Dis.Location

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Van 07-09-1999 t/m 19-09-1999


Dis.Location is an art project, showing the work of 16 artists in 4 exhibitions within a period of 2 weeks.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila (FIN), David Claerbout (B), Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler (IRE/CH), Runa Islam (GB/NL), Gerald van der Kaap (NL), Marcus Kreiss (D/F), Mark Lewis (GB), Christl Lidl (F), Aurelia Mihai (D), Valérie Mréjen (F), Antoni Muntadas (E/USA), Hayley Newman (GB), Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (D), Peter Stel (NL), Martijn Veldhoen (NL)

The project's performances, video and room installations deconstruct our ordered picture of reality, space and time, identity or routine. Image, narrative and time periods are shifted, the obvious becomes entangled within contradictions.

Disorientation, uncertainty or confusion are present not as a symptom of society, but as an artistic strategy. It's about the strategy of deconstructing the reality.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila / Today

At the core of the confusion is the media manipulated daily life e.g.: the contrived human controversies schooled by TV dramas and talk shows - also referred to as desire. Film and television images will be literally taken apart.

The four exhibitions in the festival series are each centred around a particular theme. 'Dis.Location' part 1 begins with the de/construction of identity, part 2 shows collages of incompatible time periods, part 3 maintains the feeling of indefinable suspense and part 4 tells of the real daily dramas.

The project takes the theme of 'dislocation' and applies it like a 'storyboard' to the whole project. During the 4 exhibitions some work will be show several times in different settings. Through this movement different aspects of the same work of art will become accessible. A lineal, static exhibition structure is broken down in favour of a dynamic, almost film-like narrative.

Entrance
Immediately upon entering the exhibition the observer's position is reversed. Runa Islams video 'Gaze of Orpheus' permanently throws the observer's view back on itself.

Curators:Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Jan Schuijren.

In March 1999 hARTware projekte moved into its new location in the city of Dortmund's music and culture centre (MuK). In the future a decentralised infrastructure for the production of media art will be available here. Also in plan is the founding of an international grant for media art. Additionally hARTware projekte can use an exhibition hall (400 square meters) as an open platform for the showing of contemporary art.

Met dank aan:
Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund, Videoprojekt Denneborg and Brinkhoff's, Dortmund.
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Yellow Cube/ Yellow Cell
The atmosphere of the Dis.Location exhibitions will be created by Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag and Hans D. Christ. A central element is Sonntag's 'Yellow Cell'. An walk-through 'Memento Mori' with a subtropical climate, rotten fruit and butterflies.
Performance:
September 7,
9.30 pm Hayley Newman, Hook and Eye (Performance)
Hayley Newman, Shot in the Dark (Performance)

Runa Islam / Gaze of Orpheus

Permanent Presentations:
September7 to 19
Jan Peter E.R.Sonntag, In the Yellow Cell
Jan Peter E.R.Sonntag, OMO
Runa Islam, Gaze of Orpheus


Dis.Location 1/4: De/Constructing Identity


September 7 to 9
The first exhibition of Dis.Location is about the position and the positioning of self, the loss, or rather the pleasure of lost, of identity. The face ('Visage') as one of the most important angle-points of identity, will be called in question by the works shown. Runa Islam deconstructs the romantic film cliché of 'losing oneself'. In contrast Hayley Newman stages her own disappearance in her performances- thereby becoming a flickering film/image.
Peter Stel, My Second Blind Date
Aurelia Mihai, Mutatie / Verschiebung
Muntadas, Portrait
Gerald van der Kaap, This Way 4 U (special edit)
Runa Islam, Tuin



Martijn Veldhoen / Dislocations

Dis.Location 2/4 Shifting Time


September 10 to 12
An irritation in time and space takes place in the second of the Dis.Location exhibitions. Familiar scenarios such as a crowed beach (Marcus Kreiss) or an historic landscape photography (David Claerbout) reveal themselves on closer inspection as cunning collages: different time spans are portrayed parallel. The contradiction in time is so subtle that the deception calls for permanent re-examination. In Martijn Veldhoens inter-active panorama the de/construct of space and time in an utopian landscape is left up to the observer.
Runa Islam, Tuin
Christl Lidl, The Blind Man
David Claerbout, Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg (1910)
Marcus Kreiss, Barcelona Beach
Martijn Veldhoen, Dislocations


Dis.Locations 3/4 Suspense


September 12 to 14
A further part of the Dis.Location art project shows work, that centres around an indefinable suspense, a suspense that takes place in seemingly endless moments in which (almost) nothing happens, but everything seems possible. Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler stage such a 'nothing-place'. In a room that is reminiscent of the Kafka short story 'Die Verwandlung', the feelings of apathy and departure, the familiarity and the uneasiness are held in suspension. Gerald van der Kaap shows a nervous woman who seems to be preparing herself for something while at the same time making absolutely no progress, whereas in David Claerbouts video we will never know if the cat ate the bird.
Martijn Veldhoen, Dislocations
Gerald van der Kaap, This Way 4 U (special edit)
Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler, Gregor's Room II
Christl Lidl, The Blind Man
David Claerbout, Cat and Bird in Peace


David Claerbout / Cat and Bird in Peace

Dis.Location 4/4 De/Reconstructing Daily Life


September 17 to 19
The media manipulated daily life e.g.: the contrived human controversies schooled by TV dramas and talk shows - also referred to as desire are presented here for deconstruction. Woman and man, daughter and father, mother and son wrestle like cat and dog over their territory. 'Today' from Eija-Liisa Ahtila, 'Cat and Bird in Peace' from David Claerbout or Valérie Mréjen's short films deal with these ritualised scenes of daily life.
David Claerbout, Cat and Bird in Peace
Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Today
Mark Lewis, A Sense of the End
Valérie Mréjen, Various shortfilms
Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler, Gregor's Room II
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[beginPage:ARTISTS | WORKS]


Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Today, 1996-97
three channel video installation (based on film), sound
Today tells about the mysterious death of 'the' grandfather, which 'happens' through the monologues of the members of the family. Ahtila uses on this occasion the basic elements of short film and thriller. However, the one dimensional fictitious film space is expanded to three screens, building an open space where the story reels off.

Runa Islam / Tuin (Garden)

Runa Islam
, Tuin (Garden), 1998
installation, one film projection (color), two video projections (black and white), sound, 8 mins., loop
Starting point of this installation is the remake of a short sequence out of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film 'Martha', that repeats itself endlessly on a projection screen that glides in the middle of the room: A man and a woman are moving towards each other. At the very moment of their meeting 'the world' (i.e. the camera) turns around them. At two next to each other situated wall projections - in the middle of and at right angles to them is placed the gliding screen - one sees simultaneously two more versions of the remake. In this case they are shot in black and white and the two protagonists are separated. They are not anymore moving towards but next to each other towards the spectator.
Because of this shifted perspective the film crew too is appearing on stage - not turning around the couple but the individuals. In a complex and subtle manner 'Tuin' is oscillating between linear and spiral structures of narration and between de- and re-territorialisation.

Mark Lewis, A Sense of the End, 1996
two channel video installation, sound, 14 mins., loop
'A Sense of the End' shows alternating on two opposite screens different stereotype ends of films: sometimes as a happy and sometimes as a tragic end. They all could come from famous films but instead they are all remakes shot by the artist. The models of the remakes are not certain films but the
stereotype of 'the end' itself.

Valérie Mréjen, Diverse short-films / video, 1998
In different short-films Valérie Mréjen traces 'everyday dramas', especially the disturbed and dismayed communication between parents and children, parents and juveniles and juvenile couples between themselves. In a tragicomic manner the short dialogues / monologues tell about the inevitable
failure of the ' I just mean well by you'.

Aurelia Mihai
, Mutatie - Verschiebung, 1997
one channel video installation, 5 monitors, sound
Through five monitors that are placed on the floor and next to each other a series of portraits is shown. The faces are not each related to a monitor but arise between them. That is, that every monitor screen shows two halves of the same face but each half orientated by the next monitor.
During the change from one portrait to the next the different halves of the faces are running vertical (monitor) and next to each other (between the monitors) as long as two 'halves' of one face have sort themselves out. In the meantime countless and hardly perceptible hybrid faces result.

Antoni Muntadas, Portrait, 1994
video projection, 6 mins., loop
The video projection shows the upper part of a man's body - from about the shoulders to the trunk - who is sitting behind a desk and obviously talks, since he strongly gesticulates with his hands. Even if we do neither see the face nor the surrounding, we are learning something about the person and it's situation since we start to read it's gestures, clothes and other details.

Hayley Newman,
Hook and Eye, 1998
performance
'Hook and Eye' was shown for the first time in 1998 at the Root Festival in Hull (GB). The artist - connected to divers sensors - is located together with the audience in a totally darkened room. Analogous to the speed of her movements she activates a single light bulb. Nearly cinematic she appears
according to her step like dance.

Martijn Veldhoen / Dislocations

Martijn Veldhoen
, Dislocations, 1998
interactive video installation
In 'Dislocations' the spectator walks into a dark room where a video panorama showing views of cities and landscapes is presented. Though Veldhoen has withhold any life from the images. Persons, traffic, birds, sounds, etc. are removed from the pictures. Through a sensor the spectator is enabled to re-implant the removed life fragment by fragment back to the scenery. He is shifting between the peaceful and at the same time hermetic idyl and the disturbing but at the same time appealing 'action'.

Jane & Louise Wilson, Gamma, 1999
video installation
The film shows shots from the inside of an empty industrial building. Here different takes of the camera are composed to a dissolving as well as a symmetric ornament of space.


Openings take place on September Tue 7, Fri 10, Tue 14 and Fri 17, from 6 to 11 p.m.
Exhibition hours on Wed/Thu and Sat/Sun from 2 to 11 p.m.
Dis.Location is the result of a co-operation between hARTware projekte and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, MonteVideo/ Time Based Arts, Amsterdam
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