Jazmina Figueroa

This film by David Bickerstaff records the making of a project by the artist Sonia Boyce called For you, only you, where she brings together the world of early Renaissance music with the contemporary voice of the Greek sound artist Mikhail Karikis. The resulting three screen video installation is presented as part of Iniva'sScatexhibition at Rivington Place until 27 July 2013.

For you, only youwas commissioned by the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, Locus+, Milton Keynes Gallery and Model Arts and Niland Gallery and with the support of Arts Council England. 

 David Bickerstaff is a London based artist and filmmaker who's work includes documentary and digital installations - www.atomictv.com.

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outside of all things, 2013

Two channel HD installation, 7:51 min

Edition 2 of 5

Richard T. Walker makes videos, photographs, text works and performances that reveal a frustrated, obsessive relationship with landscape and at the same time explore the complexity of human relations. Videos and photographs show the artist alone in the centre of dramatic landscapes, occupying a position reminiscent of a classic romantic figure contemplating the infinite, awe-inspiring mysteries of an impersonal natural world. As Walker’s narratives unfold, accompanied by his own musical compositions, viewers find themselves becoming beguiled by the artist’s gentle wit and drawn into his intimate relationships. Describing his work, Walker states, “I think, or I hope, that the viewer becomes simultaneously pushed away and pulled towards the landscape. There is a sort of redemption in the music – the idea of the Sublime is re-appropriated, re-positioned and I think the initial relationship to the Sublime becomes questioned.”

The Freestone Drone, a new video installation by George Barber, in his first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – drones – have become an everyday feature of contemporary military activity, replacing humans in reconnaissance flights, small-scale combat missions and covert operations. The US Army operates some ten thousands UAVs – a six-fold increase during Obama’s term - deploying them over locations like Pakistan and Yemen.

In an installation conceived specially for the gallery and consisting of three video projections, an array of domestic objects and numerous washing lines, George Barber’sThe Freestone Drone follows a mission from the point of view of the machine. The drone’s camera surveys cityscapes, encounters individuals, reports, and in flight becomes aware of its own utility and destiny. Drone operators routinely study the washing to learn about their targets - it is foretold that the Freestone Drone is to die entangled in a clothes line.

The video combines found and made footage to produce an uneasy, seductive montage, anchored on the drone’s private thoughts. Barber brings together war, love, life, death, and sends the drone over not only Waziristan, but also to New York and a London suburb. The drone then travels through time, projecting images of the past and possible futures.

George Barber,The Freestone Drone, 2013 video, HD video installation, 13’ video still, BAR044/1

While narrative unravelled on screen resists easy categorisation, the artist draws the viewer to empathise with the antagonist. Engendered with human consciousness and independence, the drone is a poet who disobeys orders and does his own thing, a child within a machine.

In the legacy of Godard and Marker,The Freestone Droneproposes the meeting place of poetry and philosophy as a site to consider contemporary ethical and political concerns. Ultimately, Barber’s work underlines the fact that technologies, and in particular modes of warfare, are symptomatic of the way we understand ourselves at our moment in history. Much now done in our name is at odds with democratic tradition: hidden, inhuman and robotic.

Deep State, a new film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler scripted in collaboration with author China Miéville. The work takes its title from the Turkish term ‘Derin Devlet’, meaning ‘state within the state’. This shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made.

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in a counter-language to that of popular revolt, in which a police charge, a baton attack, pepper spray, assassinations provoke, and respond to, a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Past, present and future collide to form a continuum, in which clear patterns start to recur. A 'riotonaut' time-travels through momentous demonstrations, passing through the holes punched in history by uprisings. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the Deep State, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

Deep Stategerminated from Mirza and Butler’s experiences in Cairo prior to the occupation of Tahrir Square, at a time when it seemed impossible to speak about resistance. This sharpened Mirza and Butler’s interest in making a work that calls out and dislodges ossified language and images.

Corin Sworn at Chisenhale Gallery

The Rag Papers (2013) explores the nature of attention, reuse and appropriation. The film’s worried narrative shifts between the perspectives of three characters who interact with a series of objects set within carefully designed domestic interiors. The film uses point of view shots and cutaway sequences to suggest the roaming nature of each character’s attention and in turn, reveals transient spaces such as hotel rooms, sorting depots and markets. Layering multiple subjective viewpoints, Sworn’s characters shift back and forth between modes of remembering, looking, processing and reading. Objects play a central role in the film, almost as characters in their own right; the mise en scene becoming as potent as the action of the protagonists or any suggested narrative. In recent work, such as the performance lecture Roaming Charges (2011), andHDHB (2011), made in collaboration with Charlotte Prodger, Sworn has explored the global circulation of objects and images. She expands upon these ideas in The Rag Papers with the inclusion of footage shot in second hand goods warehouses – vast repositories where post-consumer textiles and household goods are sorted for reuse and shipped to locations around the world. Here the past trails into the present as objects are recycled across place and time. Sworn is interested in the means by which artefacts are borrowed, adapted and reconfigured to tell different stories. Her work explores the social ordering of attention and how the erratic nature of perception might undermine control. Sworn’s films and installations often incorporate found images, over which she voices her own narratives, themselves composed from fragments of other texts. In The Rag Papers Sworn continues this use of appropriation but renegotiates its terms. In producing the film she worked with the actors to devise a set of actions in an apartment, and then hired two documentary filmmakers to shoot the rehearsed sequences as if they were making a documentary film. Sworn edited the resulting footage to create a narrative which vaguely apes that of a genre film. She has described the work as ‘a seedy noir film that wishes it was an intellectual thriller’.

Notes from CCW Crit

John Rouch on document and fiction

Toxic Play In Two Acts @ SLG: http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/144/Toxic-Play-In-Two-Acts-Pauline-BoudryRenate-Lorenz/756

Simone Forti

Reconsider the discourse group structure, why so many different groups?

Think about black screen and sound on it's own, cutting movements in half

Dammi I Colori (2003) by Anri Sala

Sala didn't paint the Tirana facades in Dammi i Colori (Give Me the Colors), in his current show. Others did, as part of an ongoing project initiated by Edi Rama, the city's mayor and a former artist, who takes us on a tour-with English subtitles-past the oddly intense crazy quilts of saturated color that festoon the drab city's decaying buildings. What at first seems an eerily schizoid imposition of formal modern decoration onto the wretched realities of a bleak post-apocalyptic place-crumbling walls, rummaging inhabitants, bare trees bleached by the glare of the artist's headlights-reveals itself as a post-utopian project. "The city was dead. It looked like a body," intones the mayor, who has pinned his hopes on this quixotic social experiment. "What are the colors doing to us?" Sound-deep, ambient, and urban-plays a unifying role in Sala's video, as if underscoring the mayor's words: "Color also has another role, it must bind together."

James Wentzy, who has spent years recording the history of the fight against AIDS, must soon leave the basement apartment in SoHo that has long served as his film-editing suite.

Films by Hito Steyerl

Lovely Andrea, 2007, DVD 30min

Steyerl searches for a bondage picture in Tokyo taken  20 years ago

November, 2004, DVD 25min. engl. 

“An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. And the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable”. (Agamben 2000:53)  My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died in 1998, when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist in Eastern Anatolia. There was a warrant out for her in Germany, as she was suspected of having participated in terrorist activities, for example the complete destruction of the deportation prison in Weiterstadt. She was also suspected of having been an associate to the Red Army Faction.  In 1996, she chose to go to Kurdistan in order to join the womens army of the PKK, the Workers Party Kurdistan. She took on the name „Ronahi“, trained and lived with the womens army for a few months, mostly in camps in Northern Iraq. Then in October 1998, her unit was tracked by the Turkish army close to the border. A heavy firefight took place. Only a few of the units members remained alive. They were under heavy fire by Army helicopters. Most of the survivors took refuge in what is being described as an earth hole. As surviving earwitnesses who remained in the hole say, she was shot by either army members or Kurdish village keepers after having been dragged out as a prisoner. Her case is only one of the many extralegal executions which structure this war.  “Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as the moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis.” (Agamben 2000:79)  This project tackles the question of what is nowadays called terrorism and used to be called internationalism once. It deals with the gestures and postures it can create, and their relationship to figures of popular culture, namely cinema. It ́s point of departure is a feminist martial arts film Andrea Wolf and I made together when we were 17 years old. Now this fictional martial arts flic has suddenly become a document. November is not a documentary about Andrea Wolf. It is not a film about the situation in Kurdistan. It deals with the gestures of liberation after the end of history, as reflected through popular culture and travelling images. This project is a film about the era of November, when revolution seems to be over and only it ́s gestures keep circulating.  Agamben, G (2000) 'Notes on Politics' Means Without End: (Theory Out of Bounds, V. 20), trans Binetti, V & Casarino, C University of Minnesota Press

http://ubu.com/film/steyerl_november.html

  The Empty Centre 1998, 16mm, 62min, color

Potsdamer Platz is a square in the centre of Berlin, Germany.  Before WWII, it used to be the centre of the city, the centre of it ́s power. Then it became an deadly minefield, enclosed between the borders of the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down. The area between the walls, the empty margins of the border, is open. Now, the centre returns.  After German reunification, Potsdam Square is rebuilt by transnational companies. In the same process, people are shoved out to the outskirts of the city. They are marginalized by the recentering of Germany ́s political and economic power. "The Empty Center" closely follows the processes of urban restructuring that have taken place in the center of Berlin for the last eight years. In 1990, squatters proclaim a socialist republic on the death strip. Eight years later, the new headquarters of Mercedes Benz arise in the same location.  The film makes use of slow superimpositions to uncover the architectonic and political changes of the last eight years. It focusses on Potsdam square to discover traces of global power shifts, and the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of borders.  At the same time, it traces back the history of ostracism and exclusion, especially against immigrants and minorities, which always have served to define the notion of a powerful national center. After the recent German elections, a new chancellor boasts to represent the "New Center" of public opinion. The film nevertheless strives to highlight the perspective of those who are still excluded from public representation and to give them a voice and a history. "It is not so much crossing boundaries as frontiers as it is the partial disappearance, dissolution or repositioning of the boundaries themselves. It is the shifting of the boundaries as you try to cross them... Now you begin to see that we are also talking about the fragmentation of boundaries; the partial breakdown, renegotiation, repositioning of boundaries, about the appearance of new boundaries which cut across the old ones." Stuart Hall