04: Rafman / Buerkner / Evans / Bonajo
SELECTION 2015
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
SELECTION 2015
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
Mainsqueeze starts out with the image of a washing machine tearing itself apart. The more it accelerates, the more it autodestructs. Although Rafman does not want to make a particular ethical statement, he seems to hint at a present time that’s out of joint. During his extensive journeys into the so called ’deep web’ Rafman collects, orders and observes his often disturbing imagery. He finds poetry there, where others might be repulsed.
Weresheglanspertheere is a digital animation that takes as its source material documentary images and sounds found on the internet. It examines the impact of unreliable juxtapositions of sounds and images on both the intellectual and emotional response of the viewer. The heavily abstracted and recreated found content investigates the position of a witness to the nonfictional events presented.
A poorly rendered CGI version of a famous actor and Hatsune Miku, a hologram and one of the biggest pop stars in Japan and guide the viewer through a nonlinear narrative filled with countless complicated layers and endless obscure and pop-cultural references. Evans is attentive to the ways in which the digital realm compels new relationships between physical reality and mediated image but at the same time Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen is a heartwarming story of love and loss.
Melanie Bonajo’s work explores issues of alienation and individual identity in relationship to technological progress and commodity pleasures. In Night Soil Fake Paradise she examines the possibilities of ayahuasca, a plant-based psychedelic brew that originates in the Amazon, in healing narcissistic urban dwellers and draws a parallel between the digital age, which is so bodiless, and the psychedelic world, where you have out-of-body experiences.