The Wall and Other Stories date 2019. 03. 28 – 04. 28 venue. Total Museum curator. Nathalie Boseul Shin, Johann Nowak Artist Korakrit Arunanondchai Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis Teboho Edkins Nezaket Ekici Harun Farocki Gary Hill Renzo Martens Tatsumi Orimoto Anke Röhrscheid Jeremy Shaw Hito Steyerl Mariana Vassileva cooperation. von Kelterborn Collection suppoort. Arts Council Korea
Round Table | The Vision and Future of the Collection of Video Art Date April 2 (Tue), 4 p.m. Venue Total museum, Academy Room Presenter Mario von Kelterborn Debater. Nathalie Boseul Shin, Johann Nowak Special Lecture Date April 3 (Wed), 4:00 p.m. Venue Ewha Womans University, Art & Design, A, 3F, Room#316 Presenter Johann Nowak , Mario von Kelterborn
Mario von Kelterborn was born in 1969 in East Berlin. After the fall of the Wall, he studied business administration in Augsburg. He subsequently worked as treasurer at Lehman Brothers, then in the capital market business for Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. Later with two colleagues, he set up a consulting firm for capital market products. In the meantime, he has left the company. Today he primarily devotes his time to the art world, first with the start up Archie’s Nose, a new art social media app, private assistant and connector to the art world. And second to the Von Kelterborn Collection for which, together with his wife Julia, he acquired the first works in 1997. He and his wife have developed their collection, which now comprises an impressive array of works by contemporary international artists who often deal with political topics and work in photography and video, such as Mosse, Steyerl, Harun Farocki, Gary Hill, Tobias Zielony, Barbara Klemm and Taryn Simon.
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The Wall and Other Stories
The world is changing. Constantly. Sometimes is just happens without us feeling it so much. But today most people realize that new times arriving. It’s about a new quality of impact, of influencing, of behaving, of interacting and of data flows. It’s about a new regime of borders and the way they change, in reality and in our minds. The Wall and Other Stories is about this change. Of course, mentioning the word “Wall” people in some countries think intuitively about the border between countries and people. But the title goes beyond. By talking about “other Stories”, we talk about a mindset which follows fundamental values of human behaviour and borders in our thinking. It's about power which does not equal into brutality ( Jeremy Shaw). It forces us to think and be creative – does the world exist only if we watching it? Asked the voice in Harun Farocki’s “Parallel” How does the world changes if one comes to age? – Tatsumi Orimoto. How does the world changes if one comes to age? – How do we behave between nature and technology – Korakrit Arunanondchai. And how does mankind handles changes – “Be water my friend” says Bruce Lee in Hito Steyerl’s “Liquidity Inc.” There is no easy answer, as always, when someone is part of both sides of an equation. But understanding the right questions gets us closer to the right answers – and let us understand, that borders are not abstract but set by each one of us.
Johann Nowak founded DNA in 2001 in Berlin, Germany. DNA is dedicated to promoting contemporary art. It focuses primarily on international artists. The program accommodates a wide range of artistic media (painting, sculpture, video, installation and drawing), presented via innovative, interactive, interdisciplinary and multimedia projects. DNA has an international character, collaborating regularly with numerous institutions outside Germany. Johann Nowak has been working as an independent curator, realizing numerous international projects, such as The Festival of Vision, Berlin-Hongkong in collaboration with Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin. The art festival “UNDABDIEPOST” in Berlin in the Boros Bunker.
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Floor plan
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① Wall Piece, Gary Hill, 2000 ② Best Minds Part One, Jeremy Shaw, 2007 ③ Gangster Backstage, Teboho Edkins, 2013 ④ - 1 Parallel I, Harun Farocki, I. 2012 / II-IV 2014 ④ - 2 Parallel III, Harun Farocki, I. 2012 / II-IV 2014 ④ - 3 Parallel II, Harun Farocki, I. 2012 / II-IV 2014 ④ - 4 Parallel IV, Harun Farocki, I. 2012 / II-IV 2014 ⑤ Small Mama And Big Shoes, Tatsumi Orimoto, 1997 4
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Floor plan ⑥ Swatted, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, 2018 ⑦ Is The Museum A Battlefield?, Hito Steyerl, 2013 ⑧ Liquidity Inc., Hito Steyerl, 2014 ⑨ Kronstadt 2014 Mariana Vassileva, 2014 ⑩ Defiant, Nezaket Ekici, 2008
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[ Screening Program/ Lecture Hall ] | 13:00 | 15:00 | 1. Apperception, Anke Röhrscheid, 2013 | 13:05 | 15:05 | 2. Episode III Enjoy Poverty, Renzo Martens, 2008 | 14:35 | 16:35 | 3. Painting With History In A Room Filled With People With Funny Names 3 (Subconscious Voice Chantri Version), Korakrit Arunanondchai, 2015 5
Gary Hill 6
‹Wall Piece› Single Channel Video, Color, Stereo Sound, Strobe Light, 4:3, 07:32min., 2000 In Wall Piece, the image of a man repeatedly flinging himself at a wall and speaking a single word with each impact is projected on the wall of a completely darkened space. During recording, a single flash of extreme high intensity strobe light (the only light source) “captured” the body at the moment of contact. These singular moments were then edited together to form a linear text and a sequence of a body in various positions up against a wall. In the installation, the same kind of strobe light used for the recording is mounted on the floor and focused on the projection. It flashes at approximately 60 cycles per minute, going in and of synchronization with the recorded flashes of light. At times, the light presages the image, echoes the image, or when in unison, obliterates the image.
— Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, USA) Gary Hill has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970’s. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, among others. Commissioned projects include works for the Science Museum in London and the Seattle Central Public Library in Seattle, Washington, and an installation and performance work for the Coliseum and Temple of Venus and Rome in Italy. Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1995), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), the Kurt-Schwitters-Preis (2000), and honorary doctorates from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland (2005) and Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, WA (2011).
Jeremy Shaw
‹Best Minds Part One› 2 Channel Video, Color, Original Soundtrack, 4:3, 48:31min., 2007 Jeremy Shaw’s artistic practice engages with youth subcultures and cultural deviance. Jeremy documents the contested zones of a generation of young people in socialization systems, while at the same time examining the various aspects of the recording process, from the breakdown of analog information to his role as insider/chronicler. By reinterpreting conventional aspects of documentary, rock, video, narrative film and visual art within a conceptual framework, Shaw creates work that establishes dialogue within and around these marginalized communities. ‹Best Minds Part One› examines systems of aesthetics and technology that support the social and private experiences of a subculture. The immersive installation consists of two looped video projections that juxtapose the violent dancing of straight-edge youth with Shaw’s melancholic, time-warping score inspired by Wiliam Basinski’s ‹The Disintegratioin Loops›, Clint Burnham writes. “The video shows us kids slowed down – the dancers are simultaneously balletlike and frenetic – but we are also witnessing a dirge, a funeral, twinned with Shaw’s music like a lament for a scene that is now so over (or maybe just a parody of itself ). And in this last moment of historicity, we also see a strong connection to the literary heritage – the Beats – established by Shaw’s title, which refers to the first lines of Ginsberg’s poem Howl, itself a lament or dirge for the institutionalization of both his friend Carl Solomon and his mother Naomi.” – Text by curator Wayne Baerwaldt
— Jeremy Shaw (b. 1977, North Vancouver, Canada) Jeremy Shaw studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He explores altered mental states, focusing on the aesthetic and scientific valences of psychedelics. The Berlin-based artist works primarily in video and Kirlian photography – a technique used to capture electrical discharges.
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Teboho Edkins
‹Gangster Backstage› Single Channel HD Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 37:30min., 2013 Gangster Backstage is Teboho Edkins' follow-up to Gangster Project, a film he completed a few years before, and for the making of which he ventured in one of Cape Town's most violent black townships where few white people dare to enter, to observe the life of real gansters at first hand. This time, instead of seeking the gangsters in their natural habitat, he summons them to the neutral setting of an empty classroom by lauching a casting call. Interviews, during which the characters talk candidly about the pros and cons of gangster life alternate with scenes in which they stage their fears and dreams, in a barren Dogville-like decor, with white tapes marking the claustrophobic outline of a prison cell. Between the torment of confinement and the omnipresent threat of an untimely death, these amoral human beings evolve in the South-African society, which has failed so far to come to terms with itself.
— Teboho Edkins (b. 1980, USA) Teboho Edkins was grew up in mainly in Lesotho, but also Germany, South Africa and France and now lives in Berlin. He studied Fine Art in Cape Town, did a 2-year post-graduate residency at le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains in France, and completed a post-graduate programme of the dffb film academy in Berlin.
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Harun Farocki
‹Parallel I› 2 Channel HD Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 4:3, 15:53min., 2012 Parallel I opens up a history of styles in computer graphics. The first games of the 1980s consisted of only horizontal and vertical lines. This abstraction was seen as a failing, and today representations are oriented towards photo‐realism. For over one hundred years photography and film were the leading media. From the start, they served not only to inform and entertain, but were also media of scientific research and documentation. That’s also why these reproduction techniques were associated with notions of objectivity and contemporaneity -- whereas images created by drawing and painting indicated subjectivity and the transrational. Apparently today computer animation is taking the lead. Our subject is the development and creation of digital animation. If, for example, a forest has to be covered in foliage, the basic genetic growth program will be applied, so that ‘trees with fresh foliage’, ‘a forest in which some trees bear four-week-old foliage, others six-week-old foliage’ can be created. The more generative algorithms are used, the more the image detaches itself from the appearance as found and becomes an ideal-typical. Using the example of trees and bushes, water, fire and clouds we compare the development of surfaces and colourings over the past thirty years in computer animation images. We want to document reality-effects such as reflections, clouds, and smoke in their evolutionary history. – Harun Farocki
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Harun Farocki
‹Parallel III› 2 Channel HD Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 07:21min., 2014 Parallel III seeks out the backdrops of the game worlds and the nature of their digital objects. It reveals digital worlds which take the form of discs floating in the universe – reminiscent of pre – Hellenistic conceptions of the universe. The animated worlds appear as one-sided theatre stages, flat backdrops revealed only by the movements of an omniscient camera. The objects in the worlds often do not react to “natural forces.” Each of their properties must be separately constructed and assigned to them.
‹Parallel II› Single Channel HD Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 08:38min., 2014 Parallel II explores the borders and boundaries of the game worlds. The work follows characters’ attempts to escape the edges of their animated world by any means, and seeks to reveal what lies outside of the defined spaces and digital borders.
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Harun Farocki
‹Parallel IV› Single Channel HD Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 11:20min., 2014 Parallel IV explores the actions of the heroes and protagonists of the video game world. These heroes have no parents or teachers; they must test their relationships with others and determine of their, own accord, the rules to follow. Farocki notes these characters are “homunculi, anthropomorphist beings, created by humans. Whoever plays with them has a share in the creator's pride.”
— Harun Farocki (1944-2014, born in Czechoslovakia) Harun Farocki attended from 1966 to 1968 the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). In addition to teaching posts in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Manila, Munich and Stuttgart, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Farocki made close to 120 films, including feature films, essay films and documentaries. He worked in collaboration with other filmmakers as a scriptwriter, actor and producer. He wrote for numerous publications, and from 1974 to 1984 he was editor and author of the magazine 「Filmkritik」. His work has shown in many national and international exhibitions and installations in galleries and museums.
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Tatsumi Orimoto
‹Small Mama and Big Shoes› Single Channel Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 4:3, 23:37min., 1997 Orimoto uses his aging mother (suffering from Alzheimer’s and bouts of depression) as a primary subject for a variety of unexpected scenes. He has photographed her with huge cardboard shoes that make her several inches taller. The contrast between the tiny woman with the furrowed brow and the ridiculousness of the particular situations is powerful.
— Tatsumi Orimoto (b. 1946, Kawasaki, Japan) Tatsumi Orimoto studied at Califonia Institute of Art and was assistant of Nam June Paik. Now he lives and works in Kawasaki City. His central subjects are communication and interaction. He presents not only the strange, but also the familiar within the strange: The photographs of his mother remind us of a look into our own, at least imaginary, family album. Orimoto’s subjects are old age, illness and the bodily and mental decline of his mother. In our youth-oriented society this phenomenon is often disregarded. His own, slower ageing process is en passant also subject of his long term study. The likeness of mother and son becomes more clear as the years pass by, but the visualization is not melancholic, but has a cheerful distance.
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Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis
‹Swatted› Single Channel Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 21:14min., 2018 Online video game players talk about their difficulties fighting against “swatting”, a potentially mortal form of cyber bullying that threatens them whenever the play. This work is a winner of the Studio Collector Price for Le Fresnoy, 2018.
— Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis (b. 1988, France) Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis graduated from INSAS (Belgium) in editing, from Sint-Lukas Art School (Belgium) in filmmaking and from Le Fresnoy (France). Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis explores a cinema beyond the boundaries of genres. His films question memory, virtual, technology and the intermediate spaces between the worlds and between the words. He was known as a filmmaker with his film Ondes noires which has been shown in many international festivals, such as the IDFA, the Clermont-fd Short Film Festival, the Regensburg Short Film Festival etc. He currently lives and works in Paris.
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Hito Steyerl 14
‹Is the Museum a Battlefield?› 2 Channel Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 39:53min., 2013 The video installations by Hito Steyerl are insightful analyses of our contemporary society. the artist deals with global financial flow as the increasing influence of autonomous systems and she practices institutional critique with images as media of our world perception, as here with the question: Is the Museum a Battlefield? In “Is The Museum a Battlefield?”, Hito Steyerl shows that the museum has long been one of the social settings in which the struggles for political and economic dominance are played out. Steyerl combines the gesture of the scientific lecture and documentary sequences with associative thought experiments. It raises the provocative thesis that museums historically were “battlefields” again and again – such as for example, the Louvre or the Hermitage were attacked by revolutionaries – and still are today. She emphasizes especially connections of weapons manufacturing as sponsors of exhibitions. By shooting from war zones and tracing trajectories of self-aiming missiles and bullets, she creates a speculative context, for example, with the architecture of Frank Gehry. One of the main messages of the video is “that the museum is not an ivory tower and a temple of detached contemplation ... but in contrast ... the scene of contemporary social conflicts and entanglements” – Hito Steyerl
Hito Steyerl
‹Liquidity INC.› Single Channel HD Video in architectural environment, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 30:00min., 2014 As suggested by the title, this work uses water as its guiding theme. Liquidity Inc. takes as a point of departure the story of Jacob Wood, a former financial analyst who lost his job during the 2008 economic recession and decided to turn his hobby in mixed martial arts into a career. Steyerl follows actor and martial artist Bruce Lee’s dictum to “be shapeless, formless, like water,” turning “liquidity” into a trope fluid enough to speak about everything from the weather to water as material resource, to the circulation of information and assets. Projected onto a double-sided screen in front of a wave-like ramp structure, Liquidity Inc. is a captivating parable of economic crisis and contemporary culture that is by turns playful and poignant.
— Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she cofounded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.
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Mariana Vassileva
‹Kronstadt 2014› ingle channel video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 1:20min., 2014 The main part of the footage for ‹Kronstadt 2014› was made by the Gulf of Finland in Kronstadt, Russia, and has been combined with studio sequences of a ballet dancer from the St Petersburg Mariinski Ballet as well as found footage from the internet, a TV advertisement for light and heavy firearms. In the advert a speaker voice uses music terminology phrases, such as mezzoforte, while boosting the gun’s capacity at the same time as a piano is being shot to pieces, which is shown in a cynically aesthetic slow motion shot.
— Mariana Vassileva (b. 1964, Bulgaria) Mariana Vassileva transforms still life and movement through visual representation into new energetic harmony. She is not interested in the physical act of the movement, but in the mental process behind it. In a minimal way, she transforms objects, situations and manners, and presents them in another reference on a lyrical level. The spectator begins to appreciate the work through the emotional movement into a strangely represented world. In this process, one is animated toward a heightened sensibility of daily variations.
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Nezaket Ekici
‹Defiant› Single Channel Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 4:3, 07:11min., 2008 Nezaket Ekici presents herself in a dress made of a durable material normally used in the automobile industry due to its robustness, and which also corresponds to the title of the piece and its basic message. The red dress, fitted with 4000 toothpicks, calls to mind a hedgehog in defense mode. In her performance the artist subtly deals with the defense mechanisms that people use to protect themselves. Standing on a pedestal, the artist assumes several uncomfortable positions, stiffening like a sculpture and accepting the fact that she may well injure herself on the spiny toothpicks. The individual viewer reflects upon his or her own double role of attracting and then repelling others in order to not lose oneself. Threatening details are amplified in that they are projected onto the wall live, in oversized.
— Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970, Turkey) Nezaket Ekici works and lives in Germany since 1973. The artist’s performances, installations, and videos are inspired by her bi-cultural background, German and Turkish, and relates to a narrative of art history while inspired from daily life situations. She studied performance art under Marina Abramovic at Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig and her works have been shown internationally since 2000, most notably the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), P.S.1 New York (2004).
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Anke Röhrscheid
‹Apperception› 3D Animation Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 4:3, 3:50min., 2013 “Apperception” presents to us a world of constant metamorphosis. Whether what we see is microscopically small or moves across the unfathomable depths of space remains as ambivalent as the nature of the objects appearing on the black ground and flying towards us in swarms like birds or airplanes, creating a vague feeling of threat.
— Anke Röhrscheid (b. 1965, Erfurt, Germany) Anke Röhrscheidworks and lives in Frankfurt am Main. Anke studied at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main under Hermann Nitsch. She had solo exhibitions at Sprengelmuseum, Hannover(2019), Granulation, Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt am Main(2018), Phenomena in Space, DNA Galerie, Berlin(2016) etc.
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Renzo Martens
‹Episode III: Enjoy Poverty› Documentary Film, 16:9, 90min., 2008 Africa from a sarcastic point of view, Is Poverty a natural resource? Why are images of poverty the most lucrative export? Episode III, also known as ‘Enjoy Poverty’, is the 90minute film registration of Renzo Martens’ activities in the Congo. In an epic journey, the film establishes that images of poverty are the Congo’s most lucrative export, generating more revenue than traditional exports like gold, diamonds, or cocoa. However, just as with these traditional exports, those that provide the raw material: the poor being filmed, hardly benefit from it at all. Amidst ethnic war and relentless economic exploitation, Martens sets up an emancipation program that aims to teach the poor how to benefit from their biggest resource: poverty. Thus, Congolese photographers are encouraged to move on from development-hindering activities, such as photographing weddings and parties, and to start taking images of war and disaster. With a neon sign, packed in metal crates and carried through the jungle by Martens’ porters, the local population is encouraged to capitalize on what the world has given them as their share. It states ‘Enjoy Poverty.’ Hapless plantation workers question it, accept it, dance around it, yet in the end, the whole project seems bound to fail. The piece is the third in a series of films that, by enacting their own parameters, try to make visible their own complicity.
— Renzo Martens (b. 1973, Terneuzen, ND) Renzo Martens is artist who currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Kinshasa. Martens became known for his provocations, including Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), a documentary that suggests that the Congo market their poverty as a natural resource. In 2010 Renzo Martens initiated the Institute for Human Activities (IHA) that postulates a gentrification program on a palm oil plantation in the Congolese rainforest.
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Korakrit Arunanondchai
‹Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 3› Single Channel Video, Color, Stereo Sound, 16:9, 24:55min., 2015 This video is an epilogue to the research Arunanondchai began in 2012, and is part of a series – a sort of Bildungsroman focusing on the apprenticeship of a painter, The Denim Painter, who is the artist’s fictional double. The identity of this figure is forged by globalization, but also encapsulates the social and spiritual reality of Thailand. Moving between fact and fiction, Eastern and Western aesthetics, the painter undertakes a journey for self discovery, awakening and purification, in works that channel the pace and aesthetic of music videos.
— Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Bangkok, Thailand) Korakrit Arunanondchai lives and works in New York and Bangkok. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design (USA), Skowhegan School of Painting (USA) and Columbia University, New York (USA). He had solo exhibitions at a number of museums and galleries, including MOMA PS1 New York, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Palais de Tokyo France and Kiasma Helsinki. He also participated in group exhibitions of ICA London, The Metropolitan Art Society Beirut, Berlin Biennale, Sydney Biennale, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale and Mori Art Museum Tokyo. In 2019, his work will be shown at the 58th Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennale in New York as well as at Gent, Brussels and Kiev.
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The Wall and Other Stories
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