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SELECTED ARTISTS AND GALLERIES p. 06
FOCUS ON SOUND p. 96
GALLERY DIRECTORY p. 100
LOOP STUDIES p. 104
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‘Selected 10’ provides an introduction to each of the video projects and artists selected for the 13th edition of LOOP Fair. It includes images and descriptions of the 45 works that will be presented on 4, 5, and 6, June, 2015. It also includes the LOOP Studies programme that runs in parallel to the fair, and contributes to establishing the occasion to view, promote, and discuss artist film and video amid a specialized audience.
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A
12 — Dragos Alexandrescu, Absence of Presence l Gallery Taik Persons
18 — Anna Barham, Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike) l Arcade
20 — Janet Biggs, Can’t Find my Way Home l Analix Forever
24 — Fabien Charuau, Being Seen Trying l Chatterjee & Lal
26 — Chien-Chi Chang, China Town l Chi-Wen Gallery
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F
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32 — Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe, The Floating Chain | Marlborough Barcelona
34 — Clarisse Hahn, Los desnudos l Jousse Entreprise Gallery
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14 — Basma Alsharif, The Story of Milk and Honey l Galerie Imane Farès
16 — Pedro Barateiro, The Current Situation l Galeria Filomena Soares
Focus on sound
97 — Iñaki Bonillas, Ten Cameras Documented Acoustically l ProjecteSD
22 — François Bucher, Severa Vigilancia l ALARCON CRIADO
28 — Denicolai & Provoost, Constellation l West Den Haag
30 — Hoël Duret, La vie héroïque de B.S. – Un opéra en trois actes l Galerie Dohyang Lee
36 — Drew Heitzler, Paradies Amerika | Marlborough Chelsea
38 — Michal Helfman, % l Sommer Contemporary Art
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40 — Juul Hondius, Brilliant Punitive Raids | AKINCI
42 — Claudia Joskowicz, Hay muertos que no hacen ruido l Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo
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48 — Bertrand Lamarche, Les souffles l Galerie Jérôme Poggi
50 — Claudia Larcher, Self | 22,48 m²
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56 — Jonathan Monaghan, Escape Pod l bitforms gallery
58 — Mel O’Callaghan, Ensemble l Galerie Allen Focus on sound
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64 — Bongsu Park, Cell l Rosenfeld Porcini
98 — Susan Philipsz, Songs Sung from the First Person l Ellen de Bruijne Projects
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44 — Cyrus Kabiru, The end of the Black Mamba I l SMAC Gallery
46 — Katarzyna Kozyra, Faces l ZAK l BRANICKA
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152 — Lu Chunsheng, The History of Chemistry II l Vitamin Creative Space
54 — Ángel Marcos, Jilguero | Galeria Trama
60 — Jacco Olivier, No Title (480-620) l Galerie Ron Mandos
62 — João Onofre, Tacet l Marlborough Contemporary
66 — Tom Pnini, The Light Fantastic Toe l Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art
68 — Ulrich Polster, Notturno l Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
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70 — Sophia Pompéry, Still Water l Galerie Dix9
72 — Dania Reymond, Greenland Unrealised l Galerie Karima Celestin Focus on sound
78 — Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, MATRULLA l Galería Agustina Ferreyra
99 — Michele Spanghero, Monologue l Galerie Mario Mazzoli
84 — Eulàlia Valldosera, Avant la lumière | Galeria Sicart
86 — Emma van der Put, Rincé Alien l tegenboschvanvreden
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Y
92 — Wang Haiyang, Freud, Fish and Butterfly l Galerie Paris-Beijing
94 — Yao Qingmei, Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling! l Magician Space
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74 — Isabel Rocamora, Faith l Galeria SENDA
76 — Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Azor / Guernica Syndrome l Art Bärtschi & Cie
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80 — Dominik Stauch, Walking with Richard l Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner
82 — UNGLEE, Forget Me Not l Galerie Christophe Gaillard
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88 — Puck Verkade, Solitary Company l Dürst Britt & Mayhew
90 — Richard T. Walker, an is that isn’t always l àngels barcelona
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DRAGOS ALEXANDRESCU ABSENCE OF PRESENCE 2015, 2’ 12’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
The Absence of Presence is both a reflection and a representation of the impact of technology and the digital self on human relations. As we move our lives online, the Internet promises a blissful land of abundance. But can a space of constructed identities and permanent surveillance also be a space of intimacy? Dragos Alexandrecu’s film The Absence of Presence explores and questions the effects of technological interference on our capacity to be present. In the film a complex and contradictory space is presented. The frame intermittently shows inserts of fragmented physicality: tightly-cropped shots of fingers scrolling - or dancing- across the screen, eyes, legs. We hear sounds of crickets, and softly spoken words. The reverse gestures between the construction of a virtual self and a physical presence are explored. ‘What emerges in Alexandrescu’s exploration is the establishment of an architecture of loneliness, where the seductive construction of online identity acts as a symbolic wall from where it is difficult to escape. Does the ceaseless stream of intrusions and interruptions in our daily life necessarily entail inclusion in the social fabric? Or is it instead exclusionary? The Absence of Presence’s anticipatory nature is situated on the border between construction and ruin.’ Maya Byskov, curator and deputy director of Gallery Taik Persons.
Presented by — Gallery Taik Persons, Berlin
Dragos Alexandrescu (1974, Romania) is an audiovisual artist. He received a Master of Fine art from the University of Arts George Enescu, La i, Romania in 2005. His most notable exhibitions include the upcoming Ideologies and Conflicts, at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, RO. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions such as: My Time, Varikko Galleri, Sejnäjoki (2013); One day screening of My Time project, Tranzit GalleryIasi (2013); Perspectives, Vasa Konsthall and Ibis Gallery, Vasa (2009); Extended View, Gallery Sine, Helsinki (2008); Between, Platform Gallery, Vasa (2005); Index, Vector Gallery, Iasi (2005). His works have been included in several private collections in Europe. Alexandrescu currently lives and works in Vaasa, Finland.
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BASMA ALSHARIF THE STORY OF MILK AND HONEY 2011, 9’ 45’’, single channel, SD video, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 1AP
The Story of Milk and Honey is a short experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text. An unnamed man narrates the story of his attempt to write a love story in Lebanon. Through voice over narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a tale of defeat transpires into a multi-layered journey exploring how we collect information, perceive facts and recreate history. The video represents the material consequence of the failed love story, questioning where the main character is to be found in the midst of his own narrative. This work was produced with the Fundación Botín visual arts grant.
Presented by — Galerie Imane Farès, Paris
Basma Alsharif’s work considers the transmission of the history of Palestine, between fiction and reality. Sequences which have been filmed or recorded, collected in the media or on the social networks are collated into montages with a highly developed plasticity, where subtitles, and therefore the text, has as much individual presence as the soundtrack (found, borrowed from the repertoire of middle-eastern popular music, or mixed) and yet they remain very separate. Memory appears to be in full mutation, uncertain and subjective. The installation The Story of Milk and Honey (2011) is composed by three series: “Corniche Beirut”, “Les Sauvages”, “Original Family Archives”. Locations, temporalities and personalities are blurred, veering from raw documentary-type images to landscapes of pre-apocalyptic paradise. In 2014-2015, Alsharif has been artist in residence at the Pavillon Neuflize, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She is making her first feature film this year.
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PEDRO BARATEIRO THE CURRENT SITUATION 2015, 11’ 52’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
The narrative starts with the description of two events happening simultaneously: the cutting down of a palm tree and the sound of a demonstration against austerity outside the Portuguese Parliament. The two events become related, in unison, reflecting the present situation. On the one hand, the trees are being cut down because of the red weevil plague affecting specific types of palm trees brought from African ex-colonies; on the other hand, the demonstrations against austerity taking place in southern European countries such as Portugal, Spain and Greece identify the EU toxic assets as the roots of the economic crisis. These two events find a parallel in the film, creating a connection between natural and social systems.
Pedro Barateiro (1979, Almada, Portugal) is a multifaceted artist who works with sculpture, installation, video, painting, drawing, photography and text, using a broad field of action in search of a code for the senses and meanings of the image. Barateiro has an MA in Visual Arts (2006) from Malmö Art Academy, and is a graduate of Maumaus School of Visual Arts, Lisbon. He was the artist in residence at AIR Antwerpen; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; and in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. He participated at the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial, the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2008), the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), PHotoEspaña (2008), and Busan Biennale (2006). His work is present in several public collections, such as the Deutsche Bank Collection; EDP Foundation; Serralves Museum; ARCO Foundation; BESart - Colecção Banco Espírito Santo; Fundación “la Caixa”; and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He lives and works in Lisbon.
Presented by — Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisboa
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ANNA BARHAM DOUBLE SCREEN (NOT QUITE TONIGHT JELLYLIKE) 2013, 31’ 30”, 2 channel installation, colour, sound, edition of 3 + 1AP
Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike) explores the production and interpretation of voice between human and computer. The video shows a sequence of images sliding from one screen to another as they are repeatedly edited to a voice over. The script was constructed from many mutations of a text about cleaning a squid, which Barham read aloud and processed through speech recognition software, over and over again, creating a strange kind of feedback loop between herself and the computer. The images are used as an oblique code and syntactical key to track the transformations of particular sounds and words within the script. There is no start or finish, no structured narrative, but instead an associative accumulation of multiple ‘sense’. The main protagonist is a large format UV printer, tended by the hands of an unseen (human) printer, who carefully tapes iridescent paper to a print bed and cleans its surface with a brush before the arm of the mechanical printer rolls into action, blurring the lines between body and machine in a way that points to Barham’s writing method, which pitches technological and computational processes against the human voice to create a productive slippage. Punning images are triggered by the voice over: blinds in an office interior; an owl; particles flowing inside a virtual solid; black ink falling through water. The printer’s constant and repeating presence produces a sense of continuous production: the production of ‘meaning’ in the work in which the viewer is immersed and complicit; and the continuous and unrelenting production of self.
Presented by — Arcade, London
Anna Barham (1974, Birmingham, UK) works with video, sculpture, writing and live readings, exploring the plasticity of various technologies of language and their effect on subjectivity. Recent solo exhibitions, performances and commissions include Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; Composite, Brussels, and Rotterdam Film Festival (2015); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (2014); Site Gallery, Sheffield, and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2013). Recent group exhibitions and screenings include Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Künstlerhaus KM, Graz (2015); STUK, Leuven (2014); South London Gallery (2013), and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2013). Barham’s work is represented in major international collections including the Tate in London, and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela. She lives and works in London.
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JANET BIGGS CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME 2015, 9’ 44’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5
Can’t Find My Way Home explores the role of memory in the construction of identity. An avid collector of gems, Biggs’ grandfather was able to recall the most obscure names of samples in his collections even as he was losing the ability to remember or identify family members around him. In 1980, Merkers miners discovered a unique and extraordinary geological anomaly 800 meters below the surface: a cavern filled with giant, glistening, geometric crystals, some measuring more than a meter in length. Entering this natural wonder is like walking into a mammoth geode, an experience that is both immersive and otherworldly. Can’t Find my Way Home juxtaposes footage shot in the crystal cavern with documentation of neurological research conducted in laboratories in New York and Houston. In doing so, Biggs draws visual connections between the structure of these crystals and the proteins that determine the biochemical conditions of a hyper-excited brain, such as one afflicted with Alzheimer. By physically exploring the Merkers crystal cavern, Biggs figuratively sets out to investigate the diseased brain of her grandfather, tracing fading memories and making astonishing discoveries as she herself experiences disorientation and confusion, some of the same symptoms endured by Alzheimer’s patients.
Presented by — Analix Forever, Geneva
PREMIÈRE
Janet Biggs (1959, Harrisburg, PA, USA) is an American artist, known primarily for her work in video, photography and performance. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has captured such events as speeding motorcycles on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Olympic synchronized swimmers in their attempts to defy gravity, kayaks performing a synchronized ballet in Arctic waters, sulphur miners inside an active volcano, and a camel caravan crossing the Taklamakan desert of Western China. Biggs received her undergraduate degree from Moore College of Art, and pursued graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been featured in the first International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias; the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon; Vantaa Art Museum; Konsthall Passagen, Linköping; Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. She currently lives and works in New York.
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FRANÇOIS BUCHER SEVERA VIGILANCIA 2007, 36’’ 2 channel, HD video installation, edition of 5 +AP
Severa Vigilancia is a nod to the title of a little-known play by French author Jean Genet. The project arises from a happening at the University of Antioquia, Medellín, in 1999. That year had witnessed much violence on campus, with three people being murdered in the same semester. During a seminar of the Master’s degree program in theatre, two students who had to give a presentation on the life and work of Jean Genet decided to stage a hoax of an armed kidnapping of some fellow students. For this purpose, they wrote a detailed script designed to produce a crescendo of terror, finely tuned to reach peaks of anxiety that probably would not have been attainable in the unfolding of a real event. ‘Why would you risk having me, of all people, do a presentation on Genet?’ asks the author of the hoax, under the alias of ‘Joche’. He asks this rhetorical question without mocking the faces of terror he saw on his fellow students. ‘Joche’ is no different from Genet: he signals the moment when he feels his resemblance to the French author, ‘A scoundrel instilling fear’ he says smiling. The underworld of Genet’s youth is the same as the one ‘Joche’ has witnessed in Medellin; Genet is alive in the Medellin of the 90s in the same way as Dostoyevsky lives on in the characters of Kurosawa (Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?, Trafic 27, Gilles Deleuze, 1998). Just as Genet is not easily dismissed as an amoral, savage anarchist, so ‘Joche’ must be understood as a man with a mission. On the one hand, he sets out to break the codes of theatrical representation, and on the other to rebel against the status quo of an apathetic academic world that is unable to experience the horror that is taking place outside the walls of the classroom, a few meters away, in a city that is bleeding from mindless violence. The piece embodies many layers of violence: from the violence that is, to the violence that is not, and to the violence that could have been. It also points towards the undecidability between violence and the representation of violence. It remains suspended forever within a fiction - and its double.
Presented by — ALARCON CRIADO, Seville
François Bucher (1972, Cali, Colombia) is an artist trained in film by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded a research grant from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. He is currently a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå, Sweden, where he is pursuing a doctorate in art practices within the same institution. Bucher’s works are interrelated, and each virtual splice is there to create multiple short circuits of unpublished meaning. His pieces create ellipses, new dimensions of thought underlying the whole field. He participated at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, in the Latin American Pavilion, curated by Paz Guevara and Alfons Hug (2013). His work was present at the 43rd Salon (inter) National de Artistas, Medellín, curated by Mariángela Méndez. During 2014, he was one of the artists selected for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, curated by Berta Sichel; Cuenca International Biennial, Ecuador, curated by Jacopo Crivelli. He is currently working on a solo project for FLORA ars+natura, Bogotá, curated by José Roca. François Bucher lives and works in Berlin.
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FABIEN CHARUAU BEING SEEN TRYING 2015, single channel video installation, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
The video installation consists of a video mapped onto multiple squares of frosted glass mounted on stands. The work uses as its source material footage from the Internet showing Indian devotees at prayer. The artist has used online face-detection software to create a graphic overlay. Footage sourced from the Internet consists of online ‘Darshan’ recordings. ‘Darshan’ is a Hindi term meaning ‘auspicious sight’: the action of seeing and being seen by the deity whereby a state of spiritual closure between devotee and god may be attained. Observing that devotees pray in front of computers, this project investigates how the Internet processes a prayer. The footage also recalls online surveillance technologies.
Presented by — Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai
PREMIÈRE
Fabien Charuau (1974, Lorient, France) is a visual artist working with photography and video. Having spent half his life in India where his journey with photography began, he sees himself as an Indian photographer of French origin. Some of the latest exhibitions that include his work are Spheres 7, Galleria Continua / Le Moulin de Boissy (2015); Ways of the Road, Alliance Française de Delhi (2013); Spheres 6 - overview, Chatterjee & Lal Gallery, Mumbai (2013); Dératisme#44 - ANASTASIE online show curated by Joël Riff (2012); and Exchanging Glances, Chatterjee & Lal Gallery, Mumbai (2011). Besides having had his work shown in solo and group shows and at photo festivals, his reflection on Indian photography has led him to take on a curatorial role for shows on contemporary Indian photography, such as This Is Not That, Galerie Duboys (2011). He also writes on Indian photography for the French magazine PHOTO. Fabien Charuau lives and works in Bombay.
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CHIEN-CHI CHANG CHINA TOWN 1992 - 2011, 19’ 23’’, single channel, edition of 5 Courtesy of Chang Chien-Chi, Magnum Photos, Chi-Wen Gallery
Immigration is propelled by suffering. To witness the shifting patterns of populations is to see the world in all its exigencies: war, natural disasters, repression, famine, poverty and persecution. But there is a hope at the bottom of that Pandora’s box of troubles: the hope that propels immigrants to settle in strange lands. To contrast the bleak, blackand-white lives of the Chinese men living in the US, Chien-Chi Chang chose to use colour when photographing their families in China. The last 22 years of developing these relationships are now culminating in a threegenerational drama. Some of the first waves of illegal immigrants are now choosing to return to China to enjoy the prosperity they have created there and spend the rest of their lives with family members they have not seen for nearly two decades. Yet their sons still choose to be smuggled to New York, leaving their own families behind. Divided families remain divided. The compelling quality of this project is its universality. It is about the essential human need to hope for the future and about being willing to sacrifice one’s immediate happiness in order to fulfil the dream of giving one’s children a ‘better’ life. But is economic prosperity worth the social cost? Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found in the lives of the people left behind in China and in those of the second and third generation immigrants growing up in the United States. Look at them, and listen to their voices. You may not understand their language, but you can feel their longing.
Presented by — Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei
Chien-Chi Chang (1961, Taiwan) has spent over a decade working in New York’s Chinatown, documenting the lives of immigrants there. His latest project China Town developed out of an interest in the dispersion of individuals and families from their homeland. From 1992 to 2011, he has followed the lives of illegal immigrants in New York City’s Chinatown who left China as a matter of survival. These pictures have appeared in National Geographic magazine, as well as the New Yorker, Time, and the Germanlanguage edition of Geo. The series earned Chang first place in the ‘Daily Life Story’ category in the 1999 World Press Photo Contest. That same year, Chang won a grant from the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund for humanistic photography and was awarded the Visa d’Or for magazine photography in Perpignan. In 1999, he was named the Missouri/NPPA Magazine Photographer of the Year. He has exhibited at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Biennale di Venezia, the São Paulo Art Biennial, and the International Center of Photography in New York. Chang is a member of Magnum Photos. He lives and works in Graz.
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DENICOLAI & PROVOOST CONSTELLATION 2012 - 2014 Animatic: 16’ / test: 9’’ / screensaver: variable duration single channel or 2 channel + screensaver edition of 10 + 4AP Courtesy of the artists, West Den Haag and Solang Production Paris Brussels
During the writing of the script of their 2D animation film project, Denicolai & Provoost acquired as much knowledge about plants, trees, and animals and their behaviour, as they learned from the animation field. The artists decided to reflect these experiences by creating Constellation, a triptych that shows the research depicting nature-culture together with the process of producing the animation. This project shifts between the two constituents of nature documentary filmmaking in order to create an open mental space for the spectator. On the one hand, the film offers a view of everyday life in the Sonian Forest near Brussels. On the other, it constantly questions the human perception of and the impact on nature. The project does not rely on narration, but on rhythm and music; it is presented as a set that combines three types of animated images: 1. The animatic, an animated storyboard comprising 344 drawings by the artists, is the structure of the animation film in progress, following the outcome in time, in action, in framing and points of view. 2. The animation test is the first study on the aesthetics and dynamics of the animation of a swan floating in a circle on the water. 3. The screensaver is a compilation of 38 images in a random loop generated by the screensaver program of a computer. The composition of images includes colour studies for the animation film and photographic details of ‘The Hunts of Maximilian’, a series of 12 tapestries inspired by the Sonian Forest. The tapestries were woven in Brussels in the 16th century, and are on display in the Louvre.
Presented by — West Den Haag, The Hague
The artist duo Simona Denicolai (1972, Milan, Italy) and Ivo Provoost (1974, Diksmuide, Belgium) work with drawings, animation, objects, prints, and installations. Central to their practice is playing with existing models such as the social and economic systems by upturning the common perception of things. They retract art from its conventional place by working within public spaces and public institutions to extend their work outward into daily life. Within the aesthetic and political intimacy of their artistic digestive process, they withdraw from all forms of elite artistic mechanisms and take up an art that is serious and exact and which almost, in a sociological sense, observes and analyses economic and social realities. Their work has been exhibited widely at institutions and galleries internationally, including places such as L’Antenne/ Le Plateau Frac Île-de-France (2011); Netwerk Center for Contemporary Art, Aalst (2012); Juan d’Oultremont, Brussels NICC vitrine (2013); and (SIC), Brussels (2014). They currently live and work in Brussels.
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HOËL DURET LA VIE HÉROÏQUE DE B.S.–UN OPÉRA EN TROIS ACTES 2013 - 2015, 46’, 3 channel installation colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
The video opera La vie héroïque de B.S. is an epic drama depicting the story of B.S., a mysterious designer who inherited certainties of modernist thought to a degree of absurdity and disenchantment. The first act plays with iconic design pieces from the 20th century. Passionate about and fascinated by those modern emblems, he began the mad enterprise of synthesising them as a zany ‘Facteur Cheval’ in designland. The second act takes place in the design firm of B.S., who is working on a very strange order, which is as absurd as it is challenging. The impossibility of resolving his project plunges B.S. into a form of madness, which drives him to continue his research alone in Greece, a place that he regards as the origin of all manufactured forms, where the column was originally conceptualized and realized. The particularity of this video opera is that each act was filmed in an installation/personal exhibition by Hoël Duret, which constituted both the décor of the opera as well as an exhibition in itself.
Presented by — Galerie Dohyang Lee, Paris
PREMIÈRE
Hoël Duret (1988, Nantes, France) lives and works in Nantes and Paris. He graduated from ENSBA Nantes Métropole in 2011. His work has been seen at the Biennale de Mulhouse where he was awarded the Young Creation Award in 2012. This award will allow him to have an exhibition, at the Museum of Fine Arts of Mulhouse, in June 2015. He was also awarded the Yishu 8 Prize, Beijing in 2014. Hoël Duret’s views on creation were influenced in a period of reinterpretation of modernist thought. There is an alternation between industrialized and artisan modes of production in his work as he shares the same interest in both modes like modernist pioneers who believed in mass industrialization but also used the skills of craftsmen. However, the fascination for modernism he displays could only be a façade, as he uses the aesthetical manners of his predecessors to criticize and examine them.
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JONAH FREEMAN & JUSTIN LOWE THE FLOATING CHAIN 2014, 30’, single channel, edition of 3 + 2AP
The Floating Chain takes the form a fauxethnographic cut-up narrative illustrated through a series of props, environments, pictures, and architectural models. The film’s aesthetic is inspired by the surrealistic banality of a breakfast cereal commercial, and the physical setting is the placeless and timeless location of the “set”. People exist solely in pictures on the wall, footage on monitors or voices from a stereo. Scenes, divided into discrete chapters, play within the frame of a television or film projection located within the set. Each chapter is told through a disembodied voiceover that illustrates a series of disparate groups and settings. The cumulative result is a collage portrait of a parallel science fiction culture where the cohesive whole is left in obscurity.
Jonah Freeman (1975, Santa Fe, US) and Justin Lowe (1976, Dayton, US) create extensive immersive installations. Their shows include Floating Chain (High-Res Toni), Marlborough Chelsea, New York (2014); Taipei Biennial 2014, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2014); SISTER MOIRE, Winfield House, London (2013); A Diamond hidden in the Mouth of a Corpse, ISTANBUL ’74 (2012); Stray Light Grey, Marlborough Chelsea, New York (2012); Bright White Underground, Country Club, Los Angeles (2010); Black Acid Co-op, Deitch Projects, New York (2009); The Station, Miami (2008); Hello Meth Lab In The Sun, Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2008). Select group exhibitions include PANOPTICUM, Robert Miller Gallery, New York (2014); Kiss Me Deadly: A Group Show of Contemporary Neo-Noir from Los Angeles, Paradise Row, London (2011); Transmission LA, MOCA, Los Angeles (2012). Freeman and Lowe live and work in New York.
Presented by — Marlborough Barcelona, Barcelona
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CLARISSE HAHN LOS DESNUDOS 2011, 12’ 17”, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 3 + 1AP
The video Los desnudos shows how landless Mexican peasants, left without their lands by the government, invent a new type of struggle by using their body as a place for political and social resistance, demonstrating naked twice a day in the streets of Mexico City, until they are proved right. ‘The work of Clarisse Hahn, anchored in the fields of the real and the social, opens us to the experience of the Other. Looking at the image of a stranger involves various degrees of exposure, projection, emotional investment and power relationships. The tensions taking place between those who occupy the surface of the image and the eye that gazes on them constitute the heart of Clarisse Hahn’s reflection.’ Extract from Face au pouvoir by Giovanna Zapperi.
Clarisse Hahn (1973, Paris, France) is an artist and film maker. Through her films, photos and video installations, she pursues documentary research into communities, behavioural codes and the social role of the body. Hahn has a diploma from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and holds a master’s degree in Art History from the Sorbonne. She writes art criticism for the magazines ArtPress, Omnibus, Bloc Notes and Crash. In 2002, Hahn was offered her first personal exhibition by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva. She has produced many videos and photos that circulate in international exhibitions: Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Guggenheim Bilbao; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva; Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona; Miami Art Central; International Biennial of Photography, Bogotá; South London Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Beijing Cultural & Creative Industry Promotion Center; and Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, among others. She currently lives and works in Paris.
Presented by — Jousse Entreprise Gallery, Paris
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DREW HEITZLER PARADIES AMERIKA 2014, 45’, 5 channel, color, sound, edition of 3 + 2 AP
Paradies Amerika is made up of material appropriated from archival television and film footage that constructs an abstract narrative from the interwoven history of Pacific Palisades, an affluent neighbourhood and district in the Westside of the city of Los Angeles, which is home to many influential and historical characters. Fictional or real, a community of particularly special and curious personages inhabit this special terrain. Pacific Palisades has been ‘home’ to the crime fighting superteam, West Coast Avengers; J. Paul Getty’s villa; the iconic Eames House; Villa Aurora, where the Feuchtwangers held ‘socialist salons’ attended by Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, and other members of the émigré community that made up ‘Weimar on the Pacific’; the Uplifters’ secret clubhouse was in the Palisades, as well as the Riviera Country Club where Elizabeth Taylor learned to ride a horse and Walt Disney played golf with Howard Hughes. Inceville, the first movie studio was in the Palisades; Brian De Palma’s film Carrie was shot at Pali High, and so was the video Slip It In for the hardcore punk band Black Flag. The Methodist Church built a Chautauqua Conference Grounds in the Palisades, and Paramahansa Yogananda built the Fellowship Lake Shrine. Kenneth Anger lived there as a child, and this is also where Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil first met. Neil Young met a young singer-songwriter named Charles Manson here while he and his friends were crashing with Dennis Wilson. It is where the surfing pioneer Miki Dora grew up, and also Gidget. Francis Clauser, who helped handpick German rocket-scientists for Operation Paperclip, including Willy Ley, Hubertus Strughold, and Wernher von Braun, lived in the Palisades. The American Nazi Party built a compound at Murphy’s Ranch, but it was raided the day after Pearl Harbor. Ronald Reagan lived there. The Arpanet was developed at UCLA in nearby Westwood. The first military drone, the Ryan Firebee, was built just across San Vicente in Santa Monica. Woody Guthrie, author of the song ‘This land is made for you and me’, lived just across the canyon in Topanga...
Presented by — Marlborough Chelsea, New York
Drew Heitzler (1972, Charleston, US) received his MFA from Hunter College, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include HDA&T at Green Gallery, Oak Park (2014); Paradies Amerika at Marlborough Chelsea, New York (2014); Golden State at MOCA, Tucson (2014); Spiral Jetty/Crystal Voyager/ Region Centrale (Bootlegged, Re-ordered, Combined, Sometimes More, Sometimes Less) at c.nichols project, Los Angeles (2013). Recent group exhibitions include Broadway Morey Boogie in New York (2014/2015); Drive-In at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2013) and Exposition de groupe at the French Embassy in New York (2013). Heitzler lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Photo credit: Bill Orcutt
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MICHAL HELFMAN % 2013, 8’ 13’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 6
This work was created in collaboration between Michal Helfman and the choreographers Noa Zuk and Ohad Fishof. The video % describes choreography as a form of musical canon. Each dancer in the group performs the same movement as the one before, with a few seconds of delay. The dancers are subjected to a kind of a repetitive ‘assembly line’ dance. Using their bodies, they create a human loop, existing in the gap between a mechanistic and repetitive tribal dance. Helfman examines the complex concept of the ‘stage’, which acts as a sort of an unfulfilled dream. The spectator undergoes a contradictory experience by watching the video from backstage, which represents the ‘real order’, while the front stage represents the ‘symbolic order’. Helfman has researched bodily practices, movement and choreographies in different cultural contexts throughout her career. She has worked with various professionals in these fields, including performers, dancers, and gymnasts. In %, Helfman explores the smooth flow of movement, data and communication that characterizes Western civilization. She examines the way it stands in opposition to the movement of the smuggler and ‘goods’ being transferred through different landscapes. Helfman deals with this kind of ‘transparent choreography’: 5 out of every 100 people are in a constant movement, internally displaced from their homeland. This video is dedicated to them.
Michal Helfman (1973, Tel Aviv, Israel) is a multidisciplinary artist. She holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, where she currently teaches in both the BFA and MFA programs. Helfman has had solo and group shows in Martin Gropius Bau (2015); Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2013); Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2010); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2009); Israel Museum in Jerusalem (2007); the 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003); San Francisco Art Institute (2001); and more. Helfman received the Anselm Kiefer Prize at the Wolf Foundation in Herzliya, and was a runner-up for the Israeli Art Prize at the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation in 2008. Helfman currently lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Presented by — Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
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JUUL HONDIUS BRILLIANT PUNITIVE RAIDS 2015, 10’ 56’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
Brilliant Punitive Raids is a short film composed of photographic images. It springs from the artist’s fascination with the equally adored and detested PLO leader Khalil-alWazir, better known as Abu Jihad, and his assassination in Tunis in 1988. The absence of media images of both Abu Jihad and the events leading up to the attack sparked Hondius’ imagination and inspired him to create these images himself. With a degree of freedom, Juul Hondius reconstructed and staged the event leading up to the assassination, frame by frame. However, Brilliant Punitive Raids is not intended as a historically correct reconstruction of events. Rather, the sequence of still photos zooms in on the personal experience of the Israeli soldiers involved, even evoking sympathy, and on the unsettling contradiction between their make-believe play of two people in love and the cold-blooded killing of a man who was determined in his fight against the Israeli occupation. Hondius’ work centres on the status and impact of media images and the ways in which they enter and determine our collective memory. In Brilliant Punitive Raids the artist worked the other way round: presenting different sides and different perspectives to one story, starting from an absent image.
Presented by — AKINCI, Amsterdam
Juul Hondius (1970, Ens, Netherlands) has participated in several exhibitions: Brilliant Punitive Raids, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); Unisono 27: Juul Hondius, Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam (2014); Post-Aura, Millennium Art Museum, Photo Biennial, Beijing (2014); Works in the Collection, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2013); Raumproduktion, Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (2011); You Are Not Alone, Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona (2011); Louvre in Heino, Museum de Fundatie, Heino (2010); Lagos Photo International (2010); Fotomuseum, The Hague; Images Recalled, Kunsthalle Mannheim (2010); The Photographers, Platform Garanti, Istanbul (2007); The Suspended Moment, Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2007); L’ École du Nord, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2006); In Sight, The Chicago Art Institute (2006); New Photography, Photo-London, curated by Mario Testino (2005); IDFA: Paradocs II The Reality in Scenes, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005); Delay, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, curated by Wilma Sütö; Chasm, Busan Biennale, curated by M. Park/T.M. Choi (2004); Potrc, Hondius/Bekirovic, Castro/Olafsson, De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2004); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2003); Musée des BeauxArts, Nantes (2002); Life in a Glass House, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002). Juul Hondius lives and works in Amsterdam.
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CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ HAY MUERTOS QUE NO HACEN RUIDO 2015, 11’, single channel colour, sound edition of 5 + 2AP
Hay muertos que no hacen ruido, ‘Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound’, uses the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman, ‘La Llorona’, as a metaphor for a nation in mourning. The Weeping Woman is a broken symbol, a melange of pre-Hispanic myths and various representations of mother goddesses. In its different versions, the legend preserves elements of its indigenous essence and represents time, the road to the underworld, death in the supernatural, and hopelessness in the everyday: it is an emblem of the despair of a nation. Registering shots of everyday life of the city of Oaxaca and juxtaposing the mundane with the mystical, this video captures the messy reality of urban life reflected in the media used to trivialize it.
PREMIÈRE
Claudia Joskowicz (1968, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia) completed her MFA at New York University in 2000. Her work is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; and the Banco Central de la República, Bogotá. It has also been shown internationally, most recently at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde; the 10th Sharjah Biennial; the 29th São Paulo Biennial; the 10th Bienal de La Habana; and the 17th and 18th Videobrasil Festivals. She has received, amongst others, a Guggenheim fellowship in film and video, a mid-career artist commission from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, and a Fulbright Scholar Award; she was the 2014 artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, sponsored by the City of Paris Mayor’s Office. Claudia Joskowicz lives and works in New York and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.
Presented by — Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile
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CYRUS KABIRU THE END OF THE BLACK MAMBA I 2014, 4’ 49’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 3 + 1AP
The End of the Black Mamba I is the first in a series of short documentaries on the declining use of a traditional fixed-gear bicycle in Kenya. Nick-named Black Mamba, the bicycle has achieved iconic status as an affordable vehicle and a popular method of transport for the Kenyan population. However, as modernisation spreads through the African continent, the Black Mamba is increasingly being replaced by inexpensive Chinese manufactured scooters and motorcycles. Filmed on a flower farm near Mount Kenya, the video shows local cyclists who still use this traditional mode of transportation. This older generation praises the Black Mamba for its reliability and health benefits, claiming that the bicycle’s replacements, scooters and motorcycles, ‘bring sickness and death’. In this film, Kabiru consciously acts as the devil’s advocate, arguing that the Black Mamba will, unfortunately, be replaced and will no longer be seen on Kenyan roads. The End of the Black Mamba I, Cyrus Kabiru not only documents a social and historical occurrence, but also creates a dialogue between his own life story and childhood, and the thriving and changing African city in which he now lives.
Presented by — SMAC Gallery, Cape Town
Cyrus Kabiru (1985, Nairobi, Kenya) creates intricate sculptural works from discarded materials that he finds on the streets of his hometown. In 2014, Kabiru launched a documentary film project, The End of the Black Mamba I, in memory of the large sculptural works from his latest work, the Black Mamba series. In 2013, Kabiru’s work was exhibited at Lagos Photo Festival and Afrofuture: Adventure with Africa’s Makers, Thinkers and Dreamers at Milan Design Week. Recognised as an innovative international figure in Africa, his work has been included in the exhibition Making Africa. A Continent of Contemporary Design, currently showing at Vitra Design Museum, Germany. He presented his first solo exhibition in 2008 at Wasanii International Artists’ Workshop, Nairobi, part of the Triangle Network workshops. After exhibiting his works in several countries, he received the award for Best Artist Innovation at the Maker Faire Africa, and was celebrated by Guinness Africa and MTVBase. Cyrus Kabiru currently lives and works in Nairobi.
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KATARZYNA KOZYRA FACES 2006-2015, 2 channel, projection and screen, colour, sound, edition of 4 + 2AP
The work Faces has to do with ballet. Like Kozyra’s previous work Rite of Spring, it was originally shown in a similar display as the one shown here - the viewer was surrounded by huge screens with faces showing extreme emotions: above all, intense concentration, tension, and equally intense effort. Clenched mouths, rapidly moving eyeballs and frowning foreheads with trickles of sweat. These are the faces of dancers: classical, modern, and hip-hop dancers captured doing their showpiece performances. Now redesigned and presented in one single projection accompanied by a TV screen with the documentation of the work from an outside view, the artist seeks to focus the viewer’s attention on one place, thus enhancing the dramatic effect of the work. The dancers were filmed in such a way that we do not see their bodies; the instruments with which they express themselves. We only see the faces, which are virtually invisible to the viewers during the performance. Dance itself is being deconstructed here, separated into the individual movements and frames in a process of tedious animation, and then assembled together again. In Faces, the actor’s body is deconstructed. Something that was a single whole now becomes visible only fragmentarily.
Presented by — ZAK l BRANICKA, Berlin
PREMIÈRE
Katarzyna Kozyra (1963, Warsaw, Poland) is a sculptor, photographer, performance artist, filmmaker, and creator of video installations and artistic actions. In 1993 she graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Faculty of Sculpture. She received, among others, the Paszport Polityki award (1997) and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage award (2011). In 1999, she received an honourable mention at the 48th Venice Biennale for her video installation Men’s Bathhouse at the Polish Pavilion. Her work has been featured at major festivals and exhibitions in Poland and abroad: Biennale di Venezia; São Paulo Bienal; Sydney Biennale; Busan Biennale; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; Museum Voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Brooklyn Museum; Kiasma, Helsinki and many more. In 2012 she established the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation. Kozyra lives and works in Warsaw.
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BERTRAND LAMARCHE LES SOUFFLES 2015, 11’, colour, sound, film video HD, edition of 4 + 1AP
The film Les souffles is one of Bertrand Lamarche’s works relative to his interest in recorded music and sound and how to show the process of listening. In several of his installations or films, Bertrand Lamarche uses turntables in some ‘mises en scenes’ where the records, the turntables and the sounds are equally important. They are all used to pinpoint the idea that space and time can be distorted or twisted by using and playing with the reality and the image of a spiral. The film Les souffles shows a close up on a phonograph that reads a record which has been previously covered with wax. The needle of the machine reads the record and a thin thread of wax grows in a constant and moving shape that breaks while too long and too fragile to resist the rotation of the turntable. It is then swallowed by a vacuum cleaner that one can just hear. This thread is eventually the negative figure of a recorded song that one can see but not hear. It shows convulsive disorder, like if the timeline organised in the constant spiral of the record had become a complete chaos.
Presented by — Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris
Exploiting spatial and distortions, Bertrand Lamarche (1966, Paris, France) proposes a group of sculptural hypotheses that are at once ecstatic and conceptual. His work is rooted in the amplification and the potential for speculation of figures that have featured regularly in his oeuvre for nearly 20 years: the city of Nancy, pop music, meteorology, giant umbellifers, revolving lights, tunnels, record decks. A large proportion of his oeuvre is characterized by a desire for subjectivation and appropriation, sometimes almost demiurgic, of various areas or figures of reality. Through modelling, the artist takes over these entities, developing a set of propositions that unsettle viewers because they are generated by looping, or present a mise-en-abyme, or result from a loss of reference points in space-time and/or distortions in scale. Lamarche lives and works in Paris.
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CLAUDIA LARCHER SELF 2015, Loop, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
The video animation Self reflects the human skin as the border between ‘oneself’ and the ‘world’. In analogy to the representation function of architecture, Self contemplates the human skin through its potential to design one’s own representation. Yet, once the human body is understood as an architectural envelope, its picture can be expanded arbitrarily and freely modulated. Methodologically, this allows Self to scrutinise the interplay of function and representation in different ways. Selfperception and the others’ awareness of oneself are thereby examined against backdrop of identity, gender and perfection. The video consists of subjective impressions which are mixed with images of real structures. A psychological space is created: real organic structures merge with abstract patterns and form a net of reality and surreal vision in which time and space become nullified. The result is a video of fictional and impossible pan shots, which create surreal imagery ranging between dream and reality.
Presented by — 22.48m², Paris
PREMIÈRE
Claudia Larcher (1979, Bregenz, Austria) is a visual artist with a focus on video animation, collage photography and installation. She studied Plastic and Multimedia and Media Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2005 she has participated in various group exhibitions and festivals in Austrian and abroad, and has presented her work in solo exhibitions. She has exhibited at: Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Tokyo Wonder Site; Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. She received the Austrian State Grant for Video Art in 2015 and the Kunsthalle Wien Award 2008. Larcher lives and works in Vienna.
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LU CHUNSHENG THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY II 2006, 95’, single channel, sound, color, edition of 5
‘A huge, room-sized container flew over my head. I was breathing in the dust swirling in this decadesold, enormous factory that covered several square kilometers. A non-stop and static rumbling noise resounded in my brain… I became cautious. I could not help but speculate about the stories behind such an enormous man made ‘object’. I had to film it. It has such a mysterious power that comes from nowhere. It is not even similar to the natural forces that drive the evolution of species in order to survive in difficult environments. There are always reasons behind people’s actions, but I always think things are not this simple. Are these reasons the true reasons? I thus imagine a group of people, and their story that no one knows. Lu Chunsheng described his experience like this in our conversation about History of Chemistry. We started to surpass reality and imagine something else - the experience of other worlds. If we say Lu Chunsheng is amused by how the world is not explainable, and the absurd nature of people’s wills that direct their actions, then his works should also not be seen as any kind of explanation of the world. His works represent events, but all the social references that these events may have are peeled away. I see multiple possibilities of interpretation in History of Chemistry - the end of the confrontation between men and their zoning represented in History of Chemistry may be seen as a deterministic prophecy of the future, but it may also just be a state of mind that is separate from the ‘events’. And this state of mind, may it be melancholic or excited, is never a conclusion of an epoch.
Lu Chunsheng was born in 1968, currently lives and works in Shanghai, China. He articulates a surrealistic and neutral attitude, breaching the boundary between documentary and fiction. Selected solo exhibitions includes: Vigorous shake and the after, the earth feature gets much clearer, prophecy comes into his mind, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou (2014); The Materialists Are All Asleep, The Red Mansion Foundation, London (2008); History of Chemistry, Project Space Zip, Seoul (2004). He has also participated in Guangzhou Triennial (2002, 2005); 27th Sao Paulo Biennial (2006); 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2008); Le Parvis Centre d’Art Ibos (2003); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2007); and Centre Pompidou Paris (2008).
And I believe that Lu Chunsheng always sees the ruins of the future behind all the flashes of reality.’ Text by Hu Fang.
Presented by — Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou
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ÁNGEL MARCOS JILGUERO 2009, 6’, single channel, colour, sound, edition 6 + 1AP
Jilguero films a tethered goldfinch which, in order to drink, must pull on a thread attached to a thimble that scoops water from a glass; the video shows the relationship between forced labour and human admiration for the repetitive movements of the Other, when the Other is in a condition of dependency. With clear autobiographical references, the author has structured this work into three clearly identifiable stages: the fields on the Meseta where these birds live in freedom amidst cornfields and poplars; the small carpenter’s workshop where the goldfinch is locked away in a cage, where, amidst the sound of machines and music from the radio, the goldfinch sings when the sun appears; and the bird has been trained to scoop water up with a thimble from a glass at the bottom of its cage. The admiration for the automated movements of another being in a situation of dependency may exemplify the goodness of the one who, from a privileged situation, subjugates the other. The domestication process frees the enslaved from doubts while making him feel indebted to his benefactor. This phenomenon has given rise to certain labour practices, amongst other forms of human behaviour. Production systems are not conceived as a relationship between equals based on a necessary exchange of favours; the production line method instils automatism as a means for subsistence, just like that of the goldfinch.
Presented by — Galeria Trama, Barcelona
Ángel Marcos’ (1955, Valladolid, Spain) work repeatedly refers to the idea of the ‘blind spot’ as defined by Nobel literature laureate Elias Canetti: ‘a point of reversal beyond which things are no longer real’. Marcos triggers his gaze beyond all real experience; there, in the space between desire, know-how and politics, seen as the result of replacing the truth by the real in a multiple game of subjectivities of knowledge and action. His works have been exhibited in recognised institutions such as Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern; ARTIUM, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León; Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Naples Museum of Art, Florida; FNAC, Paris; and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. Angel Marcos lives and works in Valladolid.
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JONATHAN MONAGHAN ESCAPE POD 2015, 20’, seamless, loop, single channel, animated film, colour, sound edition of 3
Escape Pod is based on hunting mythologies of the Greek and Nordic traditions. It captures the journey of a golden stag that roams modernist spaces of authoritarian confrontation and material excess. Lavish bedrooms, airport checkpoints, and a luxury riot gear boutique are encountered, as the scenery unfolds from the perspective of a floating viewpoint that is framed as a continuous shot. In a climactic moment, the golden fawn is birthed out of a BoConcept sofa, only to be carried away, into a heavenly Duty Free shop in the clouds. Seamlessly looped in a twenty-minute cycle, Escape Pod suggests an apocalyptic decadent future – one that is militarized, totalitarian and permeated by extravagance. It is a representation of laboured pursuits, particularly of the otherworldly or unobtainable.
Presented by — bitforms gallery, NY
Jonathan Monaghan (1986, New York, USA) crafts surreal and psychologically driven works that operate within the real, imagined and virtual worlds. He builds absurdist 3D environments that contain compelling objects, often pulling from populist sources, such as historic architecture, religious iconography, design, science fiction, and advertising. Past exhibitions and screenings of Monaghan’s work have included the British Film Institute, London; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Fe Gallery, Pittsburgh; Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Contemporary Art Centre of Thessaloniki; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn; George Mason University, Fairfax; Bitforms Gallery, New York; Curator’s Office, Washington D.C.; Market Gallery, Glasgow; Artisphere, Arlington; and Queens Museum of Art, New York. Monaghan lives and works in New York.
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MEL O’CALLAGHAN ENSEMBLE 2013, 7’ 15’’, 2 channel colour, sound, edition of 3 + 2AP
With Mel O’Callaghan’s Ensemble we are witness to an act of struggle, triumph and retreat. Man protests against the violence of man and triumphs. Three firemen move into the frame and prepare their hose. We watch as they lean into and against the elemental force of the water. After some time, a lone man moves into frame and walks, improbably, against the extreme force of the hose. He fights against it, yet ultimately prevails as he pushes forward and the men begin to retreat. The man is pushed to his physical limit and accordingly the space he is in speaks of this struggle. Set in the landscape and played out in hi-definition slowmotion, the long and thin 32:9 ratio creates a striking tableau depicting this compelling performance. It is at the threshold between the two screens that the greatest action takes place. This performance illustrates the struggle to hold ground and to eventually overcome – breaking this liminal space. Consistently exploring the concept of performance as ritual, Ensemble reinforces the artist’s interest in the absurdity of action. In this case, a man takes the challenge to push against the seemingly impenetrable force of 3 fire-fighters in polishedmetal highly-reflective uniforms with a highpressure water hose. As metaphor for our daily struggles, O’Callaghan’s protagonist and his opponents play out this act of struggle, triumph and retreat. ‘By sculpting bodies of water with one’s own body, the physical labour might not only be seen as repetitive and violent, but also as introspective and meditative. In this way, the figures seem to be distancing themselves mentally from the act and the site of endurance.’ Anja Isabel Schneider, independent curator.
Presented by — Galerie Allen, Paris
Mel O’Callaghan’s (1975, Sydney, Australia) work has recently been exhibited in the group exhibition Nature/Revelation, curated by Joanna Bosse at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne (2015); The Place of Disquiet, curated by Miguel Amado, for the third edition of A3bandas in F2 Galeria, Madrid; the Biennale of Sydney (2014); Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon; Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz, Paris; Videobrasil 05 15º, São Paulo; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart; The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; The National Museum of Taiwan; Kunstverein Konstanz; AR/ GE Kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano; Artspace, Sydney; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona; Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga; Festival Encontros da Imagem, Lisbon; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; and Le Printemps de Septembre-à Toulouse. Mel O’Callaghan lives and works in Paris.
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JACCO OLIVIER NO TITLE (480-620) 2015, 2’ 42’’, color, sound, edition of 5 + 1AP
Olivier is a painter in search of new avenues. His films are enigmatic and experiential - moving in and out of abstraction they reveal the traces and decisions made by the artist in the process of painting. While there is a clear and quite complex process involved in their creation, Olivier does not set a thematic agenda for the works, or for their relationship to one another. The films are instead imagined as windows onto converging, and often elegantly simple. At this convergence of painting and cinema, however, lies an uneasy tension, a feeling that something is about to happen or has just happened that is unexpected and beyond our control. Although his early works contain many realistic elements, Olivier sets no thematic agenda for the works or for their relationship to one another. In his new work No Title (480-620), he offers the viewer a journey through the many layers of paint on his canvas. His latest piece is on the edge of abstraction and the more successfully he lifts the veil on the traces and decisions made by the artist in the process of painting.
PREMIÈRE
Jacco Olivier (1972, Goes, Netherlands) fuses painting and filmmaking by repeatedly reworking paintings in generous casual brush strokes and systematically photographing each development. The various stages are combined into projected animations. He has recently participated in exhibitions such as: Buitengaats, Jacco Olivier, Ronald Zuurmond; Ketelfactory, Schiedam (NL); Out There #2, Rotterdam (NL); Jacco Olivier en Benjamin Li, Villa Mondriaan, Winterswijk (NL); Metamorphosen, Ovidius in de hedendaagse kunst. Rijksmuseum Twente, Enschede; Move On, 100 jaar animatie kunst, Kade Kunsthal Amersfoort (NL); and Laureaten Buning Bongers prijs, Museum Henriette Polak, Zutphen (NL). He also participates in Vita Vitale, the exhibition at the Azerbaijan Pavilion of the present 56th Biennale di Venezia (IT). Jacco Olivier currently lives and works in Amsterdam.
Presented by — Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam
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JOÃO ONOFRE TACET 2014, 7’ 40”, single channel HD video, colour, sound, edition of 6
Onofre’s new film Tacet is a reinterpretation of 4’33’’, the iconic ‘silent’ work by experimental composer John Cage. Cage originally composed 4’33’’ in 1952 to be interpreted by one or any number combination of instruments, but with instructions for the performers not to play throughout the four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the score. The ambient sounds occurring in the space during this time become part of the piece. The Latin term ‘tacet’, (meaning ‘it is silent’), after which the film is named, is the sole instruction in Cage’s musical score, meaning ‘it is silent’. As in Cage’s piece, the beginning of Onofre’s film is marked by the entrance of the performer, pianist João Aboim, and the closing of the piano lid. However, in a divergence from Cage’s instruction, the pianist sets the piano alight. The gradually building fire becomes the dominant sound and a startling image in contrast to the classical scene. Cage famously began making works for prepared piano in 1940, where elements were interposed inside the piano itself for performance. Onofre’s fire becomes an example of such preparation.
PREMIÈRE
João Onofre (1976, Lisbon, Portugal) is one of Portugal’s leading international artists. Having shown his work as early as 2001 at the Venice Biennale, he is recognised as one of the most innovative artists in video art. Lately, he has explored the correlation between cinematographic narratives and the performer undertaking a physical, spectacular activity. His work has been widely exhibited in individual and group shows in private and public institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; La Maison Rouge, Paris; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (MACRO); Kunsthalle Krems; Fundación Botín, Santander; MoMA PS1, New York. Onofre currently lives and works in Lisbon.
Presented by — Marlborough Contemporary, London
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BONGSU PARK CELL 2014, 4’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 3 + 2AP
Park’s starting point is to look at herself and her relationship to other people; her need for company yet also solitude. She creates intricate video mises-en-scène where movement is expressed in its purest form, through space, dance and sound. Park’s practice is oriented towards designing immersive settings and performances – often collaborating with musicians, dancers and choreographers; the videos recording these creations are the artist’s comments on the perennial tensions at the core of all human relationships. Her dance pieces are born out of this quandary: the continual oscillation between the joining and separation of human relationships. For Cell, Park has created a formally complex piece with three dancers, in which she experiments with perspectives and display. The integration of dance with sculptural forms is a distinctive element in Park’s artistic production. Cell concerns a dialogue about the complexity of relationships and an attempt to merge the language of images with sculptural form.
Presented by — Rosenfeld Porcini , London
Bongsu Park (Pusan, South Korea, 1981) studied at the École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux, Sangmyung University, South Korea, and Slade School of Fine Art, London. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Korea, Japan, France and the UK, including exhibitions at the Barbican Trust Arts Group, London; The Crypt Gallery - St Pancras Church, London; Bermondsey Project Space, London and the contemporary art Bordeaux Biennale Evento. In 2012, Bongsu Park was invited to perform for Platform 1 at Camden Art Centre. Bongsu Park’s practice involves photography, sculpture, video and performance. The artist’s most recent body of work focuses on collaborations with a number of choreographers so as to integrate dance into her video works and live performances. She lives and works in London.
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TOM PNINI THE LIGHT FANTASTIC TOE 2015, 5’ 43’’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
The Light Fantastic Toe presents the five minutes leading up to a stereoscopic portrait of a family, taken just before the patriarch leaves to join the Union Army. Pnini has been working to re-examine the notion that a photograph represents a decisive moment - the incidence of light striking a lens at a precise instant in time. A stereoscopic photograph consists of two nearly identical images taken with a camera with two lenses, with a separation equal to that of human eyes. With the aid of a stereoscope viewer, a magical illusion of depth is created. Pnini unravels this magical end. He extracts the two images from the stereoscope viewer and strips the photograph from its original function. The original magic is revealed and before us appears a duplication of that critical moment of traditional photography: a decisive moment that reproduces itself. A clone, a double, a mirror. The video begins with what appears to be a split screen; however, it is actually a double set creating the illusion of a stereoscopic image. Similar to the dual-lens stereoscopic image, in his video, Pnini duplicates the actual scene in real life: identical twins play two separate roles, acting in two identical sets, which themselves are replicas of an 1860s New York apartment. The portrait is no longer of one family, but is in fact of two families identical and different. Each family poses in front of a similar path and destiny, the prospect of war. As the click of the camera captures an image for eternity, so it records the possibility of death.
Tom Pnini (1981, Tel Aviv, Israel) creates time-based works and largescale installations. He has exhibited in museums and galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Milan, Toronto, Moscow, and Israel, including solo exhibitions at: Galleria Giuseppe Pero, Milan (2015); Lesley Heller Workspace, New York (2014); Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv (2012). He holds a BED from HaMidrasha College, Tivon (2008) and an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, NY (2010). He has received a Video Art Fund from the Center for Contemporary Design, Tel Aviv (2012), a Dean’s Graduate Scholarship from Parsons (2009-2010), and an Outstanding Artistic Excellence Award from Beit Berl College, Kfar Saba (2008). His works have been part of the Robert D. Bielecki Collection and The Shoken Collection. Tom Pnini lives and works in New York.
Presented by — Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
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ULRICH POLSTER NOTTURNO 2013 - 2015, 31’ 45’’, digital video, super 8, Hi-8 and VHC transferred to dgital HD,
PREMIÈRE
colour, sound edition of 3 + 1AP
The complex structure of Notturno runs riot amid the open simultaneity built up from a great diversity of visual and acoustic sources and modes of expression. Polster filters out images from moment-to-moment experience and links them together so as to connect them to historical locations and events of overriding importance – not only to the Communist utopia, but also to the Stalinist web of lies and ‘pathos formulae’. Ulrich Polster’s store of images ranges from the greyness of East German post-war cities to the coarse-grained flickering super-8 film experiments of art subculture in the GDR, invoking references from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin to Godard’s Film Socialisme, and is simultaneously enriched by innerscapes garnered on his lengthy travels in Saxony, Vienna, Chernivtsi, and Crimea. The accompanying soundtrack extends from a live performance by Vic Chesnutt to music by the avant-garde Polish composer Henryk Górecki and the melancholic German-born British composer Max Richter.
Presented by — Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris
Ulrich Polster (1963, Frankenberg, Germany) is a German artist from the former GDR. Heir to the 1980s EastGerman underground film movement, Ulrich Polster looks critically at the end of Communism and at the contradictions in the Western world. His video installations and mixedmedia collages deconstruct the collective memory, the relationship of the individual with the group, and the disintegration of social institutions, in order to reach an aesthetic experience and an interweaving of diverging time axes and horizons of remembrance. His recent exhibitions include: STALKER/ MATERIAL, Neue Sächsische Galerie, Chemnitz (2015); Made in USA, Wild West Active Space, Maastricht (2014); Notturno, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris (2013); Shaoxing Lu, Westwerk, Hamburg (2013). With a sensuously charged sensitivity, Ulrich Polster has set out to explore questions about his own artistic development. Polster lives and works in Leipzig and Berlin.
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SOPHIA POMPÉRY STILL WATER 2010, 12’ 16’’, single channel colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
Still Water shows a dark table top with various objects. A hand with a paintbrush coats the table surface with water. Through the foreshortening of the camera perspective, the water acts like a right angle in the middle of the likewise right-angled picture detail, like a framed second image. In the reflection on the water one can see a window. Later, as a heater is installed under the table, the evaporating water starts to mist the view outside. ‘Associations with Dutch still life painters of the seventeenth-century are justified in the context of Still Water not only due to motifs of interiors reflected in glass vessels but also due to the evocation of fragility, which becomes one of the main issues in the work. A picture ‘painted’ with water, after achieving its optimal sharpness and completeness, slowly begins to dry, disappear, shrink, losing sharpness, and so on, until it completely disappears from the surface. The work makes a full circle then, returning to the view of the room with which it has begun. In the Dutch paintings, specific objects were saturated with symbols of transiency, while in Pompéry’s video those meanings are conveyed in progressiveness of a ‘maturing’ and disappearing picture, shown due to specificity and possibilities offered by film, but still with a tradition of painting in the background’. Text by Marta Smoliska from Pompéry’s solo exhibition publication Nothing but a Transient Light.
Presented by — Galerie Dix9, Paris
Sophia Pompéry (1984, Berlin, Germany) studied under artist Karin Sander at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee. In 2009-2010, she participated in an educational research project led by Olafur Eliasson at the Institut für Raumexperimente, affiliated to the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. Recently her works were on display at The Silent Shape of Things, ARTER Space for Arts, Istanbul (2012); Atölye, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2013); BYTS, Stedelijk Museum s’-Hertogenbosch (2013); and Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2014). Her works have been included in collections such as: Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul; Artothek of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; Science Center Spectrum, Berlin; German Museum of Technology Foundation, Berlin; and Kunstmuseum Bonn. Sophia Pompéry lives and works in Berlin.
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Sophia Pompery, Still water video, 2011
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DANIA REYMOND GREENLAND UNREALISED 2012, 10’, single channel, 16:9, full HD, colour, sound, 3 French version + 2 English version +1AP
‘Dania Reymond’s movies dive deep into the history of cinema. With a memorial, visual and sensorial immersion, her work leads us to question not only the origins of this art but also about its future. From a soundtrack of Pasolini’s work or from an unrealized scenario by Antonioni, by interfering with the folds and corners of the images, she mixes temporality, contexts and discourses to bring forth a critical point of view of visual history.’ Extract by Julie Crenn, art critic and curator. ‘Inspired by a film project abandoned by Antonioni, which dealt with the transformation of Greenland into a frozen land, Dania Reymond plays with the virtuality of writings and landscapes. Not an adaptation, but rather a translation: a slow glide along the coasts represented. ‘Where are we?’ Text by Jean-Pierre Rehm, General Delegate of FIDMarseille.
Dania Reymond (1982, Algiers, Algeria) studied at the École supérieur des beaux-arts de Marseille, and pursued post-graduate studies at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains. She received the StudioCollector prize for her short movie Jeanne (2012). During her participation in the Jeune Création exhibition (2014), her work was distinguished as Art [ ] Collector ‘coup de coeur’. She has participated in many festivals such as FIDMarseille, San Sebastian Film Festival, and Côté Court. Her work has also been shown in institutions of contemporary art such as the MoMA, the Lyon Biennale and the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (FIAC). She currently lives and works in Angoulême, France.
Presented by — Galerie Karima Celestin, Marseille
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ISABEL ROCAMORA FAITH 2015, 19’, 3 channel (single channel version), 2 K transferred to HD, edition of 5 + 2P
Produced by the Isabel Rocamora Studio. Funded by Creative Scotland. Co-produced by GH Art Collection and the Koffler Gallery. Faith is a three-screen installation that poetically considers the conflict between the dominant monotheistic religions in Jerusalem by proposing a unification in their gesture of prayer. Conceived as an iconographic triptych, Faith intimately observes the prayer forms of the three religions in Jerusalem. The film is set in the historically resonant landscapes of the Judean desert, where a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim pray in time and place synchronicity. Questioning segregation while celebrating difference, Faith invites reflection on one of the most tragic, world echoing conflicts that persist in this new century.
Presented by — Galeria SENDA, Barcelona
PREMIÈRE
Isabel Rocamora (1968, Barcelona, Spain) is a British-Spanish artist filmmaker whose work considers the performative nature of human gesture and its relationship to individual and cultural identity. Awarded internationally, Rocamora’s moving image work can be seen in museums and filmothèques worldwide. Her films have been exhibited, amongst others, at Centre for Contemporary Art Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; the National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna. Currently showing at the Biennale di Venezia, The Mardin Biennale and the Musée de la Civilisation, Quebec City; she is also preparing solo retrospectives in the UK and Canada. Isabel Rocamora’s work is in several international collections. She lives and works between Edinburgh and Barcelona and is represented by Galeria SENDA.
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Ramadan Tahai in a process still of Faith, a film by Isabel Rocamora. © The Artist, 2015. Courtesy of Galeria SENDA.
Michael Cohen in a process still of Faith, a film by Isabel Rocamora. © The Artist, 2015. Courtesy of Galeria SENDA.
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FERNANDO SÁNCHEZ CASTILLO AZOR / GUERNICA SYNDROME 2012, 32’ 23’’, single channel, edition of 5 + 3AP
Born towards the end of Franco’s dictatorial regime and fascinated by history, Sánchez Castillo deepens his study of Spain’s darkest moments by examining the propagandistic mechanisms of memorials and political myths. Azor / Guernica Syndrome is a film showing the transformation process of the Azor (A-91) leisure yacht built by the Bazán shipyard for General Franco. Used mainly for cruising and fishing, it was the setting for various historical events such as the ‘Azor conversations’ between Franco and Don Juan de Borbón in 1948, during which it was decided that Don Juan’s son, the young prince Juan Carlos, would return from exile to study in Spain. Ten years after Franco’s death and during the transition to democracy, the Socialist Prime Minister Felipe González spent a controversial summer holiday on the yacht in 1985; the press compared his behaviour to Franco’s. In 1990, the Spanish government auctioned the vessel, specifying that it should be destined for the scrapyard. Nevertheless, it was purchased by a businessman who wanted to turn it into an entertainment venue at Marbella Bay. The authorities rejected the project. The next owner decided to dismantle the vessel and reconstruct it in front of his house. After going bankrupt, he abandoned his unfinished project and sold the entire property to a group of investors. At the end of 2011, Fernando Sánchez Castillo bought the Azor to transform it into a prism-shaped artwork. The prism is considered an exalted form in minimalist art due to its constructive impersonality and lack of sentimental or emotive references. Some original parts of the yacht were preserved, such as the mast, deck benches, signs and cleats.
Presented by — Art Bärtschi & Cie, Geneva
Fernando Sánchez Castillo (1970, Madrid, Spain) holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and a Master in Philosophy and Aesthetics from Madrid University. He took part in Programme de recherche at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. A member of the sceptical post-Franco generation in Spain, Fernando Sánchez Castillo questions the relationships between art and power, public spaces and collective memory. He has participated in collective exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York; and the 50th Biennale di Venezia. He also presented his work in solo shows at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2011), Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2007), and MARTa Herford (2006). This year 2015, he is exhibiting his work in solo shows at CA2M, Madrid; La Panera, Lleida; and Bohusläns Museum, Uddevalla. He will also participate in group exhibitions in Switzerland, Holland, Germany and Italy. Sánchez Castillo lives and works in Madrid.
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BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ MATRULLA 2014, 6’ 40’’, single channel, 16mm film transferred to video, colour, sound, edition of 3 + 2AP
Since 1971, Pablo Díaz Cuadrado has been living near Matrullas Lake, a dam nurtured by the Matrullas River, in Orocovis, a town located in the Central Mountain Range of Puerto Rico. The name Orocovis means ‘memory of the first mountain’. Pablo’s kitchen inclines over this first mountain; the wall is the hillside reinforced with river stones. In this place Pablo plants and stores ancient grains and seeds, accumulates materials with possible and unpredictable future uses, supervises the decomposition and reconstruction of everything that surrounds him; raises bees and prepares himself for the moment when water and food will no longer be available. The film approaches the physical structures, time, and symbolic value of Pablo’s project as well as the site as a whole, as an assemblage; not from a political and aesthetic vanguard, but from a rearguard that quietly picks up the debris of progress and tests alternative ways of living.
The work of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico) arises out of long periods of observation, research and documentation, during which the camera is present as an object with social implications, and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her films frequently stem from research into specific social structures or events, which she transforms into collaborative work, performance and moving image. Her recent work is concerned with the material and physical traces of abstract political ideas, particularly post-military spaces, and the relationship between new landscapes and social forms. She has participated in various exhibitions such as Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie, ‘What is not used is forgotten’, CAPC, Bordeaux; La Cabeza Mató a Todos, TEOR/ éTica, San José, Costa Rica; MATRULLA, Sala de Arte Público Proyecto Siqueiros, Mexico City; Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Post-Military Cinema, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; The Black Cave, Gasworks, London; Capp Street Project: Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Trinh T Minh-Ha & Gregorio Rocha, TATE Film; VII Bienal do Mercosul; and Invasive Exotics, RAM Galleri, Oslo. She has been awarded with a 2015 Creative Capital Artist Grant for Visual Arts for her film Summer of Women. Santiago Muñoz lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Presented by — Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan
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DOMINIK STAUCH WALKING WITH RICHARD 2014, 21’ 35’’, single channel colour, sound, edition of 7
Walking with Richard is a combination of performative and graphical videos, originating in Stauch’s long-standing engagement with the major work by Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The artist condenses the opulence of the opera into seven subject-based video clips. The images are computer animated, with samples of vocals, guitar sounds and an appearance by the artist himself. Each chapter concludes with drawings of medicinal plants with their Latin names, like those found in an encyclopaedia. The work captivates the spectator by an accurate interplay between image and audio. The dynamic of the geometrical shapes, the colours, and the sound turns it into an optical and audio experience. The work refers back to the experimental avant-garde movies from the 1920s, abstract and concrete art, but also shows influences of minimal and pop art. The contemplative rhythm and time, coupled with poetry and irony, create ample association spaces which trigger our imaginations.
PREMIÈRE
Dominik Stauch (1962, London, UK) trained as a graphic artist in Bern and studied at Berlin University of the Arts. He spent most of his childhood in London, although he also lived in Cleveland, Ohio and Cairo. Stauch has worked consistently on elaborating paintings by combining different media, sticking to the colour and form theory. He has always remained a painter, aiming at assembling colours and forms in a harmonious way. The reduction to basic geometrical form gives him the needed scope to harmonize his conceptual approach with the latest techniques. His works have been exhibited recently at the Zentrum für Kulturproduktion, Bern; Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner, Bern; Kunstmuseum Thun; märz galerie mannheim / cube 4x4x4 raumX; ETAGEN, Bern. He has been awarded the Atelier-Stipendium Berlin / Stadt Thun (2008); Anerkennungsbeitrag der UBS Kulturstiftung, Zürich (2008); Anerkennungspreis der Stiftung für Graphische Kunst in der Schweiz (2007); Preis für Bildende Kunst der Stadt Thun (2005); and Aeschlimann Corti Stipendium der Bernischen KunstGesellschaft (2001). Dominik Stauch lives and works in Thun.
Presented by — Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner, Bern
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UNGLEE FORGET ME NOT 1979, 15’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
UNGLEE directed Forget Me Not after the success of his previous experimental film Chérie, que veux-tu?, ‘Honey, what do you want?’, which was screened during the 1979 Cannes Film Festival in the section Perspective du Cinéma Français. While working on another project that required major funding, he created Forget Me Not, in order not to be forgotten. At that time, he became inspired by a famous slogan ‘In order to be recognized, you first have to be seen’. He wanted to be recognized, he therefore had to be visible. UNGLEE conceived Forget Me Not as an advertising film on himself. Formally, he took into account the voyeurism of the spectator, and turned himself into a brand, a label, a name, a black-and-white image, a Polaroid image, a video image, a printed image. UNGLEE vented his frustration by not allowing himself to see, by using fast, jerky editing, filming frame by frame, and playing with the texture of the screen. In 1980, after a screening of Forget Me Not, a man came up to him and asked if he was the director. Enthusiastically the man said: ‘You’re too much!’ In a book published in 1979, Patrick Mauriès wrote: ‘«Too much» doesn’t necessarily mean pleasant: it can be something tiresome, or even disgusting. «Too much» can be whatever goes too far, or leaves you speechless.’
UNGLEE (date unknown, Brighton, UK) became known in the late 1970s for his experimental films, then later in the 1980s for his photographs of tulips. In the 1990s, in parallel to his exhibitions, he started to intervene in art reviews such as Art Press, Art Présence, Technikart, and Revue d’Esthétique with his Disparitions, ‘Disappearances’: fictional obituaries in which he talks about his life and passion for tulips. Between 2000 and 2005, he started shooting a series of videos around the theme of love declarations. These works were shown in France, Germany, Italy, and South Africa. In 2010, he published Unglee-Puzzle, a monograph presenting his life and work. In 2012, he received a grant from the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) to start working on an immaterial sculpture, an olfactory exploration called Tulipe Bleue. He lives and works in Paris.
Presented by — Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris
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EULÀLIA VALLDOSERA AVANT LA LUMIÈRE 2015, 44’, colour, sound, edition of 3 + 1AP
Following her research on the memory stored in the things of everyday life, Avant la lumière proposes the film medium as a means of archiving rural living before the use of electricity. It brings together various types of registration ranging from documentary to fiction, and reveals the mechanisms used by the artist for its creation, i.e. the film crew, the preparation of the actors, and the fortuitous finding of objects for the atrezzo. Following the descriptions and anecdotes made by the members of ‘Association des amis du Musée de la Memoire’, around several of household items, the house becomes a film set for a multilayered study on the mechanisms of memory and shows us that memory is, in fact, a theater made of our present expectations. What remains of our ancestors’ rural existence are our own interpretations, seen from a present that evokes and recreates a former modus vivendi that tends to be idealised and tinged with nostalgia. Valldosera points at the universal contents under the particular visions in the wish to preserve a thread linking us to our origins by understanding the struggle for human survival in the environment, in step with nature and not against it, as seems not to be forgotten today. This film does not only aim to be the testimony of a project on local heritage by a group of persons, which is next to his end, but also highlights the film medium as a contemporary event by which to re-update our past and a way of activating the potential hidden under layers of oblivion and prejudices.
Presented by — Galeria Sicart, Vilafranca
PREMIÈRE
Eulàlia Valldosera (1963, Vilafranca del Penedès, Spain) is a Catalan artist, who describes herself ‘as a producer of meanings, rather than as a producer of works’. After studying Fine Arts at the Universitat de Barcelona in the early nineties she left to Amsterdam to join the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where she moved from the academic painting from which Spain was awakening in the eighties towards the new media. Her first work in progress, The Navel of the World, it is a strong statement on the disappearance of the physical objects of artistic production. Then in Bandages she interlaces her powerful performative actions with the use of cinematic devices that will end up in the creation of her well known luminic installations. The artist’s retrospective held at Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and later at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; brought together all the works that had been shown in many Art Biennials as the ones in Korea, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Santa Fe, Sydney, Lyon, Venice, Sao Paulo or Münster, and she could finally articulate all of the works were light and shadow reinterpreted our deep psychological perception of spaces, of genres, of the private and the public domains. Her work is in private and public collections including MACBA, Museo Reina Sofía, Deutsche Bank, La Caixa, Centre Arts Santa Mònica, MUSAC, FRAC PACA and Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Grand-Hornu. Eulàlia Valldosera lives and works in Barcelona.
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EMMA VAN DER PUT RINCÉ ALIEN 2015, 8’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
People need stories and images in order to create order within the world’s chaos. Emma van der Put provides us with those images. She regards the world as a ready-made film set for her observations. Van der Put doesn’t stage things; with her camera she enters into situations that ‘happen’ to her. She sees something - a situation or a place that evokes wonder, which is alienating or simply gives rise to aversion - and fascinated by it, she starts capturing it in film. Those places are, for instance, popular festivals and fairs that she would never attend herself, were it not for the idea of using them in her work. In this way she investigates, through her video works, how she relates to situations that make her feel uneasy. For one of her most recent videos, which came about during an artist-in-residence program at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, she took her camera to the notorious Brussels train station Midi/Zuid. There she would film loud advertisements, hurried travellers, or sleeping homeless people. A tag sprayed on a poster - the estranging words ‘rincé alien’, roughly translated as ‘washed foreigner’, began to assume its own intrinsic relationship with the surrounding people. The striking aspect of Van der Put’s work is the ease with which she makes day-to-day reality abstract and allows it to have greater meaning than is visible at first glance. While filming she remains detached from the things going on around her in order to maintain an overall view of the situation. At the same time she tries - by way of the camera and the technical possibilities that it offers - to fathom the latent information held in brief passing moments. Throughout the editing process she then gives shape to the relationships among the images until they actually express, in terms of their casualness, something about a location, a situation, an occurrence. Because of the rhythm of her constructions, viewers are prompted to observe on their own and give room to the imagination.
Emma van der Put (1988, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands) graduated from the Academy of Art and Design St. Joost (AKV), ‘s-Hertogenbosch, in 2010. She was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam for two years (2010-2012). After that she worked as an artist in residence at Nucleo, Ghent (2013); at Lokaal 01, Antwerp (2014); and for the past six months she has worked at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. Van der Put has participated in various international film festivals and screenings such as IDFA Paradocs at EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam (2014); Lo Schermo dell’Arte Film Festival, Florence (2014); Art Cinema OFFoff, Ghent (2014); Bosch Art Film Festival,’sHertogenbosch (2013); International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2013). She was commissioned by Huis Marseille Museum for Photography to produce various films and was nominated for the Lucas Prize (2010), the Gasunie Art Prize (2011) and the Volkskrant Visual Art Prize (2014). The work of Emma van der Put is included in various private and public collections in the Netherlands and abroad. She lives and works in Brussels.
Presented by — tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam
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PUCK VERKADE SOLITARY COMPANY 2015, 10’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
Solitary Company is a portrait of a remote island as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. This is the first episode of a triptych about the micro-community of Hrisey, a remote island off the north coast of Iceland, during the darkest months in winter when all is covered in snow and silence. During a month-long residency on Hrisey, Puck Verkade conducted interviews with three generations of local people, about their personal connection with the island, the effect of living in such a small community off the mainland, and their relationship to silence. Throughout the video we never get to see the faces of the interviewees, only their backs and the views they can see through the windows. The island itself thus becomes an additional character, showing its empty landscape and silent presence. The circular frame stresses visual isolation as well as the physical borders of the island. Essentially the narrative reflects on the borders of solitude, on silence and its inevitable connection to mortality.
PREMIÈRE
Puck Verkade’s (1987, The Hague, Netherlands) artistic practice is marked by the exploration of how human beings give meaning to life. Using an investigative documentary method, she questions matters of purpose and their ambiguous nature. She is drawn to subjects that expose the human psychological condition, the way we construct our identity through belief systems, and the individual’s position within society. After receiving her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2011), Verkade’s work has been shown at various institutions, for instance at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam. She recently completed residencies in Thailand and Iceland and will start her MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London. In 2016 she will have a solo exhibition at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague. Puck Verkade lives and works in The Hague.
Presented by — Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague
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RICHARD T. WALKER AN IS THAT ISN’T ALWAYS 2015, 10’, single channel, edition of 5 + 2AP
Working within a meditation on the ideology of landscape and nature, Richard T. Walker aims to interrogate the conception of such places, questioning what they mean to us and what the particularities of such an understanding reveal about who we are. Approaching the experience of these environments as metaphor, he seeks inconsistencies within our understanding as a critical tool to reveal points of confrontation between innate desire, cultural interpretation and reality. The piece an is that isn’t always plays with notions of spatial transition, emphasizing the physicality of distance in both real and emotional terms; highlighting the particularities of perception and the fragility of a linear-based understanding of reality. Walker wants to pose questions that address the point where the actuality and the preconceived understanding of an experience come together, mapping out an inquiry into the relationship that this may share with our sound and image-based understanding of reality.
Presented by — àngels barcelona, Barcelona
PREMIÈRE
Richard T. Walker (1977, Shrewsbury, UK) makes videos, photographs, sculpture, installations and performances that reveal a frustrated, obsessive relationship with landscape and at the same time explore the complexity of human relations. He received his BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University College in 1999 and his MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2005. His work has been in exhibitions at: àngels barcelona (2006, 2010); Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Carroll/Fletcher, London; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and K21, Düsseldorf. Walker was a recipient of a fellowship at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley in 2007 and received an Artadia Award in 2009. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2009 and was a resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011. He was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2007–2009, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2009.
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WANG HAIYANG FREUD, FISH AND BUTTERFLY 2013, 3’ 26’’, single chanel. colour, sound, edition of 7
Wang Haiyang, a young artist from Shandong province, is far removed from the dominant currents of contemporary Chinese art, which are often characterized by social content and political metaphors. His work explores the various states of the subconscious and our twisted relationships with our desires. During his studies at the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts, his psychologist encouraged him to express his anxieties and the depths of his soul through his painting, instead of following academic styles. In his animated videos, Wang Haiyang expresses himself through stream of consciousness. Freud, Fish and Butterfly and Double Fikret are ‘animated paintings’ that result from his extraordinary work involving pastel drawings and successive erasures. The artist uses a technique similar to that of William Kentridge, drawing continuously on the same sheet of paper. He photographs each stage of this patient and meticulous handwork, and then animates the images to create a video. Both animations are composed of two thousand drawings. Wang Haiyang drew and erased each day for over a year, finally returning to his point of origin: a blank sheet of paper. He has compared his method to the spiritual practice of the Tibetan mandala: ‘A monk spends an entire year creating a sand mandala that is destined to disappear. Once it is completed, the ephemeral work is simply destroyed, without leaving any trace. One might think that there is nothing on this paper, which I have completely erased, but in reality it represents 1325.5 hours in the life of Wang Haiyang’ he says.
Presented by — Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris
Wang Haiyang (1984, Shandong, China) is an artist specializing in painting and engraving. In 2008, he received his degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His painting talent was discovered early in his career, and has won him numerous awards. Most recently Wang Haiyang has gained international fame for his animation works: his films Freud, Fish and Butterfly and Double Fikret were awarded at the 55th DOK Leipzig Film Festival, the 11th Sommets du cinéma d’animation in Montreal, and the 25th Holland Animation Film Festival. His works have been selected at over twenty other international festivals. In 2012, Wang Haiyang won the Today Art Museum of Beijing’s Young Talent award. He currently lives and works in Beijing.
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YAO QINGMEI DANCE! DANCE! BRUCE LING! 2013, 12’, single channel, colour, sound, edition of 5 + 2AP
Yao Qingmei uses an interventionist approach to re-imagine and perturb the mundane parameters of reality in order to yield new possibilities. Layering absurdist gesture with poetic action, a particular emphasis is placed on how symbolic gestures gain or lose traction and power through subtle displacement and appropriation. Her theatrical performances and interventions find form in areas overlapping burlesque techniques of parody, which combine with framing devices influenced by theatre sets and costume, pedagogical lectures, political satire and dance choreography. In the work Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling! Qingmei assumes the guise of a fictional character ‘Bruce Ling’ holding a hammer and sickle in each hand. The performance shifts between a sequence of gestures referencing kung fu, socialist era renditions, ballet, and contemporary dance. Alternating in a ‘call-and-response’ with live music, a pianist improvises an interpretation of the soundtrack from Bruce Lee’s ‘Fury of the Dragon’. The dance modulates between melancholic and theatrical registers of emotion, before culminating in the destruction of an ancient ceramic pot.
Presented by — Magician Space, Beijing
Yao Qingmei (1983, Zhejiang Province, China) was the winner of the Prix Spécial du Jury du 59ème Salon de Montrouge. She recently presented newly commissioned work in her first solo exhibition as part of Modules, Fondation Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent, curated by Bernard Marcadé, at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Major exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Magician Space, Palais de Tokyo (2014); (OFF) ICIELLE & FIAC, Paris (2014); Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart (2014); Fondation du doute, Blois (2014); 59ème Salon de Montrouge (2014); Chapelle des Carmélites, Toulouse (2014); and Centre national d’art contemporain de la villa Arson, Nice. Yao Qingmei lives and works between Paris and Limoges.
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LOOP Fair, for the first time, opens a section dedicated to sound. Curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier, has made the selection of three galleries and artists: Iñaki Bonillas, Michele Spanghero and Susan Philipsz. ‘In a world where our ears are constantly bombarded by sound, and personal listening devices have become ubiquitous, shared aural spaces are increasingly rare. The works shown at LOOP Fair 2015 attach an importance to the issue of paying attention to listening, and are linked with two themes: the relationship between image and sound and the sound as a mental image.’ Anne-Laure Chamboissier
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IÑAKI BONILLAS TEN CAMERAS DOCUMENTED ACOUSTICALLY
1998, digital audio and 10 CD’s, edition of 6 Diez cámaras documentadas acústicamente (Ten Cameras Documented Acoustically) was first shown on the occasion of an exhibition called Foto Septiembre, an annual photography exhibition under the following condition: every artist who is invited to take part in the show has to find his or her own spot or venue. ‘I chose to work in Mexico City’s branch of Tower Records, and settled on a project that would – rather unorthodoxly – involve the store’s headphone listening station.
I recorded the ‘sound’ of ten different cameras such as Pentax, Minolta, Nikon and the like (i.e. the sound of their shutters being pressed) onto a compact disc that was then inserted in the listening station. People would be shopping around Tower Records for the latest release, pick up a headphone set and all of a sudden hear this strange tapestry of stuttering shutter technology – an audio-based photographic work presented in the pretty straightforward ‘photographic’ context of a photo exhibition.’ Iñaki Bonillas
Since the late nineties, the young Mexican artist has been establishing a relationship with photography in his work. With a regard for the aesthetics and the conceptual practices of the sixties and seventies, Iñaki Bonillas has been gradually isolating the constituent elements of photography and connecting them with other procedures. He linked elements together that were a priori incompatible: on the one hand a personal, biographical narrative that consists of private anecdotes and emotions, and on the other, a quasi-scientific element of compilation, classifying and archiving.
Presented by — ProjecteSD, Barcelona
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SUSAN PHILIPSZ
SONGS SUNG IN THE FIRST PERSON ON THEMES OF LONGING, SYMPATHY AND RELEASE 2003, 24’ 16’’, edition of 3 + 2AP
Over the past two decades, Susan Philipsz has explored the psychological and sculptural potential of sound. Using recordings, predominantly of her own voice, the artist creates immersive environments of architecture and song that heighten the visitor’s engagement with their surroundings while inspiring thoughtful introspection. The music Philipsz selects responds specifically to the space in which the work is installed. While each piece is unique, the storylines and references are often recognizable, exploring familiar themes of loss, longing, hope, and return. Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release was a work to be played intermittently over the PA system of Tate Britain’s painting galleries as part of the Tate Triennial ‘Days Like These’ 2003. Susan Philipsz recorded herself singing ; ‘Please Please Please Let me get what I Want’, by The Smiths, ‘Hang On’, by Teenage Fan Club, ‘How Much I lied’, by Gram Parsons and ‘Wild as the wind’ by Ned Washington.
Since the mid-1990s, Philipsz’s sound installations have been exhibited at many prestigious institutions and public venues around the world. In 2012, she debuted a major work at dOCUMENTA (13) entitled Study for Strings, which was later featured at the Museum of Modern Art NY (2013). Philipsz also presented solo shows at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2014), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013), K21 Standehaus Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011), Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2010-11), Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State in Columbus, OH (2009-10), Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2009), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2008), a/o. She conceived installations for the 2007 Skulptur Projekte, Muenster, Germany and 55th Carnegie International in 2008. Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize in 2010.
Presented by — Ellend de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam
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MICHELE SPANGHERO MONOLOGUE
2014, 7’02”, loop, single channel with stereo, audio color, sound, edition of 3+AP
The video installation Monologue shows the process of ambience recording of the empty Teatro Regio in Parma (one of the world’s most important opera houses): the layering of the sounds makes the theater resonate. With silence the theater is in darkness, but, as the sound rises, the lights slowly grow up to reveal the theater and, in backlight, the artist alone on stage thoroughly listening to the sound – the monologue – of the theater.
Graduated in Modern Literature at the University of Trieste, Michele Spanghero has also attended workshops in electronic and improvised music, sound design and video making. His artistic activity is focused on sonic arts, in the form of musc (as double bass player), and sound art. Part of his research is also dedicated to visual experimentation, with particular attention towards the photographic medium. He has exhibited and performed in different international contexts such as museums, galleries, clubs and festivals in Italy, France, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and USA. His work is installed in both private and public collections, such as the Finstral Collection, the Mart Museum in Trento, the Ettore Fico museum in Torino, and the TRA museum in Treviso. His records have been released for several labels such as Dedalus Records, headphonica, Palomar Records, Gruenrekorder and MiraLoop.
Presented by — Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin
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Art Bärtschi & Cie Barth Pralong 24, rue du Vieux Billard, Genève
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+41-22 310 00 13 barth@bartschi.ch
22,48 m² Rosario Caltabiano 30 rue des Envierges, 75020 Paris +33 981722637
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Contact@2248m2.com
bitforms gallery Steven Sacks 131 Allen St, New York, NY 10002
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+1 212-366-6939 steve@bitforms.com
AKINCI Leylâ Akinci & Renan Beunen Lijnbaansgracht, 317, 1017 WZ Amsterdam +31(0)20 6380480
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Info@akinci.nl
Chatterjee & Lal ALARCON CRIADO
Mortimer Chatterjee & Tara Lal
Julio Criado
01/18 Kamal Mansion Floor 1, Arthur
Calle Velarde, 9, 41001 Sevilla
Bunder Road Colaba, Mumbai 400 005
+34 954 22 16 13
India
info@alarconcriado.com
+91 22 22023787 info@chatterjeeandlal.com
Analix Forever Rue de Hesse, 2 CH - 1204 Genève
Chelouche Gallery for Contemporary Art
+41 22 329 17 09
Nira Itzhaki
analix@forever-beauty.com
7 Mazeh St.,Tel Aviv, 65213
Barbara Polla & Julie Gil
+972-3-6200068
àngels barcelona
nirai@zahav.net.i
Quico Peinado & Gabriela Moragas Calle Pintor Fortuny, 27, 08001 Barcelona
Chi-Wen Gallery
+34 934 12 54 00
Chi-Wen Huang
info@angelsbarcelona.com
Hua South Road Section 1/Taipei +886 2 8771 3372
Arcade Christian Mooney 87 Lever Street, London EC1V 3RA, United Kingdom +44 20 7608 0428 info@arcadefinerts.com
chiwen.huang@chi-wen.com
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Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo
Galeria Sicart
Paul Birke
Ramon Sicart
Av. José Manuel Infante, 1208, Santiago
C/ Font, 44, 08720 Vilafranca del Penedès, Bar-
+56 (2) 2269 0401
celona
info@dieecke.cl
+34 938 18 03 65 galeriasicart@galeriasicar.com
Dürst Britt & Mayhew Jaring Dürst Britt & Alexander Mayhew
Galeria Trama
Van Limburg Stirumstraat 47, The
Joan Anton Maragall & Natàlia Peña
Hague
Carrer de Petrixol, 5, 08002 Barcelona
+31 6 24620663
+34 933 174 877
jaring@durstbrittmayhew.com
natalia@galeriatrama.com
Galerie Allen Joseph Allen Shea
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59 rue de Dunkerque, 75009 Paris +33 (0)1 45 26 92 33
Ellen de Bruijne Projects
galerieallen@galerieallen.com
Ellen de Bruijne Rozengracht 207 A, 1016 LZ Amsterdam
Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner
+31(0) 20 530 4994
Bernhard Bischoff & Katia Masson-Gallucci
info@edbprojects.com
Waisenhausplatz 30, Postfach 6259, CH-3001 Bern +41 (0)31 312 06 66 mail@bernhardbischoff.ch
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Galerie Christophe Gaillard Galería Agustina Ferreyra
Christophe Gaillard & Camille Morin
Agustina Ferreyra
12 Rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris 03
750 Ave. Fernández Juncos Local 1. San
+33 1 42 78 49 16
Juan
camille@galerie-gaillard.com
+1(787).302.0071 info@agustinaferreyra.com
Galeria Dix9 Hélène Lacharmoise
Galeria Filomena Soares
19 Rue des Filles du Calvaire, 75003 Paris
Filomena Soares & Manuel Santos &
+33 01 42 78 91 77
Hugo Dinis
hlacharmoise@yahoo.fr
Rua da Manutenção 80, 1900 Lisboa +351 21 862 4122
Galerie Dohyang Lee
gfilomenasoares@mail.telepac.pt
Dohyang Lee 75 Rue Quincampoix, 75003 Paris
Galeria SENDA
+33 1 42 77 05 97
Carlos Duran
info@galeriedohyanglee.com
Passatge de mercader 4, 08008 Barcelona (temporary space)
Galerie Imane Farès
+34 934 87 67 59
Imane Farès & Caterina Perlini
info@galeriasenda.com
41 Rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris +33 1 46 33 13 13 caterina.perlini@imanefares.com
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Galerie Jérôme Poggi
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Jerôme Poggi & Simon Poulain 2 Rue Beaubourg, 75004 Paris, França
Jousse Entreprise Gallery
+33 9 84 38 87 74
Philippe Jousse & Sophie Vigourous
s.poulain@galeriepoggi.com
6 rue Saint-Claude, 75003, Paris 01 53 82 10 18
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
art@jousse-entreprise.com
Jocelyn Wolff & Nasim Weiler & Eline Grignard 78 Rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris +33 1 42 03 05 65
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nasim.weiler@galeriewolff.com
Magician Space Galerie Karima Celestin
Qu Keije & Pan Baohui & Billy Tang
Karima Célestin
Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang, Beijing
25 Rue Sénac de Meilhan, 13001 Marseille
+86 1058405117
+33 6 28 72 44 24
billytang@magician-space.com
kc@karimacelestin.com
Marlborough Barcelona Galerie Mario Mazzoli
Violant Porcel
Mario Mazzoli & Tania Tonelli
Carrer d’Enric Granados, 68, 08008 Barcelona
Potsdamer Straße 132, 10783 Berlin
+34 934 67 44 54
+49 30 75459560
vporcel@galeriamarlborough.com
info@galeriemazzoli.com
Marlborough Chelsea Galerie Paris-Beijing
Max Levai & Pascal Spengemann
Geoffroy Dubois
& Aliza Hoffman
62 Rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris
545 W 25th St, New York
+33 1 42 74 32 36
+1 212-463-8634
geoffroy@galerieparisbeijing.com
aliza@marlboroughchelsea.com
Galerie Ron Mandos
Marlborough Contemporary
Ron Mandos
Andrew Renton & Louisa Adam
Prinsengracht 282, 1016 HJ Amsterdam
6 Albemarle Street, London W1S, United Kingdom
+31 20 3207036
+44 20 7629 5161
info@ronmandos.nl
la@marlboroughcontemporary.com
Gallery Taik Persons Timothy Persons & Maya Byskov Lindenstraße 34, 10969 Berlin
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+49 30 28883370 berlin@gallerytaikpersons.com
ProjecteSD Silvia Dauder & Maria Pose Passatge de Mercader, 8, 08008 Barcelona +34 934 88 13 60 info@projectesd.com
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W Rosenfeld Porcini
West Den Haag
Ian Rosenfeld & Dario Porcini & Chiara
Marie-JosĂŠ Sondeijker
Gandini
Groenewegje 136, 2515 LR Den Haag
36 Newman Street, London
+31 70 392 5359
+44 20 7637 1133
info@westdenhaag.nl
chiara@rosenfeldporcini.com
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S
ZAK | BRANICKA SMAC Gallery
Asia Zak Persons & Monika Branicka
Marelize van Zyl
& Sofia Hauser
145 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, 7925
Lindenstr. 35, D-10969 Berlin
+27 (0)21 422 5100
+49 30 611 07375
info@smacgallery.com
mail@zak-branicka.com
Sommer Contemporary Irit Fine Sommer & Chen-li Gal 13 Rothschild Blvd., Tel Aviv, 66881 +972 3 5166400 chenli@sommergallery.com
T tegenboschvanvreden Pietje Tegenbosch & Martin van Vreden bloemgracht 57, 1016 ke amsterdam +31 [0]20 320 67 68 info@tegenboschvanvreden.com
V Vitamin Creative Space Zhan Wei & Yan Chuan Room301, 29Hao, Heng Yi Jie, Chi Gang Xi Lu, Guangzhou, 510300 0086-20-84296760 mail@vitamincreativespace.com
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Running in parallel to the Fair, LOOP Studies hosts an extensive program of discussions, talks and private meetings, aimed at creating synergy between international art professionals. The forum’s main goal is thus to provide a space to critically understand and collectively debate the ever-evolving Video Art practices, by merging experiences and coming to envision new methodologies. Having already explored the modalities of production, collaborative creation and diffusion of Video Art, this year’s edition of the Panels, “Beyond Objects? A Debate on Engaged Attitudes towards Collecting”, will then draw attention to collecting strategies, in this way coming full circle and providing a comprehensive insight into the full spectrum of the Moving Image art ecosystem. Indeed, while the global art scene constantly reshapes, the influence of collectors is reinforced as a result of their purchasing power, social skills and ability to detect artists that will later be recognized. Contextually, worldly positions coexist along unconventional, passionate and daring minds, for whom the practice of collecting respectively corresponds to mere speculative strategies or to directed philanthropic efforts. For the latter category, collecting does offer opportunities for economic investments, but it also entails the possibility for enriched and new ways of approaching life’s experiences. While attempting to navigate the skepticism caused by a market that very often reduces artworks to collectibles stripped bare of any cultural value, this discussion will then aim to outline the profile of the ‘engaged, involved and committed collector’. Specific attention
will be drawn to Moving Image practices that, by enjoying a temporal and ephemeral quality, are naturally subjected to specific, and yet sometimes controversial norms. The debate will accordingly explore the consistently wide constellation of collecting attitudes, by privileging those that, to different extents, lead to the production of contents; the processes related with the evolution of those same practices in both the institutional and the private realm; the practical issues inherent to the very nature of Films and Videos, as well as the specificity of their market and legal regulations. The three-day program of the Professional meetings will then expand the discussion, through a series of closed door conversations, articulated around LOOP 2015’s driving themes: ‘What about Collecting Video Art?’ and ‘Beyond the Image: Sound’. The specificities of Sound Art will also be discussed.
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LOOP PANELS
‘BEYOND OBJECTS? A DEBATE ON ENGAGED ATTITUDES TOWARDS COLLECTING’
WEDNESDAY 3 18.30h | OPENING SESSION – Cercle del Liceu ‘VÍDEO-RÉGIMEN. Coleccionistas en la era audiovisual’: Exhibition Opening and conversation This exhibition puts together a series of videos by international artists, from private collections in Spain. The idea for the project stem from the stringent necessity to put into value the work of Spanish collectors committed to the moving image, as well as from the need to investigate its repercussion on contemporary culture. Indeed, the audiovisual nature of Film and Video implies new modalities of production, distribution and preservation, not only influencing the medium’s status as a collectible, but also giving birth to a novel typology of spectators and, therefore, to new forms of reception. Curator Carles Guerra in conversation with Spanish collector Emilio Pi
THURSDAY 4 10.00h – 11.30h | PANEL DISCUSSION ‘A BRIGHT FUTURE? The Engaged, Involved and Committed Collector’ When thinking about collecting strategies, two very different profiles can readily be outlined for collectors: that of ‘Prosumers’ and that of ‘Consumers’. Although very often sharing an innate inclination for investment, or indicating possibly overlapping approaches. Prosumers tend to be devoted patrons of the arts, generally responding to specific political, historical or social agendas, while Consumers are more likely driven by commercial purposes and thus by the trends dictated by the market. By paying specific attention to the collecting of Video Art, the aim of this session will be to explore the existence and agency of the Post-Objective/ engaged collector, to assess his role in the contemporary art market and to ultimately outline the essential resolutions to support and develop the medium’s recognition. LOOP Committee Members Haro Cumbusyan, Jean-Conrad and Isabelle Lemaître in conversation with Alain Servais. 14.00h – 15.30h | ARTIST TALK LUNCH WITH…Bernhard Leitner When LOOP was founded in 2003, Video Art did not have as wide an audience as today – and interested collectors were only a few. A parallel can then be drawn with Sound as an art medium, that similarly slowly evolved to become one of the most important feature in contemporary art, since the dawning of the Twentieth Century.
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As an architect and pioneer of sound art, Bernhard Leitner (1938) explores the fundamental relationship between the sound, the space and the human body. His work focuses on spatial creativity, and sound is deployed as the very medium to mold and structure the space. This conversation aims to disclose the artist’s oeuvre, through a studied selection of significant works made by the end of 1960s. Artist Bernhard Leitner in conversation with curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier (The conversation is part of the curatorial program ‘Beyond the Sound’, by Chamboissier). 18.00h – 19.30h | PANEL DISCUSSION ZOOMING IN: From Private Collecting to Public Engagement What is that leads collectors to commit to curatorial processes, apart from the will to pay justice to artists beyond the market? Indeed, whether in the form of foundations or creative projects, very often collections promote specific agendas by being opened to public enjoyment. In these cases, they evolve into vital platforms, aimed at exploring the social and at fostering the participation of either local and international communities. By encompassing different and international realities, this conversation will thus address the shift from, or the exchange between, private acquisition to public commitment. Aaron Cezar (Director, Delfina Foundation), Miguel Rios (Collector and Director, Leal Rios Foundation), and Sandra Terdjman (Director, Council; Program Advisor, Kadist Foundation) in conversation with Gabriela Galcerán (Collector and Director, Talking Galleries)
FRIDAY 5 10.00h – 12.00h | ONE-TO-ONE CONVERSATIONS. COLLECTING LIVE: In Conversation with the Players By gathering together international collectors to participate into one-to-one conversations, this session will result into a concise roundup on different collecting strategies. The debates will particularly address the implications related to the inherent nature of Moving Image art and its market. The artist perspective will also be addressed. Collector Agah Ugur (CEO, Borusan Contemporary) in conversation with Haro Cumbusyan Collector Han Nefkens (Arts Patron, Han Nefkens Foundation and Art Aids Foundation) in conversation with curator Carles Guerra Collectors Angel and Clara Nieto in conversation with curator Montse Badia (Director, Cal Cego Collection) The Artist Take Academy-Award® winning artist Pierre Bismuth in conversation with curator Bartomeu Marí (Director, MACBA) 14.00h – 15.30h | ARTIST TALK LUNCH WITH…Pierre Bismuth At the end of the 1970s, American artist Ed Rusha conceived Rocky II, a fake rock named after Sylvester Stallone’s memorable performance, and later abandoned someplace in the Mohava Desert. With the help of a private detective and two Hollywood screenwriters, artist Pierre Bismuth embarked on a journey to find it. “What is an art piece that nobody can see?” he argues. “But more than that, what is an art piece that nobody knows about? (…) I understand that an artist can do an invisible piece, but a piece that no one knows is kind of weird. It’s beyond any kind of conceptual statement you can have.” This decade long investigation has finally come to life in ‘Where is Rocky II?’, a wit documentary blurring together reality, fiction and the cin-
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ematic. This session will constitute an exclusive opportunity to hear the artist illustrate its making and the possibility for a specific insight into film production.
“Beyond Collecting: The Construction of Artistic Legacies” - by Henry Lydiate (Art Lawyer and Consultant, The Henry Lydiate Partnership, Lecturer)
16.00h – 18.00h | KEYNOTE LECTURES QUESTIONING SOPHISTICATION
“Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.” Marcel Duchamp 1957.
“Editioning the Moving Image: Old Problems and New Possibilities” – by Erika Balsom (Theorist, Art Critic and Lecturer at King’s College, London)
Duchamp planned all his artwork: he made copious notes, sketches, models, maquettes, The sale of artists’ film and video as limited and trial assemblages; he carefully archived editions on the art market is an increasingly planning material, not only for his own reference but also for what he called “the posdominant form of distribution, displacing both the rental model of the co-ops and the terity”. He also meticulously and assiduously planned for art after death: throughout the sale of uneditioned works. The widespread espousal of editioning represents a reining in last twenty years of his life he worked secretof the inherent reproducibility of the moving ly on conceiving, sourcing and fabricating materials for, and trialing assembly of, an image and its wholesale recuperation into the symbolic economy it once compromised, installation work. that of the unique work of art. The rise of this Duchamp died in 1968 and, following his model has provoked considerable controdirections and instructions, his named trusversy. For some, its artificial scarcity goes against the inherent qualities of the medium tees assembled and exhibited the work at its and betrays promises of access and democ- intended location in 1969. The Philadelphia Museum of Art continues to own and show ratization; for others, it represents the only this now iconic posthumous work, Étant way film and video will be taken seriously by museums and the most viable economic donnés, 1946-66, through which Duchamp posthumously delivers the completion of his model to support the livelihood of artists. artistic explorations. Influenced by the practices of late nineMost artists give little if any thought to teenth-century printmaking, the idea of selling artists’ films as limited editions arises posterity. The job of artists’ future estate exin the early 1930s but remains unrealized at ecutors and administrators could be greatly facilitated by living artists embracing within that time. Throughout most of the twentitheir practices, from the outset of their eth century, attempts to edition film and careers, straightforward and undemanding video consistently failed to achieve market planning measures. viability. This changes in the 1990s, when a number of factors align to make such a modThis session explores key issues involved in el of distribution not only possible, but increasingly preferred. This talk will unfold this and arising from the death of an artist, which history, proposing an account of the reasons practicing artists - regardless of their artistic behind the increasing adoption of the limited skill, market or critical value - may find stimulating and useful during their working lives: edition over the past twenty years, and will explore what implications this development contracts for sale and for lending, including the licensing of public showings of their works. has for the distribution and acquisition of © Henry Lydiate 2015 film and video today.
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SATURDAY 6 12.00 – 13.30h | PANEL DISCUSSION + BOOK LAUNCH An Aperitivo with the ALT[av] group As a network of artists, curators, thinkers and cultural agents, the ALT[av] - Alternative Audiovisual Network from Brazil, proposes a discussion on new paradigms towards collecting, distributing and exhibiting, as well as a reflection on the market for Video and Moving Image practices at large. The talk will not only highlight cases of success, but it will also encompass experiences that bring new perspectives over industrial and formal standards (as, for instance, the museological). In bringing about an exhaustive analysis of the features constituting so unique mediums as Film and Video, it will span both the contextual role of private collections in the Multimedia Age, the notions of intellectual property, proprietary platforms and network services, as well as the online and offline status of a video, before being stored (i.e., the possible stages of a multimedia piece’s life).
PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS
4-5-6 JUNE, MEDIA LOUNGE Among the meeting leaders, Anne-Laure Chamboissier (Independent curator), Enric Enric (Lawyer specialising in intellectual property rights), Menene Gras Balaguer (Director, Culture and Exhibitions, Casa Asia), Carles Guerra (Curator and art critic), Vanina Hofman (Director, Taxonomedia), Lluís Nacenta (Curator), Rachel Rits-Volloch (Director, Momentum), Pau Waelder Laso (Curator and Art critic), Gabriela Galcerán (Director of Talkinggalleries) Jordi Balló (Director, Máster en Documental. de Creación, UPF).
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Oficial Sponsors
Collaborating Institutions
Collaborating Companies
Collaborating Hotels
Media Partners
Online Media Partner
Other Collaborators
Edited by Anna Penalva & Maria M. Vila; designed by Paula Rufi Domingo
Produced by Screen Projects
Screen Projects is a cultural agency specialised in moving image in contemporary art, which develops projects of different formats and locations through the collaboration with key players.
SCREEN PROJECTS is solely responsible for the content ownership SCREEN PROJECTS, not being in any way responsible for any content provided to SCREEN PROJECTS by any third party -whether author, curator, producer, or programmer- who will be responsible for acquiring all necessary rights for the dissemination of such content in LOOP BARCELONA 2015.
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LOOP Barcelona 2015 Directors: Emilio Álvarez & Carlos Durán LOOP Fair: Anna Penalva Pauline Lévêque Maria M. Vila Miquel Matas Ferrer Carmen Corbera Silvia Gutiérrez Kirchner PRODUCTION: Isa Casanellas Álvaro Bartolomé Mercedes Durán Alba Valverde Onfocus-Technical Production LOOP Festival: Conrado Uribe Adriana Valádez Summer Secrest LOOP Studies: Carolina Ciuti Victoria Sacco Montserrat Vicent Espejo Communication: Núria Gurina Eduardo Carrera David Martrat Marta Peret Press: Beatriz Escudero & Ainhoa Pernaute Design: Paula Rufi Domingo
LOOP Barcelona is done through the complicity, support, creativity... and patience of all our collaborators, without which this project would not be possible. To all of them: GRÀCIES! ;)
SELECTED #10
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The projects included in LOOP Fair 2015 have been carefully selected by the four engaged collectors that conform the LOOP Committee: chaired by the enthusiastic Jean-Conrad Lemaître, and formed by Isabelle Lemaître, Marc & Josée Gensollen, Renee Drake and Haro Cumbusyan. To them, we would like to give a special thank you for their generous contribution and advice in putting together the selection for this 13th edition of LOOP Fair.
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