Leonie Kellein Training Set (screen memory II) 2021
The Second Body
17 - 20 June 2021
12pm to 6 pm, Thur to Sun
Featured artists: Max Bloching, Tomás Fernández Vértiz, Leonie Kellein, Rit a Morais, Benjamin Ord, Sam Risley
Website:
http://www.artistsmovingimage.info/the-second-body.html
Instagram: @goldsmithsartistsmovingimage
Events:
Online Screening: 19-20 June 2021
Online Panel Discussion: 19-June 2021, 2pm
Supported by Goldsmiths, University of London
The Second Body
During a period of pervasive interiority, how have we begun to consider and manifest our future selves and societies? Borrowing its title from Daisy Hildyard's eponymous book, this group exhibition probes a range of possible encounters with this second body as a global presence, starting from a shared exploration of how the moving image intervenes in the pasts, presents and futures of our individual and collective bodies.
The exhibition presents recent work by students studying on the Artists Film and Moving Image Masters at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is organised by the programme director Gail Pickering.
Participating Artists
Max Bloching
What current is under the sea? (2021)
Single-channel back projection installation, high definition 16:9, silk on glass, colour, stereo, duration: 17 min.
Notions of silence, emptiness or void, have been of interest for art and spiritual practitioners for hundreds of years as a portal into often unpredictable forms of presences. In my work I am interested in how humans shape and are shaped by experiences of silence. In a world where slowness becomes a movement of resistance to the order of our present, I am interested in creating environments of stillness that invite the listener to enter into quiet audio-visual landscapes.
What current is under the sea? embarks from a silent encounter with the American minimalist poet Robert Lax and travels into natures curious polyphony of movements. A sound and moving image poem in search for 'living stillness'.
Max Bloching is a German filmmaker currently based in London. Informed by a background in social anthropology, sound recording and improvised music, Max has been drawn to questions around participatory filmmaking, migration and Quakerism, and the ways humans shape and are shaped by sound and ‘silence’. Max´s recent film Unwritten Letters (59mins, 2020), a participatory ethnographic film co-directed with the Syrian filmmaker Abd Alrahman Dukmak, has won the Willey Blackwell Student Film Prize at the 2021 RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film and has been shown internationally at festivals such as Visions Du Réel, Switzerland, Ethnografilm Paris and the Moscow International Festival for Visual Anthropology.
maxbloching.com
Instagram: @max_bloching
#maxbloching
Rita Morais
In The Wolf's Mouth (2021)
Two-channel video installation, colour, sound.
The memory of a landscape: the absent-presence of all that has crossed it and whose voice every so often still sings. In The Wolf’s Mouth is conceived as an approximation to a site of ancient roman mine exploration through a play between the visible and the invisible that lies inside. In a region where the mountains got destroyed thousands of years ago in order to dig for gold, we find today a landscape of apparent natural origin. It is only when we start entering the earth that we comprehend about the presence of other stories that shape the site. This piece is an approximation to the tunnels and cavities of the corpse of a mountain resorting to a spatial and haptic portrait of it. Once we enter, stories unfold and visuality is something else. To see through what seems to no longer be there. This piece has been thought as an initial approach to this site and history, only to later be deepened in a larger film-in-progress named The House Is Made Of Stone.
Rita Morais (b. Portugal) works at the intersection of cinema, contemporary art and research, focusing in particular on understanding the ways in which experimental cinema and artists’ films echo problems related to ecology, (auto-)ethnography and fiction. Her practice is situated in a cross-interpretation of times and gestures, in which the creative making that requires a present is intrinsically linked with the impulse of memory that is to investigate as well as with the intention of the future that is to program. A master's student at Artists' Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths, University of London, she is the founder and programmer of MIRAGEM, a meeting and film screening series in the Azores triangle, and collaborates in the programming of the Experimental Competition of the Vila do Conde IFF. Having participated in artistic residencies in centers such as NO ENTULHO - ArtWorks in Portugal and SIM in Iceland and exhibited work in both countries, she prepares her films The House Is Made of Stone and It Is Not Fire.
#ritamorais
Tomás Fernández
Vértiz
Llegar (2021)
Two-channel video projection, high definition 16:9, colour, stereo, duration: 20 min.
The filming for Llegar took place in the town of Chinampas, Jalisco in 2019, a small town in the centre of Mexico with a population of less than 2000. The town remains a site of constant change, for members of the community who have repeatedly chosen to migrate between Mexico and the USA seeking better opportunities. In 2016, an Italian company installed a wind farm of 43 windmills called ‘Palo Alto’ which now belongs to the landscape surrounding the town. Llegar thereby explores the relationship between a community, and the nature that surrounds it, whilst remaining in the presence of a wind power plant. It aims to question where the future of poverty stricken communities lies within a context defined by environmental progress, violence and political corruption.
My approach to moving image centres on the observational, attempting to question its foundations, techniques, and the meaning of reality through a camera. The conceptualisation of reality through film has been a constant question since early film. Taking part in this question, and practice through the use of observational documentary whilst also acknowledging my part as a filmmaker is a key component in the process as a whole. Through film my intention is to immerse the viewer in a sensorial space, in which I invite the audience to question the political reality in which we live. Through exploring the subjects of community and migration, their pasts, presents and futures, and the ways in which they interact within each-other, I aim to highlight their importance in the contemporary era.
Tomás Fernández Vértiz (b. 1994, Mexico City, Mexico) is a London based artist who works with the mediums of photography and moving image. Tomás explores community and migration and the circumstances in which they exist and in which they co-relate, using documentary and the observational as a mechanism.
bytomasfernandez.com
Instagram: @bytomasfernandez
#tomásfernándezvértiz
Benjamin Ord
Backdrop/Solo (2021)
Two-channel video installation, high definition video and Super 8 film transfered to digital, colour, sound, duration: 9 min.
Backdrop/Solo is made up of two videos shown on flat screen monitors, one which is mounted on the wall and one which is placed on the floor in front. There is a passage between the two works in which the viewer may pass. Music by the underground noise band The Dead C plays across the two videos.
In the wall video we experience a shifting sense of absence and presence through an image which sits in between itself and averts its gaze. As the video unfolds across time, we witness the persistence of the body between the surface of the image and thus its latent potential for liveness.
The floor video appropriates the historical use of moving image as documentation for dance. Only short segments of choreography are revealed through stretched images from digitised super 8 film. The viewer is placed inside this central absence, in the gulf between the two screens, where they experience a paradox of distance and proximity.
In the shifting attention between the two objects, we gain an awareness of our own body as it moves through the gallery space and our co-existence with the moving images both in and out of view.
Benjamin Ord was born in Auckland, New Zealand and is based in London, UK. He was a dancer for over a decade, working with Company Wayne McGregor and the Royal New Zealand Ballet among others. His practice, now primarily based in performance and moving image, is concerned with the paradox of body and object. A key interest is the way in which images through their relationships to the live body, and within a dialogue between forms, can be re-appropriated to exist within the spatial and temporal present of the viewer.
benjaminord.com
Instagram: @bennyord
#benjaminord
Leonie Kellein
Training Set (screen memory II) (2021)
Two-channel video installation, colour, sound, duration: 6 min looped.
The video installation Training Set (screen memory II) explores the ways we deal with plastic and (ecological) trauma - both in confronting the issue of duration and the very idea of infinite transformation. The work consists of a system of video monitors, headphones, wall paint and a plastic object laying on the floor. The monitors play two videos that combine footage of a playful, childlike imagery with scenes that were shot with the plastic object on a scrapyard. The soundtrack of the work is a compilation of a talkshow about a young girl remembering dying in a previous life.
Within the videos different spheres of consciousness and time are created and the idea of the plastic object becoming a shapeshifter comes into play; from one second to the next it is becoming a surfboard, becoming a body, becoming the water. Viewers of the work are invited into the same vulnerable and exposed relationship as the plastic protagonist has with the created environment; it is shape shifting and almost not being in one's one body. It becomes less a thing than a trace of its movement. However, the plastic protagonist presents itself as a frightening, deathly body it seems to be dependent on protection and care at the same time.
Leonie Kellein (b. Switzerland) is a visual artist and filmmaker. She studied at HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg and Goldsmiths, University of London. In her current work she reflects on terms of memory, trauma and our expectations of matter and materiality. She has won several awards and scholarships including the Deutschland stipend by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the DAAD study scholarship and the Art School Alliance stipend by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. and the Karl H. Ditze Stiftung. For her short film Dream City she won the Jury Prize during the participation at the exhibition 'Urban Ecologies' at Weltkunstzimmer Düsseldorf. Her works have been shown internationally at film festivals and galleries such Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis, International Filmfestival Visions du Reél and Kunstverein Schwerin. Alongside her artistic work she has also created videos for theatre productions at Kampnagel, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and Thalia Theater in Hamburg. For 2021/22 she receives the Advancement Prize by the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung IN:VISIBILITIES that focuses on the social and political dimensions of a long-digitalized everyday life that also encompass material and physical processes.
Instagram: @lon_secle
#leoniekellein
Sam Risley
Becoming Moss (2021)
Single-channel video projection, colour, stereo, duration: 18 min.
Becoming moss. Becoming bacterial. Becoming lichen. Becoming human-host-body. Becoming vampiric parasite. As we are forced into isolation by a nature we belong to, regarding our singularity has never seemed so difficult. Our symbiosis has manifested itself, overwhelming. So we wallow in our pasts, unable to conjure our present as we destroy our future.
Becoming Moss is constructed to represent a psychic flux of internal and external time. It puts into dialogue our internal psychic time, muddied by our minds ability to conflate past and present into one perception, and external, geological time that elapses steadily. These two liminal zones are representative of our first and second bodies.
We play symbiotic host body to various other life forms. What happens to our edges and sense of self when we are made aware of this? Could this help us rethink the importance, not only of community, but also of the political formulation of the capitalist individual?
Through a lens of ancestral traces, both human and animal, Becoming Moss is a consideration of deep time through a lens of our currently fragmented claustrophobic viewpoint. The resultant video is a witness to humanity’s bearing on our planet.
Sam Risley is an artist working across installation and moving image. His work centres on narratives of renewal. These works often emanate from a song, text, image or anecdotal story. Stories frequently populated by friends, family and mythic or historical figures, who contemplate memory, time, movement and the hauntings of personal and public histories. Cues that arise during the production are followed, allowing room for chance encounter and narrative divergences.
samrisley.com
Instagram: @sam.risley
#samrisley