Often, one only sees glimpses of a work in a show, does not have time to stay for the entire film or forgot who made the video that you cannot stop thinking about. Therefore, this past winter we gave our audience the chance to wish for the films they would like to see most. From the many suggestions we received, we have finally created a program that includes everything from classics such as John Smith’s Girl Chewing Gum to Trisha Donnelly’s noted and appreciated work from Documenta 13, 2012. Two evenings are curated by artists Lisa Tan and Pierre Bismuth.
The festival opens with an evening screening of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle at Bonniers Konsthall on Saturday, March 23rd. The bar will be open, and between 20:30 and 21:30 we will take a break in the screening to darken the gallery and host a performance in recognition of Earth Hour, the global climate manifestation where people and cities are encouraged to turn off the lights for one hour. The tickets for this opening evening are 80 SEK (or 60 SEK for seniors, students and everyone under 20 years. free for members). For reservations please contact [email protected]
Encore! is organized by Bonniers Konsthall and takes place at Biografen Sture every Monday and Tuesday from March 25 to April 16. Purchase your ticket here.
PROGRAM
Sat 23/3 Prelude at Bonniers Konsthall, 17.30-01.30
Matthew Barney, Cremaster Cycle 1-5, 1994-2002 (397 min).
The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five films directed by artist Matthew Barney. Biologically, the cremaster is a muscle that raises and lowers the testicles. In his five-part epic, Barney traces the formation of sexual definitely, using the descension of the cremaster muscle as a symbol for the onset of male gender. Barney has also said the film can be seen as tracing the creative process of the artist, and also a self-portrait.
At Biografen Sture:
Mon 25/3 Invigningskväll
Jennifer Bornstein, Celestial Spectacular, 2002 (4 min).
Celestial Spectacular is a silent short film depicting a natural phenomenon. The film addresses notions of obsolescence: for example, the obsolescence of 16mm film as an art or documentary medium; of rudimentary, home-made special effects; and the notion of film’s and photography’s ability to capture truth.
Matthew Barney, Drawing Restraint 9, 2012, (150 min).
With a soundtrack composed by Björk, Drawing Restraint 9 is an unconventional love story set in Japan. The narrative structure is built upon themes such as the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil. DR9 is an ongoing series of films, sculptures and drawings that Barney has been working with since 1987.
Tue 26/3 Cause and effect
Fischli & Weiss, The Way Things Go, 1987 (30 min).
The Way Things Go is an art film by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss. It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine.
The Otolith Group, The Radiant, 2012 (64 min)
The Radiant explores the aftermath of March 11 2011, when the Great Tohoku Earthquake struck the North East Coast of Japan. The Radiant travels through time and space, invoking the historical promise of nuclear energy and summoning the future threat of radiation.
Mon 1/4 Ways of being
Ben Russell, Trypps #7, 2010 (10 min)
An intimate long-take of a young woman’s LSD trip in the Badlands National Park that descends into a psychedelic, formal abstraction of the expansive desert landscape. Concerned with notions of the romantic sublime, phenomenological experience, and secular spiritualism, the work continues Russell’s unique investigation into the possibilities of cinema as a site for transcendence.
Daria Martin, Sensorium Tests, 2012 (20 min).
Sensorium Tests is set in a controlled laboratory environment where a woman is being measured for her capacity to respond to sensory stimuli while a scientific observer looks on. This woman’s sensory responses to selected tones and images mimic the real-life neurological phenomenon of synaesthesia, the joining of normally separate perceptions, such as ‘hearing’ colors, ‘smelling’ words, ‘tasting’ shapes, ‘feeling’ names.
Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999 (15 min)
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore stitches together together found and original footage of discos and raves across Britain during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, chronicling the rites of passage experienced by successive generations of British (sub)urban youth.
Ben Rivers, Two Years at Sea, 2009 (88 min).
Two Years at Sea follows Jake Williams, an older man who lives in the middle of the forest. He goes for walks in whatever the weather, and takes naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time sitting in a loch. He is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects.
Tue 2/4 Encore! According to Pierre Bismuth
AES+F, The Feast of Trimalchio, 2009 (25 min).
Renzo Marten, Episode III:Enjoy Poverty, 2009 (90 min).
Episode III, also known as ‘Enjoy Poverty’, is the 90 minute 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.
The night is introduced by Pierre Bismuth, artist and screenwriter (co-writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Mon 8/4 After the cathastrophy
Chris Marker, La Jeteé, 1962 (28 min).
The influential science fiction film La Jateé from 1962 tells a story of time travel through still images. The tale of a man, a slave, sent back and forth, in and out of time, to find a solution to the world’s fate after World War III.
Lea Porsager, The Anatta Experiment, 2012 (24 min).
The Anatta Experiment, first exhibited at Documenta 13, revolves around the experimental and spiritual groups who had their base on Monte Verità – The Truth Mountains – in Ascona, Switzerland in the early 1900s.
Omer Fast, CNN Concatenated, 2002 (18 min).
In CNN Concatenated, death is signified by a compulsive staccato montage of words, phonemes and pauses for breath sampled from ten thousand hours of images recorded from the 24-hour news channel, all uttered by male and female presenters who are substituted one for another, in one long chain of identical links. A meta-discourse of breath and words takes force rather than form in this montage, which builds the anxious rhythm of an urgent harangue, subliminal and paranoid, uttered in the first person and addressed to ’you’, a spectator.
Christian Jankowski, Casting Jesus, 2012 (45 min).
Casting Jesus is an audition where 13 professional actors compete for the role of Jesus. A distinguished panel of Vatican members judge the actors as they complete a variety of tasks including, breaking bread, performing a miracle and carrying the cross, as well as dramatic interpretations of their favorite Jesus quotes.
Tue 9/4 Encore! According to Lisa Tan
Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011 (61 min).
Davey scours through her earliest black-and-white photographs: portraits of her rebellious Catholic sisters in the early 1980s. She walks around her apartment, whispers in the microphone and quotes everything from the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on photography to the poet Alejandra Piznarnik’s ideas on food.
John Bock, Gast, 2004 (11 min).
Gast depicts a rabbit hopping freely in the artist’s apartment, which is littered with sculptures composed of quotidian household items. Bock’s camera follows the rabbit’s movements as his own costume manipulates them. References to Joseph Beuys’ performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) are evident, but Bock reverses Beuys’ mandate by learning from rather than teaching his companion.
Lisa Tan, Sunsets, 2012 (23 min).
The video documents an informal translation and transcription (Portuguese to English) of a 1977 interview with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977). Lispector’s figurative and highly imaginative stories approach the limits of subjectivity in remarkable ways. The piece layers the interview with scenes that were filmed in Sweden during the liminal zone of either 3am during the summer, or 3pm during the winter.
The night is introduced by Lisa Tan.
Mon 15/4 Re-staging
John Smith, Girl Chewing Gum, 1976 (12 min).
A commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional. Since 1972, British filmmaker John Smith has developed a style that reworks reality and playfully exposes the cinematic language for viewers.
Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 2001 (63 min).
The Battle of Orgreave, staged 17 years after the original battle, is a large scale performance re-enacting a confrontation between the police and striking miners from the 1984-5 miners strike. More than 800 people participated in the re-enactment, many of them former miners, and a few former policemen, reliving the events from 1984 that they themselves took part in.
Phil Collins, marxism today, 2010 (35 min).
marxism today comprises a series of interviews held with three women who taught Marxism-Leninism in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Interspersed with archival footage, the film offers different perspectives on life before and after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic.
Tue 16/4 Trisha Donnelly
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2012 (90 min).
“Untitled (2010-ongoing) from Documenta13 is a kind of digital screen wipe: a horizontal scrolling bar scraped pixels across the wide cinema screen and seemed to promise a blank screen, but instead left behind a digital smudge. In our digitized world it might seem ridiculous to be concerned about the properties of specific mediums, but perhaps there is still something at stake in asking whether a work like Untitled is a painting or a film, or somehow both” (Frieze magazine, issue 151).
