17: Aglaia Konrad / Larry Gottheim

6 April, 2014 - 16:00
SPHINX

A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of contemporary moving image practice.

Das Haus

Aglaia Konrad
,
BE
,
2014
,
16mm
,
23'

Shot in a house by architect Juliaan Lampens in Sint-Martens-Latem (Belgium), Das Haus resumes Aglaia Konrad’s interest in the possibilities of the cinematic medium to generate – rather than capture – an architectural experience. There are two architectural comparisons that are often applied to filmmaking: the idea of cinema as a ‘window’ and as ‘mirror’. Das Haus, entangles and complicates those comparisons by treating windows as interfaces that blur the inside and outside and whose transparency acquires materiality, and by using mirrors as devices that disrupt form pushing it to a state of potentiality. In Das Haus the screen is no longer a window but rather a skin: a tactile surface and a membrane that is neither safe nor transparent because it reveals its inner cinematic compositional strategies. (Anna Manubens)

Doorway

Larry Gottheim
,
US
,
1970
,
16mm
,
7'

Larry Gottheim’s concern for working with edges, isolating details, the prominence of the frame as a shape and revealer of edges, love of photographic texture, are all dealt with lucidly in this film. One is drawn into these beautiful images through his poetic feel for photographic qualities – i.e. light, movement, texture – his ability to transform a landscape through his rigorous use of the frame to isolate in order to call attention to a heretofore hidden beauty. (Barry Gerson)

Concrete & Samples III Carrara

Aglaia Konrad
,
BE
,
2010
,
16mm
,
19'

Concrete & Samples III Carrara was shot in the famous marble quarries of Carrara. This constantly evolving landscape is being characterized by its temporary architecture and sculpted structures. It is almost as an earthwork, 'describing' a space, a material and an activity all parts of an economy. It draws a sculptural journey and the visual scanning of the landscape. In the absence of a traditional narrative, it is the space itself, that takes the role of the protagonist, while the camera proposes a narration through its traveling and observation.

Fog Line

Larry Gottheim
,
US
,
1970
,
16mm
,
12'

Fog Line is a wonderful piece of conceptual art, a melody in which literally every frame is different from every preceding frame (since the fog is always lifting) and the various elements of the composition – trees, animals, vegetation, sky, and, quite importantly, the emulsion, the grain of the film itself – continue to play off one another as do notes in a musical composition. The quality of the light – the tonality of the image itself – adds immeasurably to the mystery and excitement as the work unfolds, the fog lifting, the film running through the gate, the composition static yet the frame itself fluid, dynamic, magnificently kinetic. (Raymond Foery)