Module 1, Palais de Tokyo, November 6th-30th

 

The Palais de Tokyo invites the d.c.a association, a network which federates 46 contemporary art centres in France, to occupy the Module 1 from 6 until 30 November 2008. The d.c.a art centres put forward an artists’ films in order to compose three programmes, presented alternately in the Module.

d.c.a invited Andrea Bruciati (in partnership with AMACI, the Italian Contemporary Art Museums Association) and Bettina Steinbrügge to freely create two programmes from the selection of films put forward by art centres within the scope of FIAC CINEMA (at Palais de Tokyo on Friday October 24th 2008)

Andrea Bruciati, art critic and curator, is director of GC.AC in Monfalcone since 2002.

Bettina Steinbrügge, art critic and curator, is artistic director of the Galerie Andersen’s Contemporary in Berlin. She runned the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg between 2001 and 2008.

In addition to the “IV” programme by Andrea Bruciati and the “Fear and Desire" programme by Bettina Steinbrügge, the third programme, “From A to Y”, will present all the films put forward by art centres which are members of d.c.a. These three programmes reflect the diversity of contemporary video production, showing the wealth of the most recent artistic creation in France, supported by art centres and emphasising the contemporary nature of their choices.

 

« IV »

Program by Andrea Bruciati

As Aristotle previously observed in Book IV of Poetics, “homo aestheticus”, through creating an image of another world for pleasure, another way of showing things, changes his own reality as much as the reality which is external to him. Thus created, this super-reality becomes the outpost for speculations, in which the elusive dimension of the image forms the basis for a new ontology of representation.

With Roberto Cuoghi, Simona Denicolai et Ivo Provoost, Julien Prévieux, Markus Schinwald.

Roberto Cuoghi
Foolish Things
A proposition of Centre international d’art et du paysage (Ile de Vassivière)

On a strip of beach as artificial as a picture postcard a sun alternately rises and sets. The musical accompaniment – the famous thirties love song These Foolish Things – adds a strain of melancholy and yearning.

Simona Denicolai et Ivo Provoost
È tutto oro
A proposition of la Chapelle du Genêteil, Centre d’art contemporain /Le Carré 
Scène Nationale (Château Gontier)

A fluttering plastic bag tied to a rock, a little girl who falls to her knees, an apparition of the Virgin Mary: the impact of the image, its symbolic value, and the striking quality of this vision are the core moments of this experience.

Julien Prévieux
Post-post-production
A proposition of Centre d’art contemporain la synagogue de Delme (Delme)

Here Prévieux kits out the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough with a new set of effects: each shot is enhanced with additional explosions, flames, smoke, floods and avalanches. Thus "boosted", the film takes on a completely different narrative rhythm.

Markus Schinwald
Ten in Love
A proposition of CAC Brétigny (Brétigny-sur-Orge)

The objects in the film take on a religious feel, like relics from some unknown liturgy. In the same way, the deliberation of the gestures and the on/off lighting cuts combine to accentuate the movements of each character.

 

"Fear and Desire"

Program by Bettina Steinbrügge

One of the characteristic traits of post-modern society is the re-expression of words via visual means. We are party to the replacement of symbolism by the imagination or pretence. If the imagination is really replacing symbolism, then what is the nature of our narratives today?
The question should actually be: how do we narrate these narratives?
All the works presented in this programme are linked to one another by the fact that the representation is open to doubt. Memory, vision and identity are fragmented as a result. Nothing can be assumed real any longer, which is particularly the case for the individuals present in this programme. Thus they appear not only as searching for an elusive reality but also searching for themselves.

With Mounir Fatmi, Arnaud Maguet, Alice Anderson, Antoinette Ohannessian, Emre Hüner, Gail
Pickering, Markus Schinwald, Bettina Hutschek.

Mounir Fatmi
The Machinery
A proposition of le Creux de l’enfer (Thiers)

Mounir Fatmi invents visual spaces and linguistic games that spur viewers to cut free of their political and religious preconceptions and allow them to contemplate these issues in new ways. The Machinery brings to light our doubts, fears and desires.

Arnaud Maguet
Girls are Weird
A proposition of the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson (Nice)

In his return to the pop aesthetic that of the 1950's–1970's, Maguet admits to a single form of nostalgia: "Nostalgia for what I have never known." Rooted in a collective memory, this ambiguous feeling is here amplified and deformed through the prism of the subculture.

Alice Anderson
The Dolls’ Day
A proposition of l’Espace Croisé (Roubaix)

Alice Anderson’s film The Dolls’ Day is inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s novel Morella, itself a variation on a classical theme: the tragedy of cold, unloving rationality. The Dolls’ Day is an allegorical tale of a girl's stifling relationship with her parents.

Antoinette Ohannessian
Autoportrait
A proposition of 19, Centre régional d’art contemporain (Montbéliard)

Antoinette Ohannessian brings together reality and its forms of representation via an examination of the effects of texts and words on the visible. The resultant constellation of ideas tells us who we are and how we interact, without ignoring the uncertainties, lies and shifts in meaning of our lives.

Emre Hüner
Boumont
A proposition of les Abattoirs (Toulouse)

Ecological problems, poverty, the risk society and modern man's relationship with nature are the issues driving the work of Emre Hüner. In a social system more decadent than it has ever been, the survival instinct becomes all-consuming, as our daily lives are reduced to loneliness, the search for food and the need for protection. 

Gail Pickering
Dissident Sunset
A proposition of Parc Saint Léger – Centre d’art contemporain (Pougues-les-Eaux)

Dissident Sunset engages with recent histories of radical action and social rituals. Re-staged for the camera, a series of archival photographs of 20th-century dissident groups form a playfully choreographed assemblage. As the buildings around them begin to collapse and disintegrate, the groups instinctively fall back on introspection, throwing themselves into a carnivalesque ritual dance. 

Markus Schinwald
Ten in Love
A proposition of CAC Brétigny (Brétigny-sur-Orge)

The inner conflict between space and body, between the uncanny and the disquieting, together with the shortcomings and the irrational side of the individual and collective self: these are the themes of Ten in Love. The artist explores the stage notion of an "evolving matrix" by creating a performance structure founded on the rational/emotional dialectic. 

Bettina Hutschek
Domino
A proposition of centre d’art passerelle (Brest)

Documentary images and historical maps merge with a poetic explanation of social destiny: the construction and deconstruction of society depend on the games of the gods as an influence on cultural forms. The mythological protagonist is set against the pseudoscientific descriptions, and thus the issues of the real nature of the gods and of their power over our fate remain unresolved.

 

"From A to Y"

Programme by d.c.a

A choice of films produced, co-produced or shown by the art centers member of the d.c.a network.

With A Constructed World, Neal Beggs, Simon Boudvin, Jean-Marc Chapoulie, Veaceslav Druta, Anne
Durez, Maria Loura Estevão, Frédéric Garnier, Kang Hyun Wook, Seulgi Lee, Fleur Noguera, Claire-
Lise Petitjean, Elisa Pône, Laurent Terras, Laurent Vicente, Virginie Yassef.

A Constructed World 
Le Feu Scrupuleux
A proposition of Cneai (Chatou)

Le Feu Scrupuleux is an adaptation of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972), a prophetic story of ecological disaster in which the crew of a spacecraft work to maintain what is left of nature in outer space. Filmed on a boat, A Constructed World provides a version in which arrogant commercial excess and self-obsessed capitalism lead us to wonder if anything is worth saving. And so Le Feu Scrupuleux continues its negation of organized disorder by deliberately ignoring and refusing to recognise reality.

Neal Beggs
Adidas Kids
A proposition of the Grand Café, Centre d’art contemporain (Saint-Nazaire)

In this video three teenagers, Gypsies living on the outskirts of a city, do their best to communicate with an art critic (in real life Scottish art critic Duncan McLaren, present during Neal Beggs's residency in Saint-Nazaire) and an artist, both of whom speak little or no French. The teenagers are reduced to despair by the realisation that the adults do not even understand the word "Adidas".
The viewer witnesses this impossible dialogue in a film that speaks to us of translation and contemporary urban forms of communication.

Simon Boudvin
L’architecte/The Architect
Une proposition de La Galerie, Centre d’art contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec
(Noisy-le-Sec)

A drawn shape endowed with movement by its maker explores demolition sites and materials.

Jean-Marc Chapoulie
CHIPs Around Los Angeles 
A proposition of the Palais de Tokyo (Paris)

The video Chips Around Los Angeles is an editing of extracts from the TV series Chips, in which two policemen on motorcycles, always perfectly aligned, check on the roads of Los Angeles.
A film-maker and a video-maker, Jean-Marc Chapoulie has been questioning cinema and television in all its forms for several years. 
Born in 1967. Lives in Paris.

Anne Durez
 Donnant #
A proposition of the Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France (Pontault-Combault)

This single continuous shot relates a performance that took place in October 2006 at the Pointe des Poulains headland on the island of Belle-Ile en Mer, at the spot where high tide isolates the headland. A woman is asleep on the sand. The incoming tide moves into shot, surrounds the body and slowly covers it.

Veaceslav Druta
Vols
A proposition of la Maison des Arts Georges Pompidou (Cajarc)

A boy executes a balancing act high above a rural landscape. His graceful movements bespeak a yearning for freedom and a quest for what can only be a precarious, airborne equilibrium, while the sound track injects a note of vague anxiety into an elliptical narrative.

Maria Loura Esteváo
La femme qui court/Woman Running 
Une proposition du Parvis, centre d’art contemporain (Ibos et Tarbes)

The camera follows the road leading from Portugal to Irun. Overlaid on the image is Maria Loura Esteváo's silhouette, running in the opposite direction. The artist films this migratory route in a kind of re-examination of her personal history.

Frédéric Garnier
On air
Une proposition du Centre d’art contemporain, Passages (Troyes)

On air examines a shift from a natural state of being to a formatted, impersonal one, offering a visual trace of what people tend to put off acknowledging: the outer limits of life, sexuality and natural reproduction. This is an exploration of the individual's uncertainties about a current trend in genetic research: cloning for eternity.

Seulgi Lee
Marcher sur les poissons
A proposition of the Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel)
  
A girl creates squishing noises as she walks along the street – because she has sea bream attached to the soles of her sneakers. She keeps walking straight ahead until the fish have entirely disintegrated. 

Kang Hyun Wook
No dit qoui ? “on dit quoi?" 
Une proposition de l’Abbaye Saint André, Centre d’art contemporain (Meymac)

No dit qoui? “on dit quoi?” refers to the foreigner's preconceptions about a new country. Every expatriate arrives with a dream; and this film plays on the notions of comfort, space and social status as the dream evaporates and tension and instability develop within a relationship.

Fleur Noguera
Smoke 
A proposition of CRAC Languedoc-Roussillon (Sète)

Smoke, Fleur Noguera’s first animated film, explores landscape and the natural environment. This ethereal, atmospheric narrative is a call to let our imagination wander freely. Taking the natural world as a stage, Noguera conveys the muted violence of rushing streams and the oppressiveness of looming mountain shadows. Her graphics assert an attachment to profoundly natural spaces and broad vistas, drawing out all their drama and poetry.
(From the introductory text for the Fleur Noguera/Pauline Fondevila exhibition at the Chapelle Saint Jacques Art Centre in Saint Gaudens.)

Claire-Lise Petitjean
En face
A proposition of the Centre d’art de l’Yonne (Auxerre)

The video en face is a night exterior shot of the Zervos home at La Goulotte, Vézelay. Under the aegis of the late Christian and Yvonne Zervos this house welcomed a host of major 20th-century artists and writers. In the video it becomes a ghost haunting the image.

Elisa Pône
La Passion des fils/Passion of the Sons
A proposition of CAB, Centre d’Art Bastille (Grenoble)

Passion of the Sons relates the encounter between Pasolini and Citti as it is said to have happened, showing them engaged in a long, painful thumb wrestle. In this video Elisa Pône studies our relationship with others through the way friendships develop.

Laurent Terras
Good Vibes 
A proposition of 3bisf, lieu d’arts contemporains (Aix-en-Provence)

Any impact results in a conversion of kinetic energy into heat energy during the process of material deformation. Because higher speed impacts increase peak stresses and deformation, greater consideration must be given to the materials and forces involved.

Laurent Vicente
Skuite
Une proposition du Domaine départemental de Chamarande (Chamarande)

Laurent Vicente's video animation Skuite uses a high-speed skateboard run to conjure up absent or missing urban signs. Here the body "slips in between reality, set and camera, utilising the codes of each. Out of this experiment emerges an image whose symbolic elements can focus our attention on the development of an idea." (Laurent Vicente)

Virginie Yassef 
Et le mur lui obéit
Une proposition du CRAC Alsace, Centre rhénan d’art contemporain (Altkirch)

Shot during a trip to Brazil, Virginie Yassef 's video And the Wall Obeys Him (2004) includes, inter alia, footage of a zeppelin, an iguana and a street vendor. Out of scenes lifted from the everyday her kaleidoscopic editing of sound and visuals shapes an extraordinary but still tangible world.