Atallah - Cociña - León
In this edition, Proa selected the series of videos Lucía, Luis y el lobo (Lucía, Luis and the wolf), produced by artists Niles Atallah, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León. The originality of their work results from the combination of a literary narrative, voice-over, images from childhood memories and fear of the night, all exceptionally accomplished. This new and creative production contains a universe of images, words and sounds that rock its spectator to the core.
The following text, written by Daniel Reyes León, accounts for the magnitude of Lucía, Luis y el lobo:
A story that seems to tell itself, but that ultimately transmits a relationship between time and fear, between childish disguises and bare nakedness in the face of great facts, developed through three audiovisual moments integrated into a controlled disaster. The installation “Lucía, Luís y El Lobo”, created by the trio from Diluvio Lab, Niles Atalha, Joaquín Cociña y Cristóbal León in the Animal Gallery, a piece that could function perfectly well in high definition cinemas or other spaces exclusively destined to be used for viewing films, is flanked by the precision – less precise every time – of a space controlled by the powers of visual art.
“Lucía, Luís y el Lobo” may seem like a horror story, but it is not; rather, it is a suspense narrative told through stop motion animation and careful acoustic and scenographic work, based on object recognition of the elements used in the video. This is what separates the animations “Lucia” y “Luis” from the realm of pure film, situating them instead in a territory of object recognition that displays the selection process involved in art direction, and at the same time conceals the extensive labor behind the over six minutes of animation that comprise the story in the video. It is to be precise, rather than to conceal, that they divert attention from the technical impeccability towards the construction of a recognizable place from its disastrous constitution.
If the space of the cinema has made us accustomed to seats, carpets, and lights -- despite antique cinemas that, in their deterioration, maintain an aseptic line for viewing a film – the viewing proposed in this exhibit presents the principle projection intermingled with the multiple screens as an impossible furnishing. The trajectory and recognition of the objects in the installation, beyond fusing the technology of the screens and the projections with dirt and wood, constitute a restaging of the elements used in the audiovisual pieces. Like when they carry a defendant to the scene of the crime in order to recreate the crime. Time, which is sculpted and manipulated through narrative in the stop motions, is open to the times of the route and recognition of the installation, emphasizing the optimization of the resources with which the audiovisual pieces were constructed. The stop motion, imputed, does not have to go to the recognition of Svankmajer or of the brothers Quay, but of their scenographic fingerprints.
The screen is not alone and thus time is hidden from us. Time is constructed photo by photo and is reduced to the story of Lucia and Luis, children who live in a place built on acceleration and fear, on what is heard and told. Children who are drawn on walls and who inhabit a space that deteriorates in the light of their voices off stage; who tell us a simple story, a story in bits and pieces, as though it were a story that we caught in the middle, after it had begun, and that tends to get diluted in those perverse details of the overly specific. The installation does not try to be realistic, to imitate how children talk, nor to imitate childhood under its classical film archetypes, but to develop particular characters that are witnesses to a synthetic time, that speak about those lost minutes between one photo and the next without needing to manifest the nostalgia or the narrative of Proust as an antecedent. They are obvious stories, direct, where colloquialism triumphs over protocol, where fear and humor are as powerful as the image.
However, the scenery carries us towards disaster, to that which is commonly denominated as “disorder”, the space inhabited by phantoms of modern rationality. More than once we’ve said something like “do not disorder my disorder, because I understand it”. As in Art where there is very little left to understand, this installation uses elements of everyday technology to tell a story, and it does so following the previously stated maxim: “do not disorder my disorder, because I understand it”. Everything seems to have its own place, each story seems to have no connection to the next, yet the three parallel elements converge into a single perverse utilization of the childish imagination as an excuse to escape from the professional deformations of our local artistic “sphere”. The wolf, the space, Lucia and Luis; stories of acceleration and fear.
Awards: The series Lucía, Luis, y el lobo was previewed at many international festivals and received several awards such as: 1st Prize, Best International Film, Fantoche International Animation Film Festival, Baden, Switzerland; Grand Prix Wooden Wolf Prize, Animated Dreams, Animation Film Festival, Tallinn, Estonia; Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film, FIBABC (Festival Iberoamericano de Cortometrajes ABC), Madrid, Spain (2009); Special Mention Jury Prize, 16º Valdivia International Film Festival, Valdivia, Chile (2009); Literaturwerkstatt Berlin Prize, Zebra Poetry Film Festival Berlín (2008); and 2nd Place Award, Fair Play Film and Video Award Festival, Lugano, Switzerland. (2008). Luis was exhibited at Guggenheim Museum, New York, as one of the winners of the YouTube Play Guggenheim, Biennial of Creative Video (2010).
Ergin Cavusoglu
Rumanian artist Ergin Cavusoglu transforms a unique image into a multiplicity of meanings: time passing and quotes on A. Warhol’s unique cinema takes. The following text, written by Cavusoglu himself, accounts for the value of the work he presents in this opportunity:
Empire (after Andy Warhol) is a single channel video that explores the constructs of ideas on place, non-place and placelessness.
The work reframes an ordinary building in reference to the representation of an iconicized structure, while shifting from the global to the local. Borrowing its title from Andy Warhol's film 'Empire', which consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building and runs 8 hours and 6 minutes and chronicles the passage from day to night, my single channel video rather echoes the 'space of current relations', associated with notions of temporal and spatial continuity in which the concepts of domestic comfort are unsettled through an unrelenting gaze.
The footage captures in a static shot the transition from day to night surrounding a residential apartment block, thus reframing the extant strangeness of a minaret rising through the roof of the apartment. The flats in the block, built a quarter of a century ago in Karabük (Turkey), remain occupied and the main part of the mosque with the prayer room for worshipping is situated in the basement of the apartment.
Illuminating light abruptly goes dark, generating a different register through a moment of interruption where we witness something different, 'another truth'.
In several of my works an edifice becomes theatrical and embodied in mobility in a metaphoric sense. Not as a décor, but as an actor on a theatrical stage. Although static, the changes taking place in the surrounding landscape/exterior act as the ultimate performative and transient elements within the image. I believe that an image presented in an art context should have a degree of poetry embedded within it. I also like seeing these images as informing other images of truth.
Ergin Cavusoglu (Targoviste, Romania, 1968). Lives and works in London. In the early 1980s, Ergin Çavusoglu studied at The National School of Fine Arts. He consequently received a BA in mural painting from the University of Marmara, Istanbul, an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a PhD from University in Portsmouth. He represented Turkey at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. He was shortlisted for the Beck`s Futures Prize in 2004, and most recently in 2010 for Artes Mundi 4 - the U.K'.s largest contemporary arts prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Ergin Çavusoglu, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Place after Place, Kunstverein Freiburg, Quintet Without Borders, ShContemporary, Shanghai and Haunch of Venison, Zurich, Point of Departure, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and NGCA Sunderland, and Entanglement, DCA, Dundee. Group exhibitions include The First Mediterranean Biennial of Contemporary Art, Haifa, Israel, All Inclusive - A Tourist World, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Between Borders, MARCO Vigo, the 8th Istanbul Biennial, British Art Show 6 and the 3rd Berlin Biennial.
www.ergincavusoglu.com
Dinh Q. Lê
For the first time, Vietnam takes part of Art in the Auditorium with the unique video of Din Q. Lê, which explores the dialogue between father and son, generational gap and cinema’s perspective on Vietnam War. Text by curator Zoe Butt:
Dinh Q Lê is one of Vietnam’s most established artists from a generation that has witnessed and endured great political, social and cultural upheaval. Born in Ha Tien on the southern border between Cambodia and Vietnam, Lê’s family took to the sea in fear of the Khmer Rouge, spending his childhood in the USA. He received his BA in Art (Studio) at UC Santa Barbara in 1989 and his MFA in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1992. Learning his country’s ‘history’ through the eyes of foreigners whose investment in the Vietnam War is fraught with numerous political agendas, Lê returned to Vietnam in 1993, determined to find the voice of his own people. Lê’s artistic practice is diverse. His early woven photographs have referred to the thousands killed under Pol Pot in Cambodia; the plight of the innumerable ‘boat people’ and their desperate search for safety and validity; or the morphing of filmic and documentary footage into compelling imagery that challenges the voice of popular media and its construction of ‘truth’. His sculptural installations and social ‘interactions’ have often drawn attention to the smaller, often overlooked consequences of everyday life in Vietnam, such as children born with deformity as a result of Agent Orange with Lê creating his own form of shrine to these souls who live a life of pain. Examining the influence of American culture in its stereotyping of contemporary Vietnam, much of Lê’s ongoing work (most recently installation and the moving image) juxtaposes the lived and mediated experiences of the social condition of Vietnam – its contradictions, insecurities and historical anomalies, but most importantly he has endeavored to illustrate the complex flowering of human persistence and resilience in the face of a powerless urge to survive.
Lê’s work has combed the little known historical facts of the complex confluence of war and the extreme assumptions that ensue in a government’s maneuvering of a dominant national psyche that limits a community’s understanding of its own past. Drawn to the issue of land rights, nationhood and questions of sovereignty, issues that are laced with varied biblical, mythical, religious or cultural metaphors that often persist in Vietnamese society today, Lê’s oeuvre is one of the most outspoken artistic voices that has consistently drawn attention to the reality of contemporary Vietnam.
‘From Father to Son’ cunningly illustrates the complex familial stereotype between fathers and sons, between ideas of nation and subject and the popular circulation, and indeed exacerbation of masculinity in Hollywood culture. Cutting film excerpts of Charlie Sheen in ‘Platoon’ and his father, Martin Sheen in ‘Apocalypse Now’, Le cuts the screen in half. In one half, Charlie Sheen watches his father (in the other half) deal with the posttraumatic trauma of the Vietnam War. In a desire to see his father reclaim his sense of self, Charlie is sent to the frontline in an effort to better understand his father’s terror. ‘From Father to Son’ ends in an escalation of violence and war, where human suffering and anger relentlessly continues. Like father, like son, Charlie too becomes a murderer and thus Le asks, from where do we redeem ourselves in our understanding of history? To what realm of knowledge and experience do we take heart that the human condition can learn from its mistakes? Le’s manipulation of the filmic image into his own fictional tale is a deliberate ploy, asking us as viewers to remain critically aware of the role of popular culture in perpetuating cultural and social stereotype.
Dinh Q. Lê (Ha-Tienm, 1968). He received his BA in Art Studio at UC Santa Barbara in 1989 and his MFA in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1992. Lê’s work has been exhibited worldwide. In 1993, Lê returned to Vietnam for the first time and in 1996 Lê decided to settle down in Ho Chi Minh City. His work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; The Bronx Museum, New York and The Israel Museum, amongst others. Besides being an artist, Lê also co-founded the Vietnam Foundation for the Arts (VNFA), based between Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City - an organization that supports Vietnamese artists and promotes artistic exchange between cultural workers from Vietnam and around the world. With funding from VNFA, Lê and three other artists co-founded San Art, the first not-for-profit contemporary art space and reading room in Ho Chi Minh City. He is currently a member of the peer committee for Art Network Asia and a member of the Asia Society’s international council.
Elodie Pong
Renowned Swiss artist Elodie Pong presents various videos where the irony on the contemporary world becomes evident. Retrieving popular icons and symbols, he builds absurd, comic and at the same time regrettable worlds. Mirjam Varadinis accurately describes the point of view of the artist presented by Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland:
Certain moments and figures in the history of humanity lie deeply anchored in our collective memory. We all know them and they consciously or unconsciously form us. The artist Elodie Pong (born in the USA, living in Switzerland) has selected such icons from contemporary history and Pop-Culture for her video piece, After the Empire (2008). There she stages encounters among them and has them recite elements of famous speeches and statements in monologues and dialogues. Karl Marx meets Marilyn Monroe, Elvis meets a Japanese version of Minnie Mouse and Martin Luther King meets Frieda, a woman from rural Zurich – the latter inspired by Pong’s grandmother. Fusing personal and collective history, After the Empireexplores questions of identity in an era of copy-paste and post-modern appropriation culture. Who are we and what has made us what we are? Or: what or who do we pretend to be?
The issue of role-playing is also central to Pong’s earlier video Je suis une bombe (2006). There a figure in a panda bear costume performs an erotic pole dance. On removing the panda’s head, a woman appears and steps up to the camera to deliver her own praises of a complex image of woman, simultaneously strong and vulnerable, a potential powder keg. Like in many other works Pong subjects here female stereotypes to critical scrutiny and opens up a stage for the protagonist’s dreams and longings. The atmosphere has something very melancholic but is at the same time filled with playful irony. This skillful weave of complex political and philosophical questions with tongue-in-cheek insouciance is very characteristic of Pongs work and gives it its distinctive flavor.
The dialogues in Elodie Pongs videos are often a mix of quotations from history, film and pop, combined with the artist’s own texts – also in Even A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day (2008). This video was realized shortly before the economic crisis in 2008, when the first signs of the imminent collapse were in the air. A group of stuffed birds debates about globalization and the state of the world economy by using text fragments coming from various sources. The quotes are assigned to the different characters in a manner that blurs the origin of the words.
Elodie Pong often also plays with references to cinema and iconic scenes of famous movies. Endless Ends (2009) on first sight seems to be a nostalgic anthology of classic film clips featuring "The End". This work's main focus, however, is directed towards the endless world of the stories' "negative space", extending itself before and after these conclusions. Each scene's final image carries some residual trace of the film that ran before, bearing its poetics, nostalgia, mystery or humour, provoking memories or just a feeling that one has missed something. In such, the end per se is seen as nothing final, but as a marker of possibilities.
Elodie Pong (Boston, 1966) is a Swiss artist and filmmaker known for her subtle, analytic works, often built as cycles or in series, which focus on human relationships, cultural codes and their impact on contemporary society. As a university-trained sociologist and anthropologist, she often deals with social structures in her artistic work. The wide-ranging oeuvre of the video artist revolves around questions of identity and collective identity construction, intimacy and separation, self stylization and unstable communication situations in a pluralistic and individualized society. Until 2004, her projects, installations and video works mainly focused on immediate visualisation of sociological structures such as intimacy, friendship, issues of gender and communication. Her more recent films can be read as multi-layered analysis and deconstruction of these very themes, where the viewer becomes part of the constellation by being offered different readings according to which the works are brought together. Elodie Pong has received several awards and grants; her work is exhibited in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.
www.elodiepong.net
Rachel Rakena
New Zealand participates in this edition with Rachel Rakena’ s intimate video. The act of eating, the anxiety, the smile of satisfaction makes this work universal. Contemplating time and paying attention to the process of food intake accounts for the possibility of art transforming a mundane and routine act into an unforgettable image:
Rachael Rakena’s work Kāore te aroha (Endless is the love), 2009, is a love song in moving image, where the act of eating becomes a metaphor for ideas of longing, plenitude and fulfilment. The work presents both a moment of intimate observation, and one of self absorption. Apparently unaware of his audience, a solitary man feasts hungrily on a fish head, while the camera hungrily watches him. In his satisfied smile at the end of the film, we as viewers are also satisfied, replete. The song is completed as he looks up, laughs, in contented acknowledgement of his audience and of the moment.
Rachael Rakena is a digital video artist, whose practice spans performance and installation. She often works collaboratively. Of Māori descent, she draws on the narratives and histories of her tribal Kai Tahu, Ngā Puhi and Pākehā (European) ancestry. Rakena has coined the term Toi Rerehiko as a way of describing and locating her practice. Toi Rerehiko, which plays on ‘rorohiko’, the Māori word for computer, is an electronic media art form immersed in Māori tikanga (customs) and values. Kaore Te Aroha (Endless is the Love), is part of an ongoing series, He Waiata Whaiaipo, and follows from highly acclaimed collaborations which have featured in prestigious international art events including the Busan Biennale 2008, the Venice Biennale 2007 and the Biennale of Sydney 2006.
Water is a consistent feature of Rakena's work. The artist has spoken of it representing a tribal, Ngai Tahu, space—destabilising assumptions that Maori identity is primarily land-based. It also operates metaphorically, providing a kind of amniotic fluid for the protection of culture. In Kāore te aroha (Endless is the love), the seated figure appears immersed to the waist in dark still liquid; he eats at the ‘table’ of Tangaroa, the Māori god of the sea. The raw fish he consumes with gusto comes from the sea, a source not only of food but of stories, particularly discovery narratives. The sea and its fishing grounds were as important to early Māori as the land; traditionally kaimoana (seafood) has always played a fundamental role in hospitality and celebration. In this film the water seems to embrace the figure; it surrounds, nourishes and protects him.
As an island nation, New Zealand’s origin myths frequently draw on the sea as birthplace or beginning. Here Rakena’s simple narrative makes reference to those myths, while focusing on the vitality and presence of a single loved one. The film plays on repeat, a recurring cycle of hunger, nourishment and satisfaction. The act of indulgence is private, methodical, and unselfconscious. It is as much about the enjoyment of an intimate ritual as about basic sustenance.
In addition to the obvious examination of the cultural specificities of food, the work’s high production values and visual gloss contribute a sense of the consumable. As viewers we are outside of the situation, yet the picture is so visceral that we can almost feel the flesh and wiry bone structure of the fish, the briny taste. While Rakena’s subject appears wholly engrossed in the activity and in the moment, we are similarly held, and sustained, by the picture.
Rachael Rakena (Ngai Tahu, Nga Puhi) has a Master of Fine Arts (Distinction) is a lecturer at Massey University, School of Maori Visual Arts. She has exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, France, Britain and the United States. In 2007, Aniwaniwa a collaborative project with Brett Graham was included in the collateral events section of the 2007 Venice Biennale. In 2006, she and Graham represented New Zealand at the Biennale of Sydney with the collaborative installation UFOB. Other major international exhibitions of recent years have included Pasifika Styles at Cambridge University in the UK, and Dateline: Contemporary Art from the Pacific at Neuer Berliner Kunstverien.
Stephen Sutcliffe
The history of cinema is present in the work of Stephen Sutcliffe through minimal fragments of time but in a new universe. A mix of sounds and images in a new visual chaos:
Using his extensive archive of VHS and audio recordings, Sutcliffe meshes soundtracks with moving images to create a sophisticated visual language. These often very short ‘video collages’ create complex, disjointed associations from fragments of written and spoken word, found broadcast images, animation and music. Moments of British cultural history from pastoral poetry and Monty Python to the pre-digital VHS aesthetic of the media, collide with a contemporary interest in appropriation and ideas of original material.
Alongside eight short video works, the programme includes the recent video Despair, 2009. Based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1934 novel of the same name involving murder, double and mixed identities, Sutcliffe’s work includes extracts from German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 adaptation of Despair, extracts from American film director Kenneth Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice, 1953, an interview with Fassbinder and 17th century baroque music.
Stephen Sutcliffe (Harrogate, 1968). He studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design and Glasgow School of Art (from where he participated on an exchange programme at Cal Arts, Valencia California). Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at Cubitt, London, 2009; Nought to Sixty, ICA, 2008 and Art Now/Lightbox, Tate Britain, 2005. Group shows include the Zenomap Performance Space at the Venice Biennale, 2003 and the British Council touring show, Electric Earth, 2003. He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2009 and he has been commissioned by Frieze Projects to present a new film work during Frieze Art Fair, October 2010.
Marthe Thorshaug
As in a fable, the legend, the horse, the landscape and death organize the creative world of Marthe Thorshaug, rescuing famous floclorik legends from the Nordic cultures:
“The Legend of Ygg” is modern legend of death riders in Norway. Under the influence of a riding instructor, a group of girl riders drive each other to extremes. Based on an old Norse legend, they use roads to test their own and their horse’s courage. Their aim is to become fearless. The girls go riding in the dead of the night dressed in black. By their use of the road as a ritual arena, they cause mysterious car accidents in the Norwegian countryside.
This 15-minute thriller art film merges with ancient mythology and current circumstances.
Marthe Thorshaug’s Norwegian production is as compelling, complete and beautiful as any art film in memory. Her use of dialogue is sparse and her capture of the playful horses in their own community reflects the sisterhood of riders who gather to ride these adorable ponies.
Each woman is trained to surrender to the rhythm of her horse’s gait. However, the goal is also to keep the horse calm as the ultimate test is faced.
Visually, the natural fullness of the horses’ manes is juxtaposed to the natural, similarly-colored fullness of the women’s hair. Well-groomed but unpretentious and fresh, both show a rugged yet deceivingly tender innocent beauty.
In the end, the horse and rider stand as one on a narrow highway, practicing their hypnotic breathing, merged without fear, disregarding all other senses.
It is here at the end that the soundtrack creates a sitar-like effect with the use of electric guitars and a vibraslap, building a tension as the hypnotic sounds become louder and faster, in time with the rhythmic gallop of the Icelandic horse approaching the final test.
It is in this same moment that the viewer is bewitched, though it is also when a transformation begins. We allow ourselves, almost hungrily, to feel this merging of beast and human, this submission of the self.
And then there is The Reveal. What was earlier an innocent, even idyllic, pastoral harmony now unmasks itself.
A car comes down the road. It is either us, already identifying with the horse and rider, or the car that will move or be destroyed. Can we just step aside and avoid the disaster?
I’m not revealing the end of the film. You’ll have to go to American University’s Katzen Museum in Washington , D.C. to find out about that. But I can reveal a little experiment on viewer reaction.
Marthe Thorshaug, the film’s creator, had communicated with me from her home in Norway that “it’s really interesting to read about the reactions to the film. In my work, the great challenge is to have my films working on as many levels as possible.”
So, I sent her summaries of over 100 individual reactions communicated immediately after viewing her film. The responses indicated that Thorshaug’s goal of diverse interpretations is guaranteed.
Marthe Thorshaug (1977) lives and works in Hamar, Norway. She graduated from the Art Academy in Oslo in 2003. Her first solo exhibition in Norway was Comancheria at Fotogalleriet in Oslo spring 2007. Her work has been acquired by musuems such as THe NAtioanl Museum of Art Norway, Musuem of Cultural History, Norway and Punkt, Norway. Her latest award was 2010 Artist in residence Oslo W17, Kunstnernes Hus.
www.marthethorshaug.no
Jalal Toufic
Jalal Toufic’ s moving video shows the value and strength of a cultural trait, incomprehensible for whoever contemplates it. A call to reflection on diverse and complex manifestations and cultural rituals, which, due to incomprehension, urevel prejudices and violences. Beirut Art Center participates for the first time in this edition of Art in the Auditorium:
On 3 January 1889, on coming across a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, in Turin, Nietzsche reportedly threw his arms around the horse’s neck to defend it, and collapsed. Had this philosopher who signed the following day several of his letters with “The Crucified,” and who was discerning enough not to view himself as the owner of “his” body come across Twelver Shi‘ite participants in the yearly ten-day commemorative event ‘Âshûrâ’, would he have intervened likewise between them and “their” bodies as they whipped and slapped the latter, exclaiming all the while, in the words with which Saint Francis addressed and referred to “his” body: “Brother donkey!”?
Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) and Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009). Several of his books are available for download at his website: http://www.jalaltoufic.com. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Southern California, as well as in Lebanon and Istanbul, and he will be a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD in 2011.
www.jalaltoufic.com
Huang Xiaopeng
The series of fragments of Huang Xiaopeng, which are presented here, reflect the accurate insight which the artist managed to transmit in his videos, where language, image and singing are confused in a pretended understanding:
Huang Xiaopeng’s work sits on the verge of the Last Empire, a country burdened by History and where the « one » official language has a homogenising role in a place with 292 languages. There is a common denominator through his research which positions language in the forefront of his practice. But this position is a political one that analyses the relationship between language and technology. It is an ironic twist that through his videoworks and installations the artist uses common online translation tools, such as Google, a corporation that has engaged in multiple political disputes with the Chinese Governmnet. Through succesive online translation, language becomes metamorphed as grammar transforms into an abstract set of rules that affect the semantics of words. Although there is a historical significance to his use of texts like the Communist Manifesto, it is this engament itself with technology that overpowers other meanings and takes over the results.
Popular Culture is another iconographic powerful scenario for Huang Xiaopeng, from Bruce Lee’s to Pop Music are part of this selection of videoworks. The artist aprehends parts of the East-West rethoric in a direct way, which does not intend to provide with answers, but will leave the viewer confused about what China means in the contemporary world.
Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya. “Translating the Last Empire”
Huang Xiaopeng’s ‘over-translation’ pointedly captures the sense of a troubling surplus or a shortfall vis à vis the original. His video soundtrack features pop songs translated from English to Chinese and back again through machine translation in random permutations. The process shows up not only distorted representation, slipshod translation, flat mistranslation but also creative mistranslation’ - ‘out of sync’ rendition that spawns new insight, fresh semantic stuff. The clamour of diverging representations and translations add up to a liberating ‘anything goes’ situation, to use Feyerabend’s phrase. In the jostle of disparate versions we are free to size up representations one against one another constantly-as opposed to judging and prescribing the ‘correct’ one.
Sarat Maharaj. “Huang Xiaopeng’s ‘Over-translation’”
Huang Xioapeng, for example, has convoluted the global matrix to absurd proportions. In Huang’s “You are the dream of my realization” (2009), a billboard size banner announces the results of a kind of ventriloquist telephone game。 For the artist compresses references to globalization through internet translation programs from Chinese to English and back again only to continue the recycling process culminating with the phrase: “thanks to the expansion of the empire economic and culture exchanges become possible to the maximum extent and previously isolated civilizations become linked.” The pronouncement, with its market driven global utopia that subsumes history and binds together all civilizations both past and present, is a cross between the capitalist avatar Adam Smith gone amok, and mega-computer HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Raul Zamudio. “The Return of the Real: The Pavilion of Realism 4”
“By dislodging the time, a slightly different dimension where aspects of our daily lives are revealed begins to open up, for example, exposing every detail of subconscious body language. It can be rather nightmarish and disturbing…”
“Pop music has always been readily consumed but is just as easily misunderstood when ex/imported to other cultures. Work with automatic fast translation software to translate from English to Chinese and/or vice versa - and I then employ the same method to translate back to the source language. By their own right, the two different languages enter into a kind of interaction without human interference. Through the mechanism, there is a misplacement of words, often humourously dark, somehow a real meaning emerges from nowhere, and the semantic misfiring becomes absurdly fitting to the image.
Through the manipulation of real-time in my videos, either by speeding it up or slowing it down, has both aural and visual consequences.” H.X.
Guess Love Everyday (2007): “This is one of my karaoke series. Through the mechanism, the semantic misfiring becomes absurdly fitting to the image. The street robbery science was the court evidence from a police video tape.”
The Explosion Is A Voice At Time The Generation Hear (2007): “Set on a fake traditional street in northern China, decelerated hip-hop music mix and mimics the crowd’s walk and movement (as there’s an invisible wall around them), I want to invite the audience to take part in this absurd karaoke.”
Only You (2009): “By their own right, the two different languages enter into a kind of interaction without human interference… Through the mechanism, there is a misplacement of words, often humorously dark, somehow a real meaning emerges from nowhere.”
Italian Aria (2008-09): “In a much of the Soviet tradition, still today, most of the opera singers are belonging to the militia force In China, though they’re not only sing the revolutionary songs but western love songs as well. By dislodging the time though out the performance, a slightly different dimension is revealed begins to open up, the semantic misfiring becomes absurdly fitting to the image. The image was taken from the state TV program.”
Hit Me Baby One More Time(2010): “The material of this video work is a 5 second footage extract from a Bruce Lee film “Way of the Dragon”. My interest is focusing on the undercurrent nationalism in many Kung-Fu films which linked to the emerging power of today’s China, as the main character always symbolizes a declined nation which once used to be a powerful and great empire.”
Excuse Me, Degree Has The Neighborhood Already Had No Toilet? (2008): “Through out of my journey looking for a public toilet in Hong Kong street, I’m questioning the relation between public function and human urges in a highly organized society.”
Huang Xiaopeng
Huang Xiaopeng (Shanxi, 1960). He has a BA in Fine Arts from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in China, and later studied at The Slade School of Fine Art in London before returning to China to take up the post of Professor of Fine Art at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, China. His work has recebtly been shown The problema of Asia at Chalk Horse Art Center, Sydney, Australia, The invisible Generation, in various public locations, Kiev, Ucrania. His been part of several renowned residenced during 2008, sucha as The Site Gallery, Sheffield (U.K.), The Slade Research centre, London (U.K.), Art Map (HK), and OCAT, Shenzhen (China).