thing I have found though is possibly rather contrary, or maybe it just is because of how I work, in that with this new found collaborative element, where one can mix and match with other artists, I have found that is has actually strengthen the way one works rather than the fusion of two. Yes you always need others input in what you create, and especially those from other areas of Art, but you have to remain true to who you are and what you want to create. That does not mean you close off and refuse to listen to others, rather you do listen and you do communicate but then you keep focused on what you wanted, otherwise you will find yourself in a tidal wave of uncertainty. The way I have worked with this synthesis of practices is to rather give the other artist a brief about what it is I am working on, what they might be working on etc. and then simply let them create. Then I will work around them to a certain extent, so if it is a musician I will not show them anything visual, I want them simply to create what they want to create in the area of where we are working and then we will see if it will fit. If you were a photographer or a sculpture I would say to you “this is SDG, this is the Universe it lives in, now do what you want”. If I knew what I wanted from them I would make it myself, and the internet and new communication is full of talk, and I’m more a doer than a talker, so do and be done, and at the end we shall see how it all worked out. I don’t know if that fully answers your question, but I think there is a simple answer for everything, and in this case my answer, if I simplified it, would be the word ‘Free’.
audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
Before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your
Summer 2015
Not ever, ever ever ever. I have never once
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
considered an audience for any of my work, possibly because I never think an audience will see it, but the truth is if you start to step into that world of thinking what what an audience might want, or need then you’re stepping into a world of wanting to please, and why would you want to do that? It is not my position to give an
ART Habens
audience what it wants, I am there to give an audience what it might not think it wants, or what it doesn’t want or what it does want but is to ashamed to admit it. Audiences are a funny thing. I hear it quite often about how audience is like a customer and the
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ARTHabens Habens ART
Christopher Marsh
customer is right etc. and its absolute nonsense. The audience for no matter what you create is there, you just have to find it. If you show your work somewhere and the general reaction is negative then that could mean 2 things, one is that the work is bad, or that the audience was wrong. So should you have created your work
Summer 2015
differently to please that specific audience? Knowing that in a weeks time at another festival / exhibit it will be a different audience who in turn adores your work! It's a mine field, and I think artists are best to stay away from it, if they have integrity that is.
4 23 0 5
Christopher Marsh
ART Habens
world is shown for free, so if your audience complains then so fucking what, they got it for free! Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Christopher. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
I’m going deeper down the rabbit hole hopefully, and I have moments where I actively seek out misery, not in an EMO way, rather if something appears that is unpleasant I try to enjoy whilst its lasts, as should every experience. I want to find more, as I am sure there are those little moments in my life where things happened that helped create what I am now, and those moments might have been lost amongst others, so I am taking time finding where those are, what they mean and what they can bring to me again. So for now my world revolves around The Conet Video Project, the much larger Sensory Dimensional Gulf and an International Collaboration called ‘Journal of my Other Self’, which is a foursome between myself, Jesse Richards (USA), Tobias Morgan (Poland) and Juan Gabriel Gutierrez (SPAIN) as we attempt to create video from the rather obscure Rainer Maria Rilke novel ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’. Bar the Conet Video Project, all the others will be using a fairly big range of differing video capture devices, or image capture I suppose is a better way to say it. It has been my pleasure!
Create what you want to create and be damned to those around you, and if they think its shit then turn it around and know that they are shit instead.
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
There’s nothing wrong with being that way inclined, and anyway, most work in todays
21 06 4
Summer 2015
Death is inevitable. We instinctively know that from the moment we are born. Consequently, our biggest fear is that of the seizing of the Self, the antonym of the universal belief in some kind of continuity, at the moment of death. However, we seem to forget that in mystifying instances of attraction and eroticism. From spiritual to bodily, these instances are extended on a vertical axis of fascination. When fascinated we experience a state where “there is nothing more than a gigantic object in a desert world� and we just are not that thing; a fascinating object is one which is, to the point where we are not, and we therefore need to be, demand to be, desire to be. We are violently ripped from existence and develop a perpetual desire for being. The process of creation is one where fascination is a trigger and an end result: It begins with an intuitive thought that captures our attention without at the same time submitting entirely to our understanding. The inability to accurately articulate it results in both a recurrent desire and repetitive attempts to do so. This leads to the creation of an autonomous offshoot, communicating the initial object of fascination. Adam Popli
Breathe Forrest, Breathe! Installation(4mx4mx4m), 2013
Summer 2015
021 4
Adam Popli
ART Habens
Adam Popli
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 Summer 2015
Adam Popli
03 4
Adam Popli
An interview with An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
Adam Popli accomplishes the difficult task of establishing an effective synergy between refined aesthetics and his insightful environmental and sociopolitical criticism, to create an area in which emotional dimension and perceptual reality coexist as a coherent unity. His evocative and direct approach invites us to investigate the relationship between reality and the way we perceive it: one of the most convincing aspects of Popli's practice is the way he creates an area of intellectual interplay between perception and memory, that invites the viewers to explore the unstable relationship between natural forces and human intervention. I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production. Hello Adam and welcome to ART Habens. To start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You are currently pursuing your BA of Digital Media Production at the Arts University Bournemouth: how does this experience influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, do you think it inform the way you conceive and produce your works today?
Adam Popli
Hello Art Habens, firstly I would like to express my gratitude for choosing me to be part of the 5th edition.
chasing cows, skateboarding down dangerously steep hills with three of us sitting on the board, my cousin, his friend and myself. It was a blessing to smell the fresh air and spend time with my family. In my teenage years I started to discover my artistic side through the medium of dance as well as art classes at secondary school, exploring new methods of construing everyday life through artistic interpretations.
Born to an Irish mother and Indian father, I’ve been fortunate to gain the experience and values of two diverse cultures. From a young age I always had an interest in exploring my natural surroundings - I used to travel to Ireland during most school holidays to visit family. Having grown up in the busy, hectic environment of London, Ireland was the motherland where I could feel a sense of freedom in the countryside,
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Adam Popli
I had always dreamed of owning my own digital camera as I grew up watching animal documentaries, which triggered and shaped the deep connection to Mother Nature and many ways she facilitates the power for us humans to inhabit Earth. Getting my first camera on my 16th birthday was a blessing, I had never received such an expensive gift, and it proved to be a profound moment for my artistic development, which would shape the artist I am today. I would take my Canon 40D everywhere with me, seeing the world through the eye of my lens, capturing the unseen beauty of London. After completing my GCSE’s and A-Levels my teachers at school had little faith in me getting into University, but I knew deep down I had what it took and showed everyone on my last year of being at school my talent was not to be overlooked. Nailing a place at the Arts University Bournemouth was to be the next step in me becoming the artist I had aspired to become. The beauty of studying BA Digital Media Production was the freedom to use various mediums and to experiment with different ideas. New media, such as projection mapping, became a discipline I was egger to master. I attended an event called Mapping Festival in Geneva and was fortunate enough to gain work experience there, giving me a deeper insight into how a festival is run, as well as giving me the opportunity to network and socialize with artists who were already established in that field. Looking back over the past years of formal education and creative education I feel I’m now finally ready to face the reality of being an artist in modern society. The experience of studying DMP allowed me to develop skills within various disciplines, such as projection mapping, VJing, hosting nightclub events, filmography, photography and installation art. I produce work in a
Summer 2015
BARISTA, installation
professional manner with room to grow, with further experience and experimentation in the next stage to come. You are a versatile artist: ranging from Photography and Illustration to
4 23 0 5
Adam Popli
Installation and Video, your approach is marked out with a deep multidisciplinary synergy between several practices, that are combined to provide your works of a dynamic and autonomous life. I would suggest our readers to
ART Habens
visit€http://adampopli.com€in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. While crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Adam Popli
BARISTA, installation
viewpoints is the only way to achieve some results, to express specific concepts?
Looking at viewpoints from opposite angles presents a situation to visualise the final piece as open to interpretation and understanding, making your audience think deeply about what is being presented to
Most definitely, crossing over artistic mediums gives an individual the opportunity to understand the concept in greater depth.
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Adam Popli
ART Habens
I would start to focus on your artistic production beginning from Barista, an interesting work that our readers have already got to know in the introductory pages of this article. What most impressed me in this project is the way you have create a point of convergence between a functional analysis of the context you examine and autonomous aesthetics. Do you conceive this in an instinctive way or do you rather structure your process in order to reach the right balance?
My work has a way of taking charge, in the sense that I allow my ideas to gradually develop and process before deciding what the final visual outcome might be. Both intuition and structure play into each other throughout my creative process. It’s important to balance both elements in order to end up with a final piece that resonates with my audience. Barista was most definitely a project that forced me to step outside of my comfort zone and challenge my creative knowledge as well as skills. Aesthetically I wanted the final outcome to challenge people’s perception of the material used and where it came from. Barista complied a total of two thousand NOS canisters (laughing gas), collected from house parties and people around Bournemouth, who use laughing gas regularly as a legal high. Being able to accumulate that amount of canisters was surprisingly easy and quick. Looking deeper into the use of the material, it illustrates a problem within todays society; the abuse of laughing gas to achieve a minute high, leaving the byproduct of a steel canister to be dumped in the bin. The steel canister takes upwards of more than one thousands years to fully break down. Using NOS canisters had been an idea I had always wanted to visualise, and my specialist project gave me the perfect
them and using the aid of digital media to achieve this goal. I feel each project I’ve undertaken whilst at University taught me valuable skills on how to cross over using various disciplines to explore a concept.
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 BARISTA, installation
Naim El Hajj
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Adam Popli
opportunity to do so. I wanted to explore the ideas of waste, consumption and materialism through the visual aid of the canisters. Modern day society promotes the idea of mass consumption and consumerism; people are obsessed by the idea of having the latest technology, fashion trends and money. I feel people in today’s society fail to consider the outcome of their actions, instead living life in the bliss of their own ignorance. The installation Barista forces my audience to directly confront the idea of consumerism/recycling through a visually appealing manner. This work centred around the idea of consumerism: you seem to invite the viewers to a personal investigation about the themes you touch on. Maybe that the following assumption is stretching the point a little bit, but I think that Barista reveals the connection between different cultural spheres which describes such a real-time aesthetic ethnography: you seem to be drawn to the structured worlds we inhabit and how they produce a selfdefining context for our lives and experience... do you agree with this analysys? Moreover, what could be in your opinon the role that Art could play in sociopolitical questions?
Yes, I would agree with this statement. Investigation the youth culture of today and understanding my generation intrigues me artistically. BARISTA, installation
To represent issues that need to be brought to peoples attention, is a critical element to my creative development. I represent ideas through a conceptual manner, adding an intellectual depth to topics I choose to work with. In my opinion I believe the youth of today need to grasp the reality of our current situation, that of climate change and environmental decline. My generation lacks the motivation our parents once had when
Summer 2015
growing up; people tend to complain about their situation instead of being proactive and trying to overcome their difficulties. From my personal experience, especially attending an Arts University, party drug use is extremely common and accepted.
4 23 0 5
Adam Popli
Barista challenged me artistically, as well as intellectually. I wanted to illustrate a problem of concern I felt passionate about student culture and their tendencies to waste. NOS abuse fell perfectly into the bracket of issues within youth culture and
ART Habens
student ignorance. Collecting the canisters allowed me to understand the severity of the situation: students are hooked to the short-term buzz NOS offers. For me Art can express a deep thought
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Adam Popli
BARISTA, installation
provoking process, giving it’s audience an insight into social, political and environmental issues, opening a visual conversation between the artist and the viewer. Art invited the audience to think of the meaning behind a certain use of
Summer 2015
material and what this could represent, inviting someone to indulge into the artist creative spirit and energy. I try to view the world from an unstructured perspective in order to understand things from a more open-minded opinion. Society, I
4 23 0 5
Adam Popli
ART Habens
I like the way you create a point of convergence between and surrealistic gaze and the severe geometry suggested by your refined composition. This combination reminds me of the idea behind Thomas Demand's works, when he states that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". While the conception of Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a sense of permanence, going beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of those concepts you explore: as you have remarked once, creativity is expressed through a mistake: so I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
My work is greatly inspired by personal experiences, it gives me a foothold to delve deep into a concept and therefore end up with a final piece that is thought provoking; demanding my audience to intellectually analyse the meaning behind the work. To an extent one has to partially disconnect from the process to give room for growth. If I wrap myself too much in my own creative process I could loose sight of the end product. Being open to criticism from my peers and allowing this to mold the final outcome gives me the best possible chance of a well polished and thought out final piece. I recognize a suggestive attempt to go beyond a mere interpretative aspect of the reality you refer to. As the late Franz West did in his installations, this work seems to reveal unconventional aesthetics in the way you deconstruct and assemble memories in a collective imagery, to draw the viewer into a process of self-reflection. Maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal
feel already has so many ways to try and structure the human population, limiting our experiences of life. Art is a way for me to express my opinion of the world we inhabit.
21 06 4
Summer 2015
BARISTA, installation
ART Habens
Adam Popli
unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?
Humans are deeply complex, and now that I have matured, I’m beginning to truly discover the deep levels of myself. I'm starting to understand how convoluted our brains are. Artists have a role to bring these buried thoughts and emotions to the surface and translate them through a visual medium. Another stimulating work of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend words is entitled I STAND FOR CHANGE ! In this work you question the climate change: many contemporary artists, such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Michael Light, use to include socio-political criticism and sometimes even explicit messages in their works, that often goes beyond a mere descriptive point of view on the issues they face. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach?
I would be dishonest if I said I aim to uphold a neutral approach, as there are many underlying topics that are represented through a conceptual manner. Though I do not wish to delve deep into this area of my work. A critical element for my work is to allow my audience to perceive what they wish from the work, I aim not to influence my audience in any way, the conceptual manner of my style gives room for people to intellectually analyses what they see, taking what they wish from the idea. If you would like to watch the video head to my Vimeo page - https://vimeo.com/128212275.
I STAND FOR CHANGE !
and climate change were intrinsic to my concepts and were topics I wanted to develop further.
“I Stand For Change” is by far the most ambitious project I've undertaken so far on my artistic journey. Having developed the idea of Barista at the beginning of my final year at university, the themes of recycling
Summer 2015
I had a dream about going abroad to help show people how serious I was about
4 23 0 5
Adam Popli
climate change. After consulting with my tutor I booked a trip and went to Iceland. The main idea for me travelling to Iceland was to hopefully project my visuals onto the icebergs, as I felt this would emphasise the importance of climate change. Upon
ART Habens
reaching the icebergs I was devastated to realise they had already melted down into small chunks of ice.This left me to choose to do a performance based on the idea of climate change. With polystyrene being such a widely used material in today's
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
ISummer STAND FOR CHANGE ! 2015
Naim El Hajj
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Adam Popli
society and the hugely negative impact it has on the environment, I felt it was important to try and illustrate this through the performance. I wanted to use a male and female head made from polystyrene to not only show how destructive this material is, but also highlighting the deeper side to humanities current state in modern culture; we use materials like polystyrene, plastic bags, plastics etc, which cause vast destruction to our natural surroundings, taking thousands of years to break down. Why haven't we found alternative materials to solve this problem? I chose to cover myself in black fabric to allow my identity to be concealed and focus the attention on the heads. I performed in various locations across Iceland, drawing attention to the otherworldliness of the place and majestic beauty this country had to offer. The performance consisted of me holding each head on my middle fingers and bringing the two together above my head then separating them in a downwards motion ninety degrees. This symbolic movement illustrates how the human population has become so separated from a collective consciousness; inevitably something will have to change or “Man will end by destroying the world.” Albert Schweitzer.
fundamental way to reach the final outcome. The performative feature of work is based on the chance of establishing a deep intellectual interplay area with the viewers: so, before leaving this conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?
This is a difficult question because in one sense my audience/peers pay a key role when I’m in the beginning phases of my project, though once I get stuck into the concept I rely on trial and error to guide me to the finishing point. Seeing my audience as a crucial component is not the case for me, I see them as an important tool for improvement and guidance. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Adam. Finally, would you like to tell our readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Currently while answering your questions, I’m sat in the mother land of India. This is my first time here experiencing my Asian routes. Spiritually I'm discovering a side to myself I knew existed, but had been waiting to unfold itself. All in all I would like to finish by saying, expect the unexpected, for one day I hope to impact this world we live on, through my creative energies.
Although each of your projects has an autonomous life, there always seem to be a clear channel of communication between your works, springing from the way you combine ideas and media. In particular, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
Letting a project develop and grow is by far more important for me than deciding on a concrete narrative, of course to an extent I will have an idea of where I hope the project will lead to, however letting a concept take a free fall approach, for me in particular, is a
Summer 2015
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Katherine C. Wilson, curator arthabens@mail.com
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
Gregg Biermann Biermann The Age of Animals (2014) is a somewhat different beast (pun intended) in that it features not found footage but rather contemporary video footage Biermann himself shot in the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the Vatican, and the Bronx Zoo. However, Biermann applies similar manipulations to this footage, producing a complex three-dimensional illusion in which foreground and background are forever trading places. Indeed, the visual experience of this film is akin to being trapped inside an M.C. Escher painting or riding a rollercoaster after taking a hallucinogen. Yet we can still see the documentary world though these disorienting distortions. In the Museum of Natural History, we see visitors looking at taxidermic animals lost to extinction along with the skeletons and footprints of dinosaurs and other bygone species. A sign reading “What makes the Earth habitable?” spins by, implying the fact that the Earth could very well become uninhabitable. In the Vatican, we see tourists videotaping and photographing the soaring ceilings dedicated to the Creator of animals according to Christian theology. The opposition between the spaces of the natural history museum and the church is emphasized through the soundtrack. This alternates between a repeated segment of sampled choral music, silence, and a recorded interview with paleontologist Peter Ward who laments the politics surrounding the discourse on global warming and evolution as well as the misguided notion that previous mass extinctions were caused only by asteroids and not by changing temperatures. The space of the Bronx Zoo, framed by the soundtrack and the other two spaces, reads not as a space of joyful childhood discovery, but rather as the last living relics of the coming mass extinction caused by human ingenuity and greed. Despite the visual distortions, we recognize tortoises, gorillas, giraffes, birds, and so on, but they, too, are barely recognizable in that they suddenly read as the last of their kind. Whether these animals are the product of supreme Creator or evolution becomes irrelevant if they are doomed to disappear. The very title of the film “Age of Animals” implies that the age can end, that there may soon be an age without animals. This film suggests that in the political opposition between science and religion, the casualties are entire species – perhaps all of them. Jaimie Baron is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include media theory, experimental film and video, documentary film and video, appropriation, and digital media. Her first book, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, was published by Routledge Press in January 2014. She is also the founder, director, and co-curator of the Festival of (In)appropriation, a yearly international festival of short experimental found footage films.
Summer 2015
A still from The Age of Animals (2014)
021 4
Gregg Biermann
ART Habens
video, 2013
022 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
A still from The Age of Animals (2014) Summer 2015 Summer 2015
Gregg Biermann
03 4
Gregg Biermann
An interview with An interview by Katherine C. Wilson, curator and Dario Rutigliano, curator arthabens@mail.com
Gregg Biermann accomplishes the difficult task of exploring the liminal area in which constructed realities and a neutral gaze on contemporary age find an unexpected point of convergence: his works are capable of offering to the viewer a multilayered experience, urging to rethink about the ambiguous dichotomy between the perception of space and time. While reorganizing motion in an attempt to look at time in spatial terms, his unconventional approach creates an unexplored area of interplay where we are invited to explore unexpected relationships with reality and the way we perceive it. I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production. Hello Gregg and welcome to ART Habens: multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice and you seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several disciplines, taking advantage of the creative and expressive potential of Video as well as of Sound: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
Gregg Biermann
working with digital technology this becomes even more crucial because one needs to override the metaphors embedded in the software in ways that go beyond the limitations imposed by the tools in conventional or analog media. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from The Age of Animals, an extremely interesting work from your recent production that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: when I first happened to get to know it I tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. But I soon realized that I had to fit into the visual rhythm suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its content: in this work, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations...
The borders between disciplines in the arts are enforced most strongly in academic or other bureaucratic institutional settings. All you have to do is fill out an arts grant application and you will find endless arbitrary borders, limitations and expectations that will be imposed. However all of these institutional controls fly in the face of the radical freedom that is implied by any innovative artistic activity after Cage. What you are hinting at here: that it is only possible to get at uncharted aesthetic territories by transcending the conventions that wall off disciplines from each other, is probably important when approaching my work. When
04 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015
A still from The Age of Animals (2014)
Naim El Hajj
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gregg Biermann
Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?
The Age of Animals is open enough to elicit varied interpretations. In this way I would say that its logic is associational rather than prosaic. It has definite content: images of dinosaur fossils from the Museum of Natural History in New York, interior views of St. Peter's basilica in Vatican City and various living animals on display at the Bronx Zoo. This however does not limit the viewers' interpretations of the presented material to a single interpretation. For example, one of the things I wanted to highlight was the tension between science and religion that paleontologist Peter Ward discusses on the soundtrack. Recently Pope Francis came out in agreement with mainstream scientists like Ward that humans are causing climate change and that it is an ethical issue that requires people to respond. I didn't know this was going to happen when I finished the piece in 2014 but the associative quality of the work allows for this to enter in to one's contemplation of the images that you are looking at for 40 minutes. So the act of interpretation here is intiutive even though the formal development of the work is quite systematic. A feature from The Age of Animals that has particularly impressed me is the way you have create a point of convergence between a functional analysis of the context you examine and autonomous aesthetics. Moreover I have highly appreciated the subtle but effective sociopolitical criticism you convey in your footage: many contemporary artists, such as Edward Burtynsky and Michael Light, use to include some form of environmental or even political message in their works. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach?
A still from The Age of Animals (2014)
presumably ever will. If every person who came across my work became an environmental activist I'd be happy but I don't think that is the function of the work. Even though my work contains the plea for political action by Peter Ward, The Age of Animals is really an elegy or a la-
Everything is political but The Age of Animals is not, in and of itself, a well argued polemic for environmental activism like Al Gore's An Inconvienient Truth. The latter film reached many more people than my obscure video work
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Gregg Biermann
ment about the profound effect that human beings have had on our planet and on other animal species and how our activities have already lead to what Elizabeth Kolbert has detailed in her books Field Notes from a Catastophe and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. So we
ART Habens
are all just writing in the sand. The ambience created by your careful composition has reminded me the concept of Heterotopia elaborated by Michel Foucault and what has mostly impacted on me is the way
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gregg Biermann
A still from The Age of Animals (2014)
you have been capable of providing the viewers of an Ariadne's Thread, inviting them to challenge the common way we relate ourselves with the outside world... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so
Summer 2015
we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
I hope that what I'm doing in The Age of Animals allows for the layered meanings that
4 23 0 5
Gregg Biermann
ART Habens
contrast between “real� recorded spaces and virtual computer generated ones is also important. The on location recordings carry with them whatever sense of place the location offers. The virtual spaces are created by the interior of the virtual 3D cubes and spheres. These objects are abstract, generic forms, yet this video apparently moves the viewer inside them. There are two distinct cameras at play : the actual video camera is one, and the virtual camera floating inside the virtual space is the other. There is a tension between these two cameras as they simultaneously produce two vantage points from which to view the imagery. At times they vie for primacy and at other times one or the other perspective seems to dominate in the viewer's consciousness. This creates a complex perceptual task for the viewer as we are looking at the material shot on location through the prism of these virtual spaces. Each space and each virtual space is paired once in nine different variations. So my hope is here that the whole complex process allows a space for reflection on what is represented and also how it is represented. We are both looking at the image and looking at how we are looking at the same time. Despite the fact that this experience is disorienting or rather becuase it is disorienting we may be able to find new paths of thought in the piece over time. So many years have passed since Guy Debord wrote the well-known pamphlet about Situationism: for the French philosopher, the manipulation of mainstream moving images had a remarkable political aim, while it seems that artists are nowadays attracted by found footage manipulation in order to investigate about issues from the psychological sphere. In your works, and I think especially to the fragmentation suggested Labyrinthine, you success in creating a sort of "micropolitics of desire". How do you achieve this balance between "political" and "private"?
you are talking about here – not only in the juxtaposition of the three spaces but also by my employing of virtual spaces made possible by 3D computer animation software. I've come to be very interested in the possibilities of manipulating live action video sequences as textures in virtual 3D animated spaces. The
Labyrinthine is part of a series of generative art works or computational transformations of iconic moments in classic Hollywood cinema. Certainly Labyrinthine evinces a post-modern sensibility and all of these questions of authorship, origi-
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gregg Biermann
nality and so forth are relevant here. I don't know that this work achieves the “dadaist type of negation deployed against the language of the dominant culture” that Debord is talking about. However I do think that my transformations of these films does make the familiar images unfamiliar by calling attention both to the techniques I impose and to the techniques of the original works. I break the original sequences away from their linear story-telling to the creation of new patterns through the synthesis of evolving fragments. What emerges is something ecstatic, the computational sublime. In the case of Labyrinthine, Martin Rumsby put it this way (Millennium Film Journal 56): “Here, the tidal relentlessness of endlessly advancing frames of appropriated images, jump cuts and fluid transformations lend the aural and visual qualities of a seascape to an urban landscape where space and time are distorted from linearity toward parallel infinities. Such a place, as a prison officer in Chicago once told me, is easier to get into than out of.” Labyrinthine, Iterations, Crop Duster Octet, and Spherical Coordinates all appropriate from Hitchcock classics. So here we have a combination of opposition and homage to the great auteur and to mass culture. These works all set something systematic into motion and then the work very much propels itself. I have always been fascinated by art is about its own structure. I like the feeling of moving through a larger architecture in time; the feeling that some sort of overarching design or organizing intelligence that we don't quite grasp is responsible for the progression events that we experience. In this way the work is not personal in the way what was known as the film poem is. Still – I think that you are correct in locating the psychological aspects that you describe in Labyrinthine. Perhaps I just magnify what is already available in Hitchcock's material. As you have remarked once, your work comes out of the avant-garde tradition of film as visual art but takes advantage of digital technologies: the substratum on which your process find its natural starting point is incessantly subverted by an insightful manipulation that communicates me a
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Gregg Biermann
ART Habens
A still from Labyrinthine (2010)
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 A still from Magic Mirror Maze (2013)
Naim El Hajj
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gregg Biermann
process of deconstruction, recontextualization and assemblage both on a semantic and on a formal aspect. What is it specifically about deconstruction which fascinates you and make you want to center your artistic style around it?
An artist has to confront the tools that (s)he uses. I don't think that tools are simply a means of personal expression but in fact lead the arts down certain creative paths. I see the meaning of digital technologies in their ability to copy and thus to reflect, transform, transmit, reframe, reverse, magnify and super-impose. The propensity to copy also undermines the idea of the unified and autonomous artwork. So while not thinking directly about Derrida, I would say that the avant-garde cinema has always had a preoccupation with film form and thus with deocnstruction, recontextualization and assemblage. This preoccupation with form also lends itself nicely to questioning the implicit meanings in the language of conventional cinema as well as opening up new and unexpected ways of understanding images through process. By the way, in these last years we have seen that the frontier between Video Art and Cinema is growing more and more vague: do you think that this "frontier" will exists longer?
Artists have been in dialogue with cinema since Marey and Muybridge (long before video). Modernist abstract artists saw in cinema the element of time and created an abstract graphic cinema that extended their ideas from painting and the same goes for the surrealist trance films. When various film artists adopted a neoromantic sensibility in the mid-20th century and this became central to the avant-garde film movement, I'd say this created a chasm between the art world and the world of avantgarde and underground films. By the 1970's film artists began to embrace the gallery environment as well as various strains of contemporary art aesthetics (minimal art, process art, conceptual art, pop art). Anthony McCall is a good example of this and he talked about how the two worlds twirled around each
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Gregg Biermann
ART Habens
A still from Spherical Coordinates (2005)
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Summer 2015 A still from High Noon Reflections (2009)
Naim El Hajj
4 23 0 5
Naim El Hajj
21 06 4
ART Habens
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gregg Biermann
other without ever really meeting. Through digital video I would say that these boundaries are much more porous. My work has been shown in both the black box (theatrical setting) and the white cube (gallery setting). Still – artists want to call me a filmmaker and filmmakers want to call me an artist. What to do? Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". When you intervene within the frame, you seem to give a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the images you capture and elaborate: so I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
One of the things that makes cinema so psychologically powerful is that the viewer cannot consciously apprehend everything that the complex synthesis of elements provides. I am not so interested in personal experience per se. Much of what I do has to do with giving up some control in order to allow for things to happen that surprise me when they emerge. In my work that appropriates Hollywood films several writers have pointed out that there is a sense of stillness to the work even as it is hyperactive. This comes from the nature of the repetition that I often employ and how it allows us to experience moments that are spread out in time simultaneously. What this allows is time for the contemplation of what is actually on screen in ways that are lost otherwise. So yes – I like the idea of giving permanence to the ephemeral.
A still from Crop Duster Octet (2011)
rhythm of your works?
By definition video is rhythm and movement, gesture and continuity. In your videos you create time-based works that induce the viewer to abandon himself to his associations, looking at time in spatial terms and I daresay, rethinking the concept of space in such a static way: this seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. How do you conceive the
Summer 2015
Rhythm has to do with the relationship of events to each other in time. I do enjoy works that play with time in interesting ways. That's why I like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman: 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so much. I've seen it 3 or 4 times and I'd say that after each viewing my experience of cinematic time and space changed in rather profound ways. I think that that kind of new understanding of time and
4 23 0 5
Gregg Biermann
space is important. Oddly this relates to The Age of Animals in various ways. For example part of the reason why people do not see human generated global warming as a problem is that its scale is too big and pace is too slow. Likewise we don't notice the extinction of many species because many of them they are too small. What Akerman does in Jeanne Dielman is to provide the viewer with a different pace and scale. I had a similar experience when I heard the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman's six hour String
ART Habens
Quartet #2. From these works and others I learned that it is possible to become differently attuned to the world through art. This may be more important now than in any time before. In my own work that involves using systematic global templates to reorganize time and space, I use digital technology for its natural propensity to copy and repeat in order to achieve the atemporal form that you mention. Rhythm is arrived at in these works by using
21 06 4
Summer 2015
ART Habens
Gregg Biermann
pre-determined and systematic patterns to restructure the found materials. Of course I always think that the patterns in these pieces are more obvious than they apparently are to most people perhaps because I have become very attuned to perceiving patterns in music and film. I have come to believe that the patterns in my pieces are just outside of most people's ability to grasp on a single viewing. These patterns are global templates so that everything that occurs in these pieces is the result of my original compositional idea and its interaction with the original iconic sequence. Of course I am often not satisfied with the result of my very first idea so the finished work is usually the result of trying many variations until I arrive at the one that works. Let me describe one of the simpler compositional ideas , In Happy Again there are 7 layers of the same sequence from Singin' in the Rain. Each layer is equally visible in the composition. The center layer runs at the speed of the original, however each 3 of the layers on the bottom of the original run at progressively slower speeds and 3 of the layers on top of the original rub at progressively faster speeds. All of the layers align for a single frame at the very center of the piece. The result is that there is a reverberation that gets tighter over time to the center of the piece and the reverberation gradually separates further over time to the end. What we experience is constantly shifting relationships between all of these layers of sound and image. The rhythms created in this piece and others are an emergent phenomenon, the result of how the all of the visual and sonic elements in original sequence interacts with the imposed formal scheme. A still from Crop Duster Octet (2011)
Before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
that my desire to have that happen has impacted my artistic decisions so much. In that way I just try to create what I am interested in seeing. One of the things that working in single channel digital video allows is flexibility as to how people can experience the work. I've been excited by the possibilities of streaming media. As a member of the board of directors of the
I would hope to have my work viewed by as many sensitive minds as possible. I am not sure
Summer 2015
4 23 0 5
Gregg Biermann
ART Habens
evolving?
Filmmakers Cooperative in New York, I have set up an agreement with Fandor to have members' films distributed online.
I seem to have a rather concentrated constellation of concerns that evolve very slowly. As far as the future goes – who knows. Maybe I'll make stained glass windows.
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Gregg. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work
21 06 4
Summer 2015