switch 2012
SWITCH CONTEMPORARY VIDEO ART
JO B QVCMJD DPOUFYU edited by Triona Ryan, Harald Turek
www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org
The Velvet Richness of Voids: SWITCH – The Artist’s Perspective Is Contemporary Visual Art more peer than public? Who do artists make artwork for? Themselves, in order to progress a research question or to progress their practices or artistic careers? Their peers, to make a good impression on their fellow artists, in a highly competitive arena? Or for a broader public audience, hoping to generate opportunities for meaningful dialogue about the issues that they are curious about? Artists make artwork for a variety of reasons, all viable and realistic, but all requiring careful and ongoing balance. At times there are art practices and projects that prioritise a response from fellow artists as opposed to taking a creative risk and wondering what a broader public may bring, by way of comment or contribution to a project. switch as an art project works to engage with us as a public audience, as curious citizens more so than as fellow artists. The Tipperary based project has operated and developed with integrity and clear intention over a number of years. This artist-led project, which has been nurtured and encouraged by North Tipperary County Council’s Arts Office, works creatively to make use of a growing reality – that of vacant retail units – in order to generate and maintain open conversations with the people of Nenagh around a range of ideas and issues that we face as a society. Each year the project selects a range of artist’s film and video, from an array of Irish and International submissions, and creatively converts vacant shop windows into large, back-lit TV screens and temporary projections. Taking place in early February, when typical Irish nights can still be dark, cold and quite predictably wet; switch transforms vacant shops and buildings, now omnipresent in all of our towns and cities, into vivid, animated displays where we as a public are offered something to ponder, even for a fleeting moment. By temporarily modifying shop windows switch brings a welcome aspect of domestic warmth to street level, by reminding us of the draw of a TV screen in the corner of the room on a cold night and of the magic of cinema as we steal ourselves away for a few short hours, safe in the hands of the filmmaker as storyteller. By selecting and presenting artist’s projects that are arresting and eye catching
this art project offers a chance for passers-by to stop for a moment, to contemplate the world that we live in and the people that we engage with. Equally the project is installed so creatively, stitched into the fabric of Nenagh, that the public, whether on foot or in passing cars, may choose to briefly glance at the works. The project is far from loud or brash. It offers the public a glimpse of the world through someone else’s eyes, that of the artist, which is open and available but not dependent on a cultural institution to mediate the work. This year’s films and videos stem from diverse international locations ranging from Canada to the UK and from Germany to the US. This international perspective has the potential not to transplant something alien into the streetscape of Nenagh but to give solace to the similarities that we face as a society, local and global. This year’s selection of work looks at the theme of balance. Balance, for example, presented in the form of stacking shapes as a metaphor for human movement and exploring how we may exist in a virtual world. Other works present us with unexplained human postures and questions why things may appear different to our presumed expectations. As one possible other common thread the works also have resonance with uncertainty, that grasping reality of the times in which we live. How do we as a society balance out any reminders of previous attachments to material wealth and to the legacy of Capitalism with its voracious addiction to progress? For one very timely view of possible alternatives and on ways of redressing a sense of social balance we can look to our new First Citizen, Michael D. Higgins, who in his Inauguration Speech in November 2011 spoke with his customary integrity and humanity about his aspirations for social solidarity and inclusive citizenship. He said that
We must seek to build together an active, inclusive citizenship; based on participation, equality, respect for all and the flowering of creativity in all its forms.1 switch offers us a tangible example of how creativity can quietly and respectfully engage with us as citizens, by pointing out to us that vacancy within our towns and cities can be temporarily transformed into moments of velvet richness. Anette Moloney 1.
http://www.president.ie/index.php?section=5&speech=1035&lang=eng
Sarah Buckius ...stacking...stacking...stacking...
01
Sarah Buckius (b. 1979 Urbana, IL) is an artist and educator who has taught at Michigan State University and University of Michigan School of Art & Design. Her creative work interweaves photography, video, performance, and installation and has been exhibited internationally. This performative-video shows replicated performances of my Sisyphean stacking and restacking a set of white blocks. Using video collage, I digitally transformed human movements to create kaleidoscopic patterns. This work explores how digital media uses replication to reconfigure a digitized moving body into infinite animated mutations. At the same time, the quirky bodily movements reestablish a sense of human physicality in virtual digital space. Sarah Buckius is based in South Carolina Aiken, USA.
Flatform With nature there are no special effects, only consequences
02
A man is shot inside an empty room and he moves and takes on positions continuously out of barycentre. The nature of the lacks of balance is invisible and his ability into standing up in spite of unnatural postures is inexplicable: this video has been realized without special effects but is simply the result of a real shooting of an artificial condition. With nature there are no special effects, only consequences outlines a declared state of suspense or unstable equilibrium between the abstract and the unexpected, control and chance, inertia and sudden shock. To be more precise the exact point of instant contact between the state of foresight and the extra ordinary. This work moves along an ideal border-line, the one of meaning, which articulates the difference between possibility and impossibility, between movement and pose (pause). The impossible impends on the possible, at least as much as the possible verifies the impossible. For Flatform, constructing a territory implies stirring events and creating spaces, concepts and inertia. Causing interactions between objects rather than interventions. Promoting relationships of position that are movements. Determining actions rather than depictions. Flatform is a group of artists founded in 2006 and based in Milan and Berlin. The group works on video and time based installations including mobile installations. Works by Flatform have been featured in several film festivals all over the world. On February 2011 Arte TV has dedicated part of the program Die Nacht/La Nuit to some works by Flatform Flatform are based in Berlin, Germany & Milan, Italy.
Fergus Fullarton Pegg Daffodils
03
Daffodils is a comment on the control of ‘nature’ reflecting on the human condition. The timelapse film was shot using STAN - Synchronous Timelapse Automated Netbot, a device designed and built by the artist. The entire process took approximately one week, consisting of 3000 single images. Fergus Fullarton Pegg is a Scottish based Artist, Filmmaker, Botanist & Inventor. He completed his undergraduate studies in Fine Art Photography at The Glasgow School of Art in 2008 and is currently undertaking a Masters in Design Innovation. His passion for plants and dedication to botanical filming enables him to capture moments of intense artistic exploration.. Fergus Fullarton Pegg is based in Glasgow, UK.
Paul Grimmer Without Mind
04
Paul Grimmer was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1975 and studied Fine Art at Northumbria University. His moving image, installation and performance work explores the biological and psychological, focusing on gaps in understanding, tensions between opposing forces and the fluid nature of identity. Central to this work is the treatment of time as a material—I work exclusively with single unedited camera shots. I am interested in how duration and stillness in a video projection can evoke a sense of place, of presentness for the observer. Without Mind (2011) was developed through a crossgenerational collaboration with the artist’s 80 year old Grandfather, who has practiced and taught the martial art of Karate for over 25 years and holds a black belt 3rd dan grade. Development began with an exploration of learning and evolved into a moving image portrait of the individual composed through an examination of movement and form. Capturing a sense of tension between intimacy and detachment in the handling of the subject the work uses documentation to subtly foreground underlying narratives of vulnerability and strength. Conventional assumptions of age and deterioration are also questioned as the work unfolds, dissecting time, slowing to reveal the detail of each movement. Familiar representations of the aging body are subverted to reveal a body that is strong, dynamic, monumentally present, dancing an intricate dance with an invisible opponent. Paul Grimmer is based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Lucie Kim & Felix von der Weppen kontinuum
05
Kontinuum is a video installation in three parts. I. anticipation II. realization reflection It is about being and the human relationship with time and space and the complexity that evolves through these variables. It is the observation of human anticipation, realization and reflection. This cycle can be applied to our whole life, as well as to singular moments. It is in space and through time that we can give form to ourselves. Lucie Kim & Felix von der Weppen are based in New York USA.
Nathalie Lavoie Chiseled Opening in the Mackenzie River
06
Commonly used as a metaphor evoking time, a river appears continuous, progressing in a linear fashion, and flowing in one direction. What happens when the river hides beneath a thick sheet of ice? The frozen surface impedes awareness of the passage of time. In this video, ice fog shrouds the frozen Mackenzie River, a landscape of profound stillness. An opening in the river reveals a hidden motion and restores the passage of time. The video captures the cyclical movement of a directional flow. Seen as a pulse, random waves merge into an attunement: a flexural gravity wave. The oscillation makes apparent how both, the creation of the temporary opening, and time itself are human constructs. Lavoies recent work explores the use of water as a medium through ephemeral installations in natural or urban landscapes. A chosen site becomes the concentration of energy, a locus from which multiple interpretations emerge and vanish. The installations or performances persist only as traces by means of photographs and/or video. Nathalie Lavoie is based in Fort Simpson, Canada.
Mark Neville Bolan Market
07
Neville’s tracking shot of a market place in Helmand Province disrupts our experience of the place as found in existing, mediated footage. The sequence explores the physical and semantic relationship bewteen the author, camera and the subject. Issues of motivation, translation, and response are generated in a powerful form. Glasgow-based artist Mark Neville makes lens-based works which have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces. His film and photography-based work has consistently looked to subvert the traditional role of social documentary practice, seeking to find new ways to empower the position of its subject over that of the author. Often working with closely knit working communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, Mark Neville’s film and photographic projects to date have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work. Points of reference for his work might include the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, or the art works of Martha Rosler, John Berger, or Hans Haacke. Mark Neville is based in Glasgow, Scotland.
David Theobald Workers Playtime
08
What do we mean by ‘labour’ in the digital age? The work is a contemporary reboot of the morale raising BBC radio show, ‘Workers’ Playtime’, which was broadcast from the factory floor throughout the 1940s and 1950s. When I made the piece I was thinking about a lot of different ideas that I think inform the work. For example, there seems to be a big disparity between the purported benefits of automation in terms of greater leisure time (‘play’) and the resulting reality of rising unemployment and the demise of manufacturing. We also seem to use a lot of this ‘spare’ time looking at screens. There is also the idea of labour in the newer ‘digital industries’, such as computer software, video games, mobile phones, internet banking etc. where we seem to be replicating the same ‘Fordist’ work structures that we had in industrial manufacturing with a decomposition of tasks again resulting in an alienation of labour. Finally, on a more flippant side, there’s the idea of the robot as a ‘worker’ with rights – perhaps as artificial intelligence develops we will need to think about how we can give robots more interesting jobs or ‘play’ time so they don’t get bored?
David Theobald is based in East Twickenham, UK.
Nenagh, Co. Tipperary
switch pays a special thanks to local shop owners who have supported the project by loaning the premises for the duration.
hctiws 2102
9 789197 952330 www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org
5th - 12th February 2012, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary