CIRCA Projects — Winter 2012 Programme

CIRCA

Programme Two — Winter 2012

Clemens von Wedemeyer — From the opposite side Manon de Boer — Think About Wood, Think About Metal

Benedict Drew — The Persuaders

Ben Russell — Trypps #7 (Badlands)

Cover image: Benedict Drew, The Persuaders (2011). © and Courtesy the artist.

Ben Jeans Houghton — Black Cloud

Introduction CIRCA Projects is a not-for-profit visual arts organisation that presents work by international contemporary artists, through exhibitions, screenings, talks and new commissions, across the North East of England. Our winter programme will feature exciting new projects across our regular programme strands – Screen and Site, investigating a loose theme of time and experience.

Screen Site Editions & Events CIRCA Screen is a venue dedicated to artists’ film and video, presenting a programme of single-screen works and promoting dialogue around the ways in which artists work with the moving image and the ‘screen’.

The year opens with an opportunity to see the video work of Berlinbased artist Clemens von Wedemeyer, whose films From the opposite side and Against Death (12 January – 24 February) construct complex narratives by combining artistic and cinematic languages. In March, CIRCA Screen will continue to play with the ideas of slowing down the expereince of an exhibition, presenting 4 works over the 4 week duration of AV Fesitval 12, by world-renowned artists John Smith, Manon de Boer, Martin Arnold and Ben Russell (1 – 31 March) – all in keeping with the festival’s theme, ‘As Slow As Possible’.

Also as part of AV Festival 12, CIRCA Site will present The Persuaders

by Benedict Drew (1 – 31 March) as a solo exhibition at the Stephenson Works, Newcastle upon Tyne. Building on CIRCA Site’s exploration of lens-based artists’ utilisation of physical space, The Persuaders will create a multi-sensory path through the exhibition site, manipulating the location and audience members in equal measure.

CIRCA have worked with artists from our programme, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Ben Jeans Houghton, Eric Bainbridge and Doug Fishbone, to produce limited edition prints and publications made as part of CIRCA’s affordable editions series. In January, Ben Jeans Houghton’s project Black Cloud will launch with an eclectic spokenword ‘further reading’ event at the historical Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle upon Tyne. All profits made through these initiatives are directed towards the exhibitions and events programme, which specialises in presenting and commissioning works by artists – both established and at a more formative stage in their career.

Screen

Clemens von Wedemeyer 12 January — 24 February

From the opposite side 12 January — 7 February Preview, 11 January, 6 — 8 pm Against Death 9 — 24 February Preview and Book Launch, 8 February, 6 — 8 pm

CIRCA Projects is proud to present the first solo exhibition in the UK, outside of London, by the German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer.

The celebrated work of von Wedemeyer is characterised by its exploration of the rituals of cinema and documentary, and by its use of looping narratives and dizzying repetition. For this solo exhibition, a different film from von Wedemeyer will open every two weeks. Against Death and From the opposite side, represent the artist’s use of cinematic strategies and motifs in his attempt to draw together the relationship between the two languages of cinema and art.

Emerging out of the artworks themselves, the concept for this exhibition format draws on the constantly revolving scenarios we see in von Wedemeyer’s films as they loop temporally, physically and narratively within a space, pushing the boundaries of the screen.

A new publication – with film stills and text by Axel Lapp – will accompany the exhibition.

From the opposite side (2007) follows a day passing in a train station in a small German town from a subjective camera eye. The film starts where it ends, and its looping nature leads the viewer to question its apparent documentary elements. From the Opposite Side was shot on location around an old cinema near Münster Central Station and was shown in the cinema as part of Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007.

In Against Death (2009) a man has seemingly become immortal after joining a tribal ritual. The film is part of von Wedemeyer’s project The Fourth Wall (2009), an exploration of the myth of the Tasaday people – an allegedly undiscovered tribe in the Philippine rainforest which came to international attention in the 1970s. At CIRCA Screen, Against Death is presented together with the film Interview (2009) which depicts the talking head of Geoffrey Frand, described as lecturer, ethnographer and actor; it is not at all obvious which guise we are seeing.

Screen

Screen

Clemens von Wedemeyer, From the opposite side, 2007. Š the artist. Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris

Screen

Screen

John Smith, Manon de Boer, Martin Arnold, Ben Russell 1 — 31 March AV Festival 24 hour launch Friday 2 March, 3 — 6 pm John Smith: Frozen War (Hotel Diaries 1) 1 — 10 March Manon de Boer: Think about Wood, Think about Metal 13 — 17 March Martin Arnold: Soft Palate 20 — 24 March Ben Russell: Trypps #7 (Badlands) 27 — 31 March

As part of the AV Festival 12 programme in Sunderland, CIRCA Screen presents an exhibition of films focusing on four internationally acclaimed artists whose work celebrates repetition, duration and the long-take.

At CIRCA Screen, the group exhibition is conceptually elongated so that the four works are presented individually, in sequence, across the one month duration of the Festival, encouraging repeat visits to the show.

AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible is a biennial festival in slow motion, with some works running for 31 days, some for fleeting moments only, and others appearing to freeze or extend time. Spanning visual art, music, sound and film, the programme manifests in different places at different paces, speeds and times of day throughout March.

Co-curated by AV Festival and CIRCA Projects. Courtesy of LUX, London; Auguste Orts; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; and Light Cone.

AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible 1 — 31 March 2012 avfestival.co.uk

Screen

Screen

John Smith, Frozen War (Hotel Diaries 1), 2001. Š the artist. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London

Screen

Screen

Manon de Boer, Think about Wood, Think about Metal, 2011. © the artist. Courtesy Auguste Orts

John Smith Frozen War (Hotel Diaries 1) (2001) 1 – 10 March

Manon de Boer Think about Wood, Think about Metal (2011) 13 – 17 March

John Smith’s Frozen War is the first episode in the artist’s Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world’s hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East. In Frozen War Smith narrates the TV news frozen in time at 1.41am, just after the U.S and Britain started bombing Afghanistan. The slow pace and rambling form of the narrative become apt communicators of Smith’s own confusion – creating an opportunity for the artist to turn the tables on the news; asking the questions it fails to ask.

Manon de Boer’s Think about Wood, Think about Metal is a slow sound portrait of composer Robyn Schulkowsky – the artist’s third cinematic portrait in a trilogy about the 1970s.

In the work, fragments of the life and thinking of percussionist Schulkowsky are explored within the historical context of the decade’s avant-garde music scene where Schulkowsky worked with composers including John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff.

Percussion improvisations by Schulkowsky provide a metronome for the film, in which rhythm and a non-linear structuring of time are employed to communicate more abstract notions, such as memory, history and life.

Screen

Screen

Martin Arnold, Soft Palate, 2010. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

Martin Arnold Soft Palate (2010) 20 – 24 March

Ben Russell Trypps#7 (Badlands) (2010) 27 – 31 March

Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold creates intensely cut sequences, in which several seconds of found footage is stretched out into longer works. In Soft Palate, Arnold directs his deconstructive impulses towards the heritage of Walt Disney to create a neurotic re-animation that comes to life in the darkness between images, where the viewer meets his dreams and demons. How much do we miss when we blink our eyes?

Intense repetition and subtle variations evoke surprising nuances from existing film material. Soft Palate makes us feel in the dark, fairly literally.

To conclude the exhibition, CIRCA Screen proudly presents Russell’s most recent installment of Trypps, a series of seven films that the artist describes as “an ongoing study in trance, travel and psychedelic ethnography.” Through an intimate long-take, Trypps #7 (Badlands) charts a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park before descending into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of the screen as a site for transcendence.

Event See Russell’s feature film debut Let Each One Go Where He May at Star and Shadow Cinema, Thu 29 March, 7.30pm, £5/£3.50

Screen

Site

Benedict Drew — The Persuaders 1 — 31 March

Stephenson Works South Street, Newcastle upon Tyne AV Festival 24 hour launch Friday 2 March, 9 am — 3 pm

The Persuaders was originally conceived in an exhibition at James Taylor Gallery, London.

AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible 1 — 31 March 2012 avfestival.co.uk

Benedict Drew (b. 1977) works across video, performance, sound and other media. His work uses the apparatus of film, video and music to test and reflect upon the relationships we have with technology and its oscillation between the exalted and the commonplace, between desire and redundancy. Much of his work has been based in collaboration, most frequently with artist Emma Hart. They have performed often in the UK and internationally including at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre, ICA London as part of the Nought to Sixty season, Performa 09 New York and most recently at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art as part of images festival where they received OCAD Off Screen Award for the installation ‘Untitled Seven’. He has traveled widely, presenting work in UK, Japan, USA and Europe. Benedict has also composed the soundtracks for several artists films. He has made many works for radio, most recently the series Unter Radio on Resonance FM. For many years he curated the London Musicians’ Collective annual festival of experimental music. He is currently on the LUX Associate Artist program and will present a solo show at Cell Project Space, London in April 2012.

Site

CIRCA Projects present a new site-specific installation, The Persuaders, by Benedict Drew. Through the use of environmental stewardship, a single screen video gives breathing instructions that induce a sense of calm and well being. Sculptures act as empathetic mascots. Faces greet you with a smile. Old technology mimics slightly newer technology. A complaint about the world is lodged. Drew’s work aims to both create and destabilize systems, playfully referencing the history of film, music and conceptual art.

Taking the form more of a ghost train than exhibition, The Persuaders leads audiences through multiple, disorientating spaces within connecting pavilions, altering our subjective sense of time and space, before being ejected into the historic site of past industries: the Stephenson Works.

Site

Benedict Drew, The Persuaders, 2011/12. Š and courtesy the artist

CIRCA Projects will launch a new Limited Edition print and artist multiple to accompany the exhibition For more information, please see circaprojects.org

Site

Editions

Ben Jeans Houghton — Black Cloud: further reading Edition and Publication Launch Event

Venue: The Literary & Philosophical Society 26 January, 6 — 8 pm £3 entry, plus special discount on print and publication sales available

Ben Jeans Houghton Black Cloud (2011), © Courtesy the artist

Black Cloud is a new project developed

by CIRCA Projects with artist Ben Jeans Houghton, drawing parallels between the Byker Scrapyard fire of May 2011 and the Great Fire of Newcastle in 1854.

The project is brought together through a limited edition print and a 32-page publication, featuring a commissioned text by Iris Priest. Priest describes Jeans Houghton’s photographs as documents of ‘a collective public spectacle and a pseudo-magical, highly subjective encounter’.

To celebrate the launch of the edition and publication, CIRCA and Ben Jeans Houghton have curated a special event in Newcastle. The evening will include short talks by guest speakers, intended to act as ‘further reading’ for the project and to uncover tangential topics addressed by emphatic specialists; which are fitting to the context of the historic Literary and Philosophical Society. £3 entry.

RSVP essential due to limited numbers.

All funds raised from entry and sales directly support the project and event

Editions

Editions

Prints Series — Affordable Limited Editions

Ben Jeans Houghton Black Cloud, No.6, 2011 Archival pigment print, 20 x 30 cm Edition of 50 £80 (unframed) Eric Bainbridge Two sausages, 1993 / 2011 Archival pigment print, 20 x 25 cm Edition of 50 £80 (unframed)

CIRCA Projects works closely with artists to produce exclusive limited editions. This new initiative provides a one-off opportunity to acquire an affordable artwork for your own contemporary art collection.

All funds raised are directed towards the exhibitions and events programme, which specialises in presenting and commissioning works by both established and emerging artists at a pivotal point in their career.

Doug Fishbone Untitled, 2011 Archival pigment print, 20 x 30 cm Edition of 50 £80 (unframed)

COMING SOON

CIRCA Editions are produced in collaboration with Jack Lowe Studio.

All editions are available from our website.

For details, email info@circaprojects.org

CIRCA are working with Benedict Drew to produce a new limited edition print and artist multiple to accompany the exhibition The Persuaders

Editons

Info

Visit — Sunderland CIRCA Screen National Glass Centre

Opening hours Tuesday — Friday 12 am — 5 pm

River Wear W Wea r St

During AV Festival 12: 1 — 31 March Tuesday — Saturday 10 am — 5 pm

CIRCA Screen

Northern Gallery Comtempory Art

The Place, Athenaeum Street, Sunderland, SR1 1QX

Sunderland Museum & Art Gallery

Public Transport

Mowbray Park

CIRCA Screen is located on the ground floor of The Place, which is a 2 minute walk from Sunderland Station. (Trains & Metro every 10 minutes from Newcastle and Gateshead.

Journey time 20 minutes.)

— Newcastle CIRCA Site Benedict Drew — The Persuaders 1 – 31 March Wednesday — Sunday 12 — 5 pm or to visit by appointment, email info@circaprojects.org Stephenson Works, South Street, Newcastle, NE1 3PE

Info

Info

Information — About CIRCA Projects Dialogue with the Present

Online

CIRCA Projects is a not-for-profit curatorial arts organisation. Its main goal is to present the viewer with coherently researched exhibitions that are embedded in the present. Our work is mainly based in the presentation and production of new art works and projects within lens-based and time-based practices. Hence our aim is to encourage a critical discussion around “contemporary art production” and we stress the importance of regularly organising artist talks, debates and lectures in order to create an access point to art and its contexts.

circaprojects.org

Exhibitions, screenings, talks, publications and commissions, in both gallery and offsite contexts, are some of the means by which CIRCA Projects works with artists – both established and at a more formative stage of their career – to promote exciting new practices and critical dialogues.

For further information about CIRCA’s current, future and past programmes, online store and archive of artist talks and conversations, visit circaprojects.org

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Contact info@circaprojects.org

Programme Partners

Funding Partners

Corporate Partners

Info

Dates — for your Diary February

January Wednesday

Thursday

Wednesday

Clemens von Wedemeyer Preview

Ben Jeans Houghton Launch Event

Clemens von Wedemeyer Preview

Friday

Friday

Tuesday

AV Festival: Benedict Drew Preview

AV Festival: John Smith Preview

AV Festival: Manon de Boer

11

26

8

March

2

2

13

April Tuesday

Tuesday

Wednesday

AV Festival: Martin Arnold

AV Festival: Ben Russell

Mario Pfiefer Preview

20

CIRCA

27

circaprojects.org

18