Victor Alimpiev, Johanna Billing, Mircea Cantor
Confined Innocence
Curated by Jan Schuijren
February 14–March 8, 2007

Confined Innocence is presented in conjunction with the Media City 13 International Festival of Experimental Film & Video Art.

Apart from its typical reference to a child’s or animal’s virtue, innocence as a purely positive term that connotes an open and optimistic view of the world, seems to be relegated to the realm of the irrelevant. Authenticity has become relative and reality is increasingly fictionalized, making it hard to connect with our inner essence at this moment in time. Confined Innocence brings together three works that question the biased perceptions we adopt and allows for a revalidation of our core emotions and genuine experience — the simple and pure, heartfelt understanding and interpretation of what we see, hear, and feel.

In Victor Alimpiev’s Summer Lightings, the dark and roaring thunder outside interacts with the controlled, choreographed gestures of a group of young girls sitting in a brightly lit classroom. As if driven by an invisible force, they intermittently drum their painted fingernails on the table. The collective tapping instills what feels like a serene tension in the room. The abrupt cuts of images of the girls’ hands lying open on the table, and close-ups of their expressions — anticipatory, excited, nervous, curious, amused — engender disquiet in the absolute silence. The sequenced play is fiercely interrupted by images of distant thunder and lightning throbbing against a black sky. With no further clues on offer, the emotional charge increases, endlessly suspending the climax, intensifying the complexity of the moment.

Departure by Mircea Cantor shows a gallery space in which a wolf and a deer tensely inhabit the room together. Their distinct yet restful awareness of each other is eerie in its disturbing silence, with the perceived anxiety projected by the viewer’s mind and returned again, bouncing back from the screen. The wolf is latently stalking the deer, though no thought of attack can be read in his mind. The enticing play of their instinctual explorations throws the viewer back and forth between a sense of bewildering wonder and fearful awe in a silent, time-distorting loop.

In Johanna Billing’s Magical World, images of desolate street scenes outside a rundown 1980s cultural centre in Dubrava, a suburb of Zagreb, Croatia, lead inside the building where a group of children are rehearsing the song “Magical World” (1), a melancholic depiction of hope and change: Why do you want to wake me from such a beautiful dream? … Can’t you see that I’m sleeping? … We live in a magical world. While performing the song in what for them is a foreign language, hypnotizing close-ups and long shots of the children alternate with the urban wasteland outside, slowly drawing us into the children’s fragile, private world. The mixture of timidity and pride, insecurity and confidence in their poses and expressions, reveals their struggle to grasp the meaning of the words they sing, but at the same time fills the room with an unmistakable and intense inner hope.

Jan Schuijren worked at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam from 1991 until 2001. Since 2002 he has worked as an independent curator, developing and presenting film, video and media art projects for many international organizations, museums and other venues. Recent projects include “Drawn by Reality – Encapsulated in Life”; an international group exhibition presented in Pittsburgh, and in September 2006 he co-curated the 7th Werkleitz Biennial in Halle, Germany. He was a member of the competition jury at Media City 6 in 2000. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

//

Tony Cokes
The Evil Series
February 14–March 8, 2007

Timely musings culled from authorities such as Condoleeza Rice, the New York Times and Slavoj Zizek are rendered as manically scrolling text and combined with pop music from the likes of The Notwist, Lali Puna and Alias. “This series is an attempt to think about events and issues most Americans disavow: why do most US voters prefer a story they want to hear over an analysis of America’s actions, history and ideology?”

The video and multi-media installation work of Tony Cokes has been exhibited at the NY MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Documenta X, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum, the IFF Rotterdam, the International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and other venues. He teaches at Brown University in Providence, RI.