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26/8/2005

Two exhibitions

Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich

Peter Doig "StudioFilmClub"

Film and music are just as much part of Peter Doig's everyday life as are his family, painting and socialising and discussing with friends. Born in Scotland in 1959, Doig's painterly oeuvre is one of the most influential of his generation of artists. It is therefore not surprising that shortly after moving from London to Port-of-Spain in Trinidad with his Trinidadian artist-friend Che Lovelace he opened a film club in his studio. He did so first of all, because Cineplex movie theaters are fast taking over Port-of-Spain, too, and thus not only are the arthouse cinemas who do not focus on Hollywood output gradually disappearing, and secondly because the two wished to create a place in which alongside the broad range of experiences for cineastes there would also be any number of opportunities for mingling music and discussion in an unpretentious, spontaneous and generously sized place. Since April 2003, Peter Doig and Che Lovelace present films once a week that their friends send them or which they pick up on their travels ­ in the private setting of the studio, but with the open mind-set of a club event, and thus discussions, the bar, or even on occasion a concert can mark the equally important beginning, the break, or the end of a joint film evening. The program includes film classics as well as indie, music and art films, not to mention current Hollywood productions. Inspired by the hand-painted ad posters that caught his eye on billboards in Port-of-Spain, Doig paints a poster, usually on the day of the screening, for each film ­ it is then pinned up somewhere on the grounds of the cultural center where Peter Doig has his studio. These paintings are pointers and an information tool, but also typical Peter Doig pieces, in which the filmic element so typical of his oeuvre, in particular the quality of evoking the viewer¹s imagination, is doubled and intensified by the reference to a specific film; be it because he takes a key scene he remembers as the motif, or associates something quite freely with the film¹s content, or introduces variations on the iconography of his own painterly oeuvre.

The film posters are therefore not only direct pointers to the particular film they announce, but also always function as parallel instruments of the imagination. Peter Doig¹s oeuvre is well known for the way it intertwines a wide-ranging archive of found images, photos he has taken himself, techniques, moods, titles, and theme from music and art history. These are not taken as models, but can be repeatedly recombined and sampled, functioning as triggers or items of information, used and experienced by the artist as manifold fields of inspiration and techniques for generating images that ensure that in his work photography, film, music and painting are always simultaneously present. In Peter Doig¹s paintings only one single film still ever crops up in variations as a direct reference to a film, namely a lonely figure in a canoe on an even more solitary and threatening lake. The motif originates from that classic horror film ³Friday the 13th² and has put in an appearance in many of Peter Doig¹s paintings, and starting with ³Swamped² (1990) via ³Canoe Lake² (1997-8) through to ³100 Years ago (Carrera)² (2002) not only expands the paintings to include a film still but also expands the reach of art history references in painting. For his film poster for Marcel Camus¹ ³Orfeo Negro (Black Orpheus)², Doig again chose his solitary canoeist and adds further aspects to his repeated painterly motif both for the painting and for the associations it offers to the film. Although Peter Doig¹s film posters are not produced as artworks, for him (and for us, too) they come round full circle to artistic oeuvre, precisely because what is for him usually only the initial or associative level of cinema is now superimposed onto a direct reference to a real film and thus presented in a new combination.

The exhibition in Kunsthalle Zürich presents 75 of the film posters that Doig has made to date together with a selection of films that were screened at StudioFilmclub. Parallel to this, the Arthouse Cinemas will present a further set of films shown at StudioFilmClub as part of the local cinema program.
The exhibition attaches an equal weighting to the StudioFilmClub¹s program for cineastes and to the importance of Peter Doig¹s film posters. The films are not shown in cinema-like screenings with only one viewing, but are screened continuously in five different rooms, and are thus as accessible as the film posters.
When selecting the films for the show, Peter Doig and Che Lovelace focused in particular on the range of offerings for cineastes in Zürich, which with its diversity of arthouse movie theaters provides a broad spectrum of filmic experiences. They have chosen films that reflect the specific context of Trinidad as a production venue or the location for films. These frequently endeavor not to marginalize the local culture, strongly influenced by Creolity, as something exotic, and also do not succumb to some affirmative exoticism by simply opting for a critique of exoticism. On show will be reviews of the filmic oeuvre of Trinidadian filmmaker and the pioneer of ³Black British Cinemas² Horace Ové, who emigrated to London, films from the 1950s made by Satyatt Ray, and an overview of Isaac Julien¹s films (such as ³Baadasssss Cinema², 2002) ­ alongside numerous other films. The extensive program of films showing at the Kunsthalle and in the Arthouse Cinemas will be announced on the Kunsthalle¹s homepage in due time. Details can be requested by email.

Kunsthalle Zurich thanks: Praesidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Luma Stiftung

Special thanks go to Museum Ludwig, Kasper König and to Alice Koegel, the curator of the exhibition there, whose research and preparatory work has enabled us to organize this film program. Our thanks also go to the organization who has kindly loaned us works for the exhibition, namely the Rheingold Collection, whose initial purchase of 35 film posters secures the future of the StudioFilmClub in Trinidad.

Events:

Public film program at Arthouse Cinemas: Film details, screening dates and location will be announced on http://www.kunsthallezurich.ch. You can also request the program by email. For the generous support and collaboration we thank This Brunner and Arthouse Commercio Movie AG.

Catalogue:
Peter Doig, Studiofilmclub : [Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 23 April - 24 July 2005 ; Kunsthalle Zurich, 27 August ­ 30 Oktober 2005]. With contributions by Alice Koegel and Nicholas Laughlin. 142 . mit 100 farb. ganzseit. Abb., Paperback, Texte dt. und engl. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2005. CHF 52.10 / EUR 32.00.

Lange Nacht der Museen: Saturday, 3 September, 7pm-2am
In the courtyard of the Loewenbraeu you will be able to enjoy music and drinks as well as experience the artist duo Nanu (S. Talaas, N. Weber) and their "letter studio". The visitors will be given the chance to have letters send out on their behalf, may it be a love letter or a long overdue letter to the grandmother.
10pm-12am: Performance by the German artist group "Da Group" (Sergej Jensen, Claus Richter, Oliver Husain).

Concert: Friday, 28 October, 8pm
The "ensemble fuer neue musik zuerich" plays Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996): Rain Spell, Sacrifice, Toward the Sea, Between Tides. With Hans-Peter Frehner (flute), Hansruedi Bissegger (clarinet), Viktor Müller (piano), Kathrin Bamert (harp), Lorenz Haas (drums), Urs Bumbacher (violin), Nicola Romanó (violoncello)

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Trisha Donnelly

Any exhibition by US artist Trisha Donnelly (born in 1974, lives and works in San Francisco) always confronts viewers with an experience of the potentiality and on occasion also with pure absence. She works in a whole gamut of media, ranging from drawing, video, photography, sound and text to performances (which Trisha Donnelly terms ³demonstrations²). And when using them she is forever exploring the place from which ³things² first become infused with existence and meaning.

If Trisha Donnelly entitles a photo of a sphinx "Hands that hold the Desert Down" (2002), then she not only changes our perception of this all too familiar photo (if it were a reality that the desert, the sand of the desert were merely held down by the Sphinx¹s massive paws, what happens if they stand up and head off, does the desert than disappear?), but also the meaning of images in general and the relation of language to images.

If Trisha Donnelly transforms sounds into physical presence in her sound piece "The Shield" (2004), by using a refined sound sequence of sonorous deep through metallically high sounds and great technical precision in the sounds to create a non-material wall that divides a room, then she transforms sensory perception from one sense into the other, and plays with the borderlines of this perception, with realities, with language, experience and signifying assignation.

Synesthesia, in other words the transposition or simultaneous perception of sensory impressions otherwise experienced separate from one another plays a major role in Donnelly¹s oeuvre (see colors in letters or numbers, the perception of forms when hearing music, and much else besides). She does so not because of some excessively intense or exaggerated perceptual abilities on her own part (or among artists in general), but as a potential means of permeating and thus reconfiguring reality.

Her works are always geared to moments of absolute concentration ­ and they are likewise always focused on the simultaneity of magic, irritation and a constructive blank space. Her works also always take us beyond what we think we have grasped at first glance, that first encounter, that initial experience, and trigger the interaction of physical and imagined, of real and fictitious in a different way in each individual viewer.

Trisha Donnelly¹s performances are never documented: They exist as oral records by those who experienced them, in other words in countless individual versions. On the opening of one of her first solo shows, in 2000 at the Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, she rode into the gallery rooms high on a horse, Napoleon¹s messenger, announced the emperor¹s capitulation (among other things with the words: "He capitulates, only by word not by will.") and intoning the words "I am electric, I am electric" rode off again. In another of her demonstrations she asked the audience to read out loud from the libretto of Alexander Scriabin¹s unfinished symphony "Mysterium" - Scrjabin is said to have been a synesthetic and he planned this symphony as a seven-day spectacular of sensory sensations made up of music, text, dance, light, fire and smell. After the reading, Donnelly turned the lights off and played a recording of a piece of music while explaining that she had come across the recording during an eclipse of the sun. After her lecture, she informed the audience that she wished to seize the next morning of everybody present, thus took a place in the mind of every individual participant in the performance, not only appropriating their time, but also turning them into an artwork. She typically executes all her actions with great concentration and a fascinating intensity. She playfully engages with group phenomena, cultic practices and the creation of myths, and above all by logical advancing conceptual art practices, considering the work to first be realized in the viewer.

Ever more often, Trisha Donnelly delegates the ³action² to the audience or a selected protagonist. For example, her photo-work "The Redwood and the Raven" (2004) consists of 31 small-format b&w photos: for each, Donnelly asked dancer Frances Flannery to perform a certain sequence of movements that she then photographed. However, the work is only ever displayed in the form of one photograph, which the gallery, institution or collector has to change each day the presentation lasts. The picture itself does not succeed in documenting a movement in time; the absent piece, the transition becomes more important than the fixed image.

Many of the photo and sound pieces refer to events that were announced but did not take place ­ what will actually happens remains open or is the product of our imagination, our memory, our supposition. Her sound piece "Dark Wind" (2002) periodically reproduces the sound of the howling wind ­ an experience which we may know from early Westerns in which the "Dark Wind" was a preferred tool to announce an event. Her photo-piece "The Black Wave" (2002) shows the natural phenomenon of giant waves before or after a storm. Wind and water, sound and images point to an event, possible occurrence, change. And like all Trisha Donnelly¹s works, the piece unfolds more through a system of different references than from the material. Positioned somewhere between experience, scientific analysis, an act of the will or the imagination, her works function in the ephemeral, at times coincidental, and raise profound questions about what art is, what reality we trust, and how we construct them in the interstices of material and spirit, abstraction and experience, belief and knowledge.

Special thanks for their generous support go to:
Praesidialdepartement der Stadt Zurich, Deutsche Bank Stiftung

Event:
"The 11th Prismatic": Sunday, 30 October, 5.30 pm Performative lecture with Trisha Donnelly. Followed by Finissage with aperitif.

Catalogue:
In collaboration with the Koelnischer Kunstverein, a catalogue is being produced. For the catalogue, which is conceived as an artist's book, Trisha Donnelly will create a special series of images. Texts by Daniel Baumann, Trisha Donnelly and a conversation between Nancy Spector and John Miller on the work of the artist.

Lange Nacht der Museen: Saturday, 3 September, 7pm-2am
In the courtyard of the Loewenbraeu you will be able to enjoy music and drinks as well as experience the artist duo Nanu (S. Talaas, N. Weber) and their "letter studio". The visitors will be given the chance to have letters send out on their behalf, may it be a love letter or a long overdue letter to the grandmother.
10pm-12am: Performance by the German artist group "Da Group" (Sergej Jensen, Claus Richter, Oliver Husain).

Concert: Friday, 28 October, 8pm
The "ensemble fuer neue musik zuerich" plays Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996): Rain Spell, Sacrifice, Toward the Sea, Between Tides. With Hans-Peter Frehner (flute), Hansruedi Bissegger (clarinet), Viktor Mueller (piano), Kathrin Bamert (harp), Lorenz Haas (drums), Urs Bumbacher (violin), Nicola Romano (violoncello)

Our education and tour program is supported by Swiss Re.

Further information and images available on request.

Image: Peter Doig, Black Orpheus

Press preview: Friday, 26 August, 11.30 am
Opening: Friday, 26 August, 6­9 pm

Kunsthalle Zurich Limmatstrasse 270 8005
Opening hours:
Tues/Wed/Fri 12-6 pm, Thurs 12-8 pm, Sat/Sun 11 am-5 pm, closed on Mondays

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