Art in the Auditorium III April 21–24, 2011

İstanbul Modern Cinema hosts the third selection of Art in the Auditorium, the video project by Whitechapel Art Gallery which takes contemporary video, animation, and short films to different corners of the world. Among artists in this year’s itinerant video program are: Ergin Çavuşoğlu with his work which references Andy Warhol’s film “Empire,” Swiss artist Elodie Pong with her film in which stuffed birds debate the economic crisis, and Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê with his film which brings actor Charlie Sheen and his father Martin Sheen together by cutting excerpts from their films and explores different subjects ranging from Hollywood and war to the complexity of family relationships and the problematic structure of history.

In collaboration the Institute for the Re-adjustment of Clocks

Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Volver,
67:53’, Italy / GAMEC
Calò uses documentary language to explore urban history and change. The work portrays the artist in a small boat hanging from the roof of the gallery, affording a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding area. The romantic visual motif of the horizon is interspersed with the vista of the industrial environs surrounding the gallery. With this allegorical portrayal, Calò has absorbed the feeling of isolation amidst the suburban sprawl and the sounds of construction work into his subjective mythology, much in the romantic tradition of the artist who stands alone facing the infinite.

Marthe Thorshaug, The Legend of Ygg,
2009, 17.00’, Norway / Henie Onstad Art Centre
Spurred on by their riding instructor, a group of female riders push each other to extremes. Basing their actions on an old Norse legend, they use roads to test their own and their horses’ courage. Their aim is to become fearless. As in a fable, the horse, the landscape, legend, and death constitute the creative world of Thorshaug, who reinterprets famous folkloric legends from the Nordic cultures.

Niles Atallah / Joaquín Cociña / Cristóbal León, Lucía”,
2007, 3’50”; Luis, 3’50”, Argentina / Fundación Proa
Lucia and Luis may seem like a horror story, but it isn’t. It is rather a narrative of suspense told through stop motion animation and careful acoustic and scenographic work. 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.  

Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Empire (after Andy Warhol),
2009, 9:43’, Turkey / The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks
Çavuşoğlu transforms a unique image into a multiplicity of meanings. The work reframes an ordinary building in reference to Andy Warhol’s representation of an iconic structure, while affecting a shift from the global to the local. Borrowing its title from Warhol's film Empire, which consists of a single shot of the Empire State Building that runs for 8 hours and 6 minutes and chronicles the passage from day to night, Çavuşoğlu’s single channel video echoes notions of temporal and spatial continuity.

Huang Xiaopeng, Guess Love Everyday, 2007, 2’51”;
The Explosion Is A Voice At Time The Generation Hear, 2007, 5’46”;
Only You, 2009, 2’50”;
Italian Aria, 2008-9, 2’42”;
Hit Me Baby One More Time, 2010g, 5’31”;
Excuse Me, Degree Has The Neighborhood Already Had No Toilet?, 2008, 5’37;
It’s Gonna Pop You Idiot!, 2006, 7’01”;
China / Para/Site
Xiaopeng’s work is situated on the edge of the Last Empire, a country burdened by history. The “one” official language plays a homogenizing role in a landmass that is home to 292 languages. His research positions language at the forefront of his practice. But Xiaopeng’s agenda is essentially political, as he seeks to analyze the relationship between language and technology. He uses common online translation tools such as Google, a corporation that has engaged in multiple political disputes with the Chinese government, which adds an ironic twist to his work. Although his use of texts like the Communist Manifesto has a historical significance, it is his engagement with technology that overpowers and supersedes other meanings.

Dinh Q. Lê, From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage, 2007, 10’,
Vietnam / San Art
Q Lê is one of Vietnam’s most established artists. He belongs to a generation that has witnessed and endured great political, social and cultural upheaval. In this video, which explores father and son dialogue, the gap between generations, cinema’s perspective on the Vietnam War and the exacerbated masculinity embedded in Hollywood culture, he intersperses excerpts of Charlie Sheen in Platoon and excerpts of his father, Martin Sheen, in Apocalypse Now. 

Elodie Pong, Even A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day, 2008, 2’34”;
After the Empire, 2008, 13’50”;
Je suis une bombe, 2006, 6’12”;
Endless Ends, 2009, 6’47”
Switzerland / Kunsthaus Zürich
Pong presents various videos that offer an ironic take on the contemporary world. Retrieving certain historic moments and figures that lie deeply anchored in our collective memory, he builds absurd, comic and at the same time troubling worlds.

Kelly Nipper, Weather Center, 2009, 5’11;
Sapphire, 2008, 4’00,
USA / Ballroom Marfa
Nipper “uses choreography to shape her ideas about space and time and weather and emotions.” Weather Center is closely based on German Expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman’s solo Witch Dance, first performed by Wigman in Munich in 1914. Wearing a mask that obscures her face, the dancer in Nipper’s video enacts highly charged movements that resemble weather patterns, while a voice-over counts from one to ten.

Stephen Sutcliffe, Despair, 2009, 7’22”;
Deleuze un Album, 2009, 23”;
Said the poet to the analyst, 2009, 1’19”;
The Garden of Proserpine, 2008, 2’08”;
Six Essential Books, 2008, 1’34”;
Vacillation, 2008, 35”;
We’ll Let You Know, 2008, 58”;
O come all ye faithful, 2007, 47”;
Come to the Edge, 2003. 1’36”
Whitechapel Gallery
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 written and spoken word fragments, 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 of original material. Alongside eight short video works, the program includes the recent video Despair, 2009.  It is based on Vladimir Nabokov’s 1934 novel of the same name involving murder, double and mixed identities.

Jalal Toufic, Lebanese Performance Art;
Circle: Ecstatic;
Class: Marginalized;
Excerpt 3,
2007, 5’
Lebanon / Beirut Arts Center
Toufic’s powerful video shows the value and strength of a cultural trait, incomprehensible to many people. His work encourages a viewer to reflect on complex manifestations and cultural rituals that often attract prejudice and violence through misunderstands. On 3 January 1889 Nietzsche reportedly came across a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin. He allegedly 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,” come across Shi’ite participants in the yearly commemorative event ‘Âshûrâ’, would he also have intervened between the participants and “their” bodies?

Rachel Rakena, Kaore te aroha (Endless is the love),
2009,  7’50”;
New Zealand / City Gallery
Rakena’s  Kāore te aroha (Endless is the love) is a love song captured in moving images, where the act of eating becomes a metaphor for ideas of longing, plenitude and fulfilment. The work depicts both a moment of intimate observation and also 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 and replete. The song is completed as he looks up and laughs, in contented acknowledgement of his audience and of the moment.