16 DAYS / 16 VIDEOS
AN EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM FEATURING A SELECTION OF VIDEOS BY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
September 9th through September 30th the Gary R. Libby University Gallery will be presenting a series of
video works as part of an educational Program. These videos have been drawn from private collections and
archives. The selection spans a wide historical frame and covers a range of interests and subject matter. It
is an opportunity for the students and our art community to revisit known and discover new artists.
DAY 1 / SEPTEMBER 9, 2022
FRANCIS ALŸS
THE NIGHTWATCH, LONDON, UK
2004
IN COLLABORATION WITH RAFAEL ORTEGA AND ARTANGEL
17 MINUTES, 30 SECONDS
Francis Alÿs' The Nightwatch (an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt),
examines the nature of surveillance in the city. In the middle of the night, the artist released a fox into London's deserted National Portrait Gallery and used the museum's CCTV system to track the animal's movements. The gallery was chosen because, unlike other institutions, it does not hide its CCTV system but purposefully incorporates several monitors that capture spectators in its exhibition displays. The museum makes explicit the constant filming and surveillance of the public. Similarly, in its exhibition format, The Nightwatch offers the possibility of tracing the fox's movement sequentially from one monitor to the next, much like a security officer could with any individual in the city. The Nightwatch places the spectator as the voyeuristic overseer of the fox's walk, mirroring the relationship between London's surveillance system and the city's inhabitants.[1]Alÿs was inspired partly by the proliferation of surveillance cameras around London, and by the number of urban foxes forced to lead a scavenger existence in the city.
DAY 2 / SEPTEMBER 10, 2022
FRANCESCA WOODMAN
SELECTED VIDEO WORKS
1975 -1978
In a long-standing tradition, in which Abramović and Mendieta were pioneers, another short-lived American artist, Francesca Woodman, also explores her traumas and frustrations through the use of the moving image. Like his predecessors, Woodman produced a series of works for cameras in which the body is both present and absent. One could say that her exploration is about the phantasmagoria of the body, a word that has the same Greek root as “appearance." In her work it is not merely accidental that the apparent (the visible) and the evanescent have the same linguistic origin. A body that is and is not is a body in the same state of conflict in which the video puts us, the conflict of a fleeting presence, in which all times are fused, in which memory captures itself as a fold: Borgesian paraphrasing the dreamer who dreams while dreaming, Woodman proposes the formula “remembering while remembering," which leads to this pleasurable, and at the same time traumatic, appearance of oblivion and the disappearance of being.
DAY 3 / SEPTEMBER 13, 2022
JIMMIE DURHAM
SMASHING
2004
91 MINUTES, 54 SECONDS
Wearing a suit, Jimmie Durham sits behind a desk like a bureaucrat performing his duty: smashing things.
In an orderly manner, a person goes in, delivers an object, Durham smashes it with a prehistoric stone
stool - violently but impassively. He stamps and signs a piece of paper as receipt and gives it to the same
person, who goes off-scene. The same order of events is repeated several times for 92 minutes. This video performance was part of Durham’s teaching residency at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy in 2004.
Since the 1980s, Jimmie Durham’s work has been characterized by an exploration on representations of the
other. Particularly, Durham has a trajectory marked by his ethnic origin, as he is of Native American
descent. His most emblematic works recover the artisanal and juxtapose it with the contemporary art
tradition of the found object to symbolically present the mutilation of indigenous cultural representations.
Considering this line of investigation, the formula used by Durham in his video Smashing may seem
strange. At first glance, it is a video which shows a character (the artist himself) in a peculiar exchange
operation: in exchange for a personal object to be destroyed by the character, each participant receives a
certificate. It might seem like a simple conceptual process: the initial reading might be that the object's
existence is purely abstract. But the comic setting, with the artist as a caricature of a frantic bureaucrat
who distributes identical certificates for different objects and to different people, is more than an
extension of the aesthetic administration, of which institutional art critique provides us with a broad
history. The violent decrepitude of the bureaucrat (played by the artist, let’s not forget) “smashing” the
objects he receives, points to something very significant: these objects, full of personal history to each of
the volunteers who decided to participate in this action or event, are leaving their nostalgia function
behind. This “bureaucratic” violent neglect that replaces the object, this memory loss, coincides with the
idea of the continuous present from which the narcissist is unable to escape.
DAY 4 / SEPTEMBER 14, 2022
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
NUDE WITH SKELETON
2002 - 2005
12 MINUTES, 36 SECONDS
+
ANA MENDIETA
UNTITLED (BUTTERFLY)
1975
3 MINUTES, 39 SECONDS
Marina Abramovic
The video Nude with skeleton by Serbian artist Marina Abramović is a work in a series based on the
“archaeological” discovery of human skeletons. In the video, the artist appears in communion with the
skeleton, and one reproduces the gesture of the other. This dance with death is evidently linked to a
political and personal context of turmoil in the Balkans. This is where the artist is from, and it is marked
by the traumas of a society that lowers the human spirit by leaving it caught in a bloody and incessant
battle for survival. The medium of video allows the artist to represent herself in a state of permanent
agony, reinforced by the display of an image repeated ad infinitum, condemning bodies and corpses to live
together intimately.
​
Ana Mendieta
Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta is an important figure in contemporary performance art. Despite her short
life, her work gained international recognition. She was undoubtedly, albeit unintentionally, one of the
pioneers of the much-propagated multiculturalism, which has been succinctly described in art history as
the shifting interests from aesthetics to ethnographic concerns. In this untitled video, Mendieta presents a
facet that is perhaps not recognized as the most representative of her work, marked by the tensions
between the body and the landscape, in a call to return to what is essential in human nature. What is
special about this video in relation to her work is the absence of the natural landscape as the territory of
her inscriptions or silhouettes made with her own body in primitive clay. We must consider that this video
dates from a time when she was experiencing her body as a malleable support to produce meanings (the
body as raw material and support for her ideas), a type of approach close to that found in a famous
performance in which Mendieta presses her face against a glass, in a sequence that goes from the
agonizing to the ironic, until she transforms her own body into material for sculpture in action. In this
video, using a technique little explored until then, the artist uses an infrared sensor that measures the
heat of the human body to record her own figure. Thus, instead of glass, Mendieta symbolically “presses”
her body against the recording material. As was her custom, the artist appears naked in front of the
camera, but distorting the image so that we see it diffused between color zones. With the movement of
the body, we see how your abdomen, for example, changes from red to blue areas, and so does each of
your limbs. The artist's body became a palette of colors, objectified, again reflecting the conflicts of
excision of subject and object that the narcissist cannot understand.
DAY 5 / SEPTEMBER 15, 2022
DAVID LAMELAS + HILDEGARDE DUANE
MANILA RUN
1988
12 MINUTES, 42 SECONDS
With Manila Run (1987), Duane and Lamelas staged the decay of the interview format over the course of
the video. The artists made direct reference to specific individuals: Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (again
portrayed by Lamelas and Duane, respectively), first couple of the Philippines and mouthpiece for Reagan’s
anticommunist foreign policy. In an initial sequence, the characters trumpet their populist slogans,
entirely appropriated from real quotations, before an unseen public. They dance and then flee the country
(Ferdinand steals cigarettes on his way out), after which the video flash forwards to a nuclear explosion in
1999. The interviewer (played by Mary Kahl), sick from radiation, visits the post-apocalyptic bunker where
Ferdinand and Imelda show off their furniture and medals—an abject version of the “news magazine”
home interview—until another explosion kills them all. Lamelas has suggested that identifying actual
political figures was a mistake, as it “ages the idea” (Newhouse). The direct appropriation of existing
media content also allows for a degree of political specificity that The Hand and The Dictator refuse. In
these earlier works, parody is conflated with generality; the real-life referents and political affiliations must
remain ambiguous. Manila Run, then, is the exception to Lamelas’s rule that politics dwell in media form
rather than its content.
​
[In Daniel r. Quiles Conversations: The Television Interview in Jaime Davidovich and David Lamelas , p. 195-
196]
DAY 6 / SEPTEMBER 16, 2022
PATRICIA DAUDER
FORWARD (FILM) AND
OTHER FILMS (2006 - 2012)
2010
16 MM. BLACK AND WHITE. NO SOUND.
6 MINUTES, 47 SECONDS
Other films
The Garden Island, 2012. 16 mm film. Color and black and white. No sound. 5 minutes, 43 seconds; March
5th, 1979, 2011. 16 mm film. Black and white. No sound. 4 minutes, 20 seconds; Flow, 2009. S8 film
transferred to 16 mm. Color. No sound. 4 minutes, 05 seconds; Sporadic, 2009. S8 film transferred to 16
mm. Color. No sound. 4 minutes, 25 seconds; Cutsurf (Bclnt. Fed.2009), 2009. S8 film transferred to 16
mm. Color. No sound. 1 minutes, 30 seconds; Les Maliens (a film), 2007. S16 mm film transferred to video.
Color. Sound. 12 minutes, 49 seconds; Les Maliens (a script), 2006. 16 mm film transferred to video. Color.
No sound. 3 minutes, 49 seconds
​
FORWARD (FILM)
"Forward (film) shows a series of landscape views and sport actions in a non-narrative, non-lineal, and
fragmented manner. The images were filmed during a 2009 Professional Windsurf Association World Cup
competition held at Pozo Izquierdo Beach in the Canary Islands, a well-known spot for windsurfing due to
its strong wind and wave conditions throughout the year. The film was made and edited with the idea to be
a faithful depiction of my spontaneous reactions to the place and the event as much as a true
cinematographic testimony of the rough environmental conditions that affected the shooting such as strong
gales, big swell and dense humidity in the air hindering clear vision"
​
The representation of a subject or an event, becomes almost a secondary aspect when viewing Patricia
Dauder's films. From the first moment, our attention is directed inevitably towards the perception of matter
and space and the experience of time. The artist's interest in working with spatial sensations, atmospheres
and topographies combined with a will to give visibility to the concept of absence has led to the nonrepresentation
of facts and the prominence of an experience of viewing and perceiving.
​
Dauder’s films explore what lies at the heart of the medium: time and length on the one hand and editing
on the other. Time seems to be suspended by the suppression of any sort of referential fact external to the
image. Therefore, the film has its own inherent time, a "suspended time" that the artist acknowledges as
characteristic of her working process. Although observation of the natural world is a constant practice and
a point of departure for many of her works, during the creative process, what's figurative or identifiable
fades to its mere disappearance becoming a slight trace, almost imperceptible.
DAY 7 / SEPTEMBER 17, 2022
LEANDRO KATZ
MOON FILMS. MOON NOTES
1980 - 2010
DIGITAL VIDEO FROM ORIGINAL
16 MM FILM
9 MINUTES, 34 SECONDS
Moon Notes is a ten-minute video in which a camera passively watches the Moon and compresses, in a
time lapse, a complete lunar cycle, leaving to the imagination of those who see it the possibility of
deciphering what happened in the intervals between each phase. In the beginning of the video a text
appears on the screen that says: “The tortuous nature of Our Progress.” A little further on, as soon as the
moon continues to ascend, the following text appears: “Camping on the Opposite Shore.” Lastly, the artist
launches this sentence: “White Rushes Tied to a Cluster of Mulberry Shoots.” These messages are, on the
one hand, an invitation for us, spectators, to write our own texts, our own reports, and, on the other
hand, they invite us to share a different time, that time of the communal sensations of our ancestors. A
time that the video allows the artist to summon as an eternal present.
DAY 8 / SEPTEMBER 20, 2022
CARLOS MARTIEL
PUNTO DI FUGA (VANISHING POINT)
2013
7 MINUTES, 7 SECONDS
“I stand in the center of the main hall of Nitsch Museum with woolen threads sewn to the front and back
of my body. The threads sewed to my back all follow the same direction to a single point on the wall. The
threads extending from my torso expand in many directions, creating the illusion that I’m being pierced by
a vanishing point.”
(Commissioned and produced by Fondazione Morra)
​
Eugenio Viola
https://kunstaspekte.art/event/carlos-martiel-vanishing-point-2013-03?hl=en
The “vanishing point” and the perspective elaboration thus implied are the expression of the will
to give the world a geometrical order produced by a western episteme aiming to rationalize it
through logic mathematics terms. They both belong to a doctrine based on the anthropocentric
concept of man as measure of the world, thus represented by Leonardo da Vinci in the Homo
Vitruvianus that becomes the extreme visualization of the Neoplatonic correspondence between
macrocosm and microcosm.
​
Starting from these considerations and dealing with a topical theme of western culture and history
of art, Carlos Martiel reverses the iconic outcome of the given image by using his body, he shows
the deviation from the model, from the platonic essence aiming at the original pureness as well as
the classic eidos in order to restore a version which is controversially multicultural and hybrid.
The artist’s body turns into a landscape to be crossed and covered, his skin becomes a painting to
be personalized and comprehended, his appendixes are branches with specific signs of belonging
just hanging on them: the meeting place for several different codes. Action is an effort of junction
which is translated into a geometrical-performative tension, into grief and nearly mantric ecstasy
of a body declined into its unshakable alterity.
​
In Carlos Martiel’s work, the context of belonging and the awareness of his own body are always
shown as being the mutable outcome of complex processes of attribution. The street and the
public place are his favourite field for acting and operating since they are granted by continuous
ways of repossession.
​
The Cuban artist is focused on specific episodes aiming to intensify the perception of social
inequalities by driving the public to adopt an ideological position which comprises signs of a
determined situation and precise context. As it often happens in the magmatic continent of South
America, Martiel’s actions are bound to a strong expressive vividness, they assume denouncing
overtones and a taste of rebellion, they recall unpleasant situations which are worrying signs of
the deep existential discomforts fought by contemporary society. His harsh and dramatic works are
characterized by a disturbing beauty and a nearly cathartic strength which drive them beyond the
contextual or sociological remark. His works, originated from a specific geopolitical localization,
proceed inductively from the particular to the general since they refer, against our will, to global
problems.
DAY 9 / SEPTEMBER 21, 2022
10 AM TO 2 PM
CANDICE BREITZ
PROFILE, 2017
3 SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEOS, COLOUR, SOUND, LOOP
VARIATION A - DURATION: 2 MINUTES, 20 SECONDS
COMMISSIONED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN PAVILION, VENICE BIENNALE 2017
Who speaks in the name of whom? In 2017, Candice Breitz represented her country of birth—South
Africa—at the 57th Venice Biennale; a country in which the question of who may (or may not)
legitimately occupy the space of representation, is particularly fraught. Recently, debates around the
extent to which white South Africans can engage, portray or stand in alliance with black South Africans,
have been amplified against the backdrop of a global right-wing backlash that seeks to reverse social
justice gains. Can would-be allies whose very being is defined by socio-historical privilege, avoid simply
entrenching such privilege as they endeavour to align themselves with communities who have been denied
this privilege? Such questions lie both at the heart of Breitz’s Love Story (2016), and at the core of Profile
(2017), a series of three short videos that respond to Breitz’s nomination as one of two artists selected to
represent South Africa in Venice in 2017 (her work was featured alongside that of compatriot Mohau
Modisakeng). In Profile, a work that was conceived and shot in Cape Town in early 2017, Breitz absents
herself from visibility before the camera, instead platforming ten prominent South African artists who
might equally have been nominated to represent the country. As their collective appearance usurps Breitz’s
presence, the implied selfportrait gives way to a polyphonic riff, imploding the very assumptions that
conventionally guarantee the genre of portraiture. “My name is Candice Breitz,” the cast of voices insists
intermittently, punctuating descriptions of who those before the camera actually are (or might be): man
or woman, white or black, working or middle class…. Veering erratically between descriptors of race, class
and gender, occupation and national belonging, the verbal palate of attributes and markers delivered by
the artists varies wildly in credibility. Who is here as a self and who is here as an other?
“I’m Candice Breitz, and I approve this message,” the multi-voiced litany concludes, parodying the
sentence that American presidential candidates are legally obliged to use as rhetorical authentication of
their campaign ads during an electoral cycle. In the context of Profile, however, the sentence subverts the
proof of authenticity it is supposed to furnish. Blurring the genre of self-portraiture with the formal
language of electoral politicking and self-promotional branding, Profile re-distributes the heightened
attention typically garnered by an artist due to a Venice appearance, to a range of fellow artists who –
much like Breitz – appear intent on consciously disrupting any fixed notion of subjectivity. Dodging
objectification, the artists featured in Profile confront the placatory ‘rainbow nation’ metaphor that is too
readily applied to post-apartheid South Africa, with the country’s lived reality. In so doing, they extricate
the question of who may legitimately speak for their nation in Venice from the regime of representation,
to prompt a debate around who should be able to speak in a discussion of the many who are not present
when they are being spoken for and about in Venice.
​
Profile features Igshaan Adams, Roger Ballen, Steven Cohen, Gabrielle Goliath, Dean Hutton, Banele Khoza,
Gerald Machona, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Chuma Sopotela and Sue Williamson. The work was commissioned by
the South African Pavilion on the occasion of the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, with the support
of the South African Department of Arts and Culture and Connect Channel.
Text: Alexander Koch
2 PM TO 6 PM
CAO FEI
i. MIRROR BY CHINA TRACY (AKA: CAO FEI)
SECOND LIFE DOCUMENTARY FILM
2007
28 MINUTES, 8 SECONDS
Cao Fei is a Chinese artist living in Beijing. She is well known for her multimedia installations and her
videos, as well as work in which social aspects, popular aesthetics, references to surrealism, and
documentary conventions are mixed while reflecting on the rapid and chaotic changes taking place today
in her country. One of her recurring concerns is the erosion caused in the real world by the virtual world,
as she shows with her video i. Mirror by China Tracy (AKA: Cao Fei) Second Life Documentary Film . Second
Life is a virtual space that gained great popularity during the 2000’s and in which people can create
characters, spaces and situations that develop in a parallel simulated world. Each character or “avatar” (a
word derived from the Sanskrit term “divine incarnation”) refers to an alter ego that each one controls in
this game in which diverse people from all over the world coexist, such as activists, soldiers, businessmen,
chefs, truck drivers, executives, the disabled or television stars. Among them is Cao Fei, whose avatar is
i.Mirror, the story of a beautiful maiden created by China Tracy with machinima, a 3-D animation program.
China Tracy is actually Cao Fei and her Second Life story exudes the influences of filmmakers like Wim
Wenders. The video is a narration of i.Mirror’s life, divided into three related parts: the first part oscillates
between the beauty and excess of virtual capitalism. The second is mostly a love story, and all three
feature a montage of humanitarian avatars. The love story is based on real events and is almost a
documentary, just like other plots are fictional or mix fiction with reality. The important thing for the
artist is that, “as a background, there is a completely human nature” in this parallel virtual world. Second
Life is, in short, a laboratory for relationships. The difference between cinema or photography and digital
art is in terms of representation and not content and, therefore, we can compare it (as well as video) to a
mirror, as we do with painting. The difference, according to the clues we follow from Rosalind Krauss'
seminal text on the aesthetics of narcissism, is that, while in painting the artist seeks for the object to be
a reflection of himself and the environment, in video, or now in digital media, these reflections tend
towards the erasure of boundaries, which are increasingly difficult to define.
DAY 10 / SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
MUNTADAS / REESE
POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
1952 - 2008
85 MINUTES, 49 SECONDS
Artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been compiling a history of presidential campaign spots
following the evolution of political advertising from its beginnings in 1952 to the present. Political
Advertisement is a personal vision of how politics and politicians are presented through the medium of TV.
For the past six general elections, the artists premiered the latest version of the tape in a public
presentation, followed by a discussion about the impact of campaign advertising.
​
Muntadas and Reese first started working on this video project in 1984. This fascinating anthology
documents the selling of the American presidency since the 1950s. Surveying the American televisual
campaign process, the artists trace the history of television ads as political strategy and marketing
technique. Played in chronological order and without commentary, the ads become a chorus of the nation’s
patriotism, partisanship, and fear. The artists’ state: “Looking back at these political ads provides a key to
understanding the evolution of images on television and the marketing of politics.”
DAY 11 / SEPTEMBER 23, 2022
10 AM TO 2 PM
CANDICE BREITZ
PROFILE, 2017
3 SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEOS, COLOUR, SOUND, LOOP
VARIATION B - DURATION: 3 MINUTES, 27 SECONDS
COMMISSIONED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN PAVILION, VENICE BIENNALE 2017
Who speaks in the name of whom? In 2017, Candice Breitz represented her country of birth—South
Africa—at the 57th Venice Biennale; a country in which the question of who may (or may not)
legitimately occupy the space of representation, is particularly fraught. Recently, debates around the
extent to which white South Africans can engage, portray or stand in alliance with black South Africans,
have been amplified against the backdrop of a global right-wing backlash that seeks to reverse social
justice gains. Can would-be allies whose very being is defined by socio-historical privilege, avoid simply
entrenching such privilege as they endeavour to align themselves with communities who have been denied
this privilege? Such questions lie both at the heart of Breitz’s Love Story (2016), and at the core of Profile
(2017), a series of three short videos that respond to Breitz’s nomination as one of two artists selected to
represent South Africa in Venice in 2017 (her work was featured alongside that of compatriot Mohau
Modisakeng). In Profile, a work that was conceived and shot in Cape Town in early 2017, Breitz absents
herself from visibility before the camera, instead platforming ten prominent South African artists who
might equally have been nominated to represent the country. As their collective appearance usurps Breitz’s
presence, the implied selfportrait gives way to a polyphonic riff, imploding the very assumptions that
conventionally guarantee the genre of portraiture. “My name is Candice Breitz,” the cast of voices insists
intermittently, punctuating descriptions of who those before the camera actually are (or might be): man
or woman, white or black, working or middle class…. Veering erratically between descriptors of race, class
and gender, occupation and national belonging, the verbal palate of attributes and markers delivered by
the artists varies wildly in credibility. Who is here as a self and who is here as an other?
“I’m Candice Breitz, and I approve this message,” the multi-voiced litany concludes, parodying the
sentence that American presidential candidates are legally obliged to use as rhetorical authentication of
their campaign ads during an electoral cycle. In the context of Profile, however, the sentence subverts the
proof of authenticity it is supposed to furnish. Blurring the genre of self-portraiture with the formal
language of electoral politicking and self-promotional branding, Profile re-distributes the heightened
attention typically garnered by an artist due to a Venice appearance, to a range of fellow artists who –
much like Breitz – appear intent on consciously disrupting any fixed notion of subjectivity. Dodging
objectification, the artists featured in Profile confront the placatory ‘rainbow nation’ metaphor that is too
readily applied to post-apartheid South Africa, with the country’s lived reality. In so doing, they extricate
the question of who may legitimately speak for their nation in Venice from the regime of representation,
to prompt a debate around who should be able to speak in a discussion of the many who are not present
when they are being spoken for and about in Venice.
​
Profile features Igshaan Adams, Roger Ballen, Steven Cohen, Gabrielle Goliath, Dean Hutton, Banele Khoza,
Gerald Machona, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Chuma Sopotela and Sue Williamson. The work was commissioned by
the South African Pavilion on the occasion of the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, with the support
of the South African Department of Arts and Culture and Connect Channel.
Text: Alexander Koch
2 PM TO 6 PM
REGINA SILVEIRA
UMA TRAMAZUL
2010
12 MINUTES, 36 SECONDS
In 2010, the Brazilian plastic artist Regina Silveira packed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo facade with a
work specially designed for the museum. A digital image on adhesive vinyl, the work fully covered the
museum's external glass in the length and height of its four facades. In total, the covered area was 2,300
m. In Tramazul the image is of a blue sky with light clouds, close to the images of skies that are naturally
reflected in the glass of the buildings, with the difference that it is constructed as a gigantic cross-stitch
embroidery. In these skies spread over the four sides of the museum, large needles virtually embedded in a
weft of intense blue simulate embroidering the clouds scattered across the glass, with threads of three
shades – between white and medium gray. Tramazul proposes itself as a false reflection and at the same
time as a camouflage that connects MASP's embroidered sky with other neighboring skies, real or reflected,
in a unique example of public or urban art. Tramazul redefined the structure's heavy modernist
architecture, lightening it to include an idyllic reflection of nature.
​
Regina Silveira is internationally known for works that interfere in spaces and buildings, inside and outside
them, such as the installation Lumen (2005) that covered the Crystal Palace of the Museo Nacional Centro
de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid; Tropel Reversed (2009), 700 mÇ adhesive vinyl on the Køge Art Museum,
Denmark; the Entrecéu installations , at the Vale Museum, in Espírito Santo (2007); Claralight, at the
Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, in São Paulo (2003).
​
DAY 12 / SEPTEMBER 24, 2022
DARA FRIEDMAN
THE CROWNING
2021
5 MINUTES, 16 SECONDS
Dara Friedman’s new digital commission, The Crowning (2021), explores the ancient and ever-renewed form
of the spiral through moving images, layering, color, and sound. Filmed on 35 mm film and transferred to
video, the spiral, as both movement and shape, is engaged through the imagery depicted—the elliptical
trajectory of the sun as it rises out of and sets back into the ocean; the merging of the human eye and
astral bodies—but also formally, as images seamlessly transition across split frames and in subtle shifts of
color and sound. With this work, Friedman foregrounds local history and alludes to how, for the Calusa, an
Indigenous population of southwest Florida, the pupil was a portal to the soul. In this work, the meanings
of the spiral are manifold, speaking to complex notions of nonlinear time, foldings of the past and future
into the present.
MANDORLA
2022
35MM FILM TRANSFERRED TO 4K VIDEO, SOUND
10 MINUTES, 43 SECONDS
In Mandorla, a form of neolithic sun-gazing compresses deep time and the momentary. The bright spiraling
orbs chance intersection, their fleeting meetings revealing the cosmological symbol of the vesica Pisces.
Occasionally a panther laps water, her tail curling and uncurling, locking eyes with the viewer’s. Small
boats flit by in animated jitters of nowness. An unsynchronized soundtrack of gong and violin notes allows
space for the sound waves to lap haphazardly like ripples of water.
DAY 13 / SEPTEMBER 27, 2022
10 AM TO 2 PM
CANDICE BREITZ
PROFILE, 2017
3 SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEOS, COLOUR, SOUND, LOOP
VARIATION C - DURATION: 3 MINUTES, 21 SECONDS
COMMISSIONED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN PAVILION, VENICE BIENNALE 2017
Who speaks in the name of whom? In 2017, Candice Breitz represented her country of birth—South
Africa—at the 57th Venice Biennale; a country in which the question of who may (or may not)
legitimately occupy the space of representation, is particularly fraught. Recently, debates around the
extent to which white South Africans can engage, portray or stand in alliance with black South Africans,
have been amplified against the backdrop of a global right-wing backlash that seeks to reverse social
justice gains. Can would-be allies whose very being is defined by socio-historical privilege, avoid simply
entrenching such privilege as they endeavour to align themselves with communities who have been denied
this privilege? Such questions lie both at the heart of Breitz’s Love Story (2016), and at the core of Profile
(2017), a series of three short videos that respond to Breitz’s nomination as one of two artists selected to
represent South Africa in Venice in 2017 (her work was featured alongside that of compatriot Mohau
Modisakeng). In Profile, a work that was conceived and shot in Cape Town in early 2017, Breitz absents
herself from visibility before the camera, instead platforming ten prominent South African artists who
might equally have been nominated to represent the country. As their collective appearance usurps Breitz’s
presence, the implied selfportrait gives way to a polyphonic riff, imploding the very assumptions that
conventionally guarantee the genre of portraiture. “My name is Candice Breitz,” the cast of voices insists
intermittently, punctuating descriptions of who those before the camera actually are (or might be): man
or woman, white or black, working or middle class…. Veering erratically between descriptors of race, class
and gender, occupation and national belonging, the verbal palate of attributes and markers delivered by
the artists varies wildly in credibility. Who is here as a self and who is here as an other?
“I’m Candice Breitz, and I approve this message,” the multi-voiced litany concludes, parodying the
sentence that American presidential candidates are legally obliged to use as rhetorical authentication of
their campaign ads during an electoral cycle. In the context of Profile, however, the sentence subverts the
proof of authenticity it is supposed to furnish. Blurring the genre of self-portraiture with the formal
language of electoral politicking and self-promotional branding, Profile re-distributes the heightened
attention typically garnered by an artist due to a Venice appearance, to a range of fellow artists who –
much like Breitz – appear intent on consciously disrupting any fixed notion of subjectivity. Dodging
objectification, the artists featured in Profile confront the placatory ‘rainbow nation’ metaphor that is too
readily applied to post-apartheid South Africa, with the country’s lived reality. In so doing, they extricate
the question of who may legitimately speak for their nation in Venice from the regime of representation,
to prompt a debate around who should be able to speak in a discussion of the many who are not present
when they are being spoken for and about in Venice.
​
Profile features Igshaan Adams, Roger Ballen, Steven Cohen, Gabrielle Goliath, Dean Hutton, Banele Khoza,
Gerald Machona, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Chuma Sopotela and Sue Williamson. The work was commissioned by
the South African Pavilion on the occasion of the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, with the support
of the South African Department of Arts and Culture and Connect Channel.
Text: Alexander Koch
2 PM TO 6 PM
CLAUDIO PERNA
LA COSA (MEDANOS) [THE THING (SAND DUNES)] (NO SOUND)
1972
7 MINUTES, 14 SECONDS
Geography is more than space, more than cartography and delimitation; geographic space is a living being
where anything can happen. This video shows us a canvas with an abstract geometric design – a checkered
canvas, by the Venezuelan artist Eugenio Espinoza – that different people are moving, without a defined
direction, on the dunes of Médanos de Coro National Park, in Venezuela. In this way, the work speaks to
us, firstly, of the artists' interaction with the geometric and, secondly, of the transformation of space into
a gesture, into a symbol, when we interrupt their daily life or when we realize that, if the human is a type
of landscape, the landscape also has a certain humanity, it is a being in itself.
URBANO / RURAL (NO SOUND)
1976
30 MINUTES, 10 SECONDS
Another video by Perna, Urbano/Rural, also documents his exploration of the country’s geography.
According to Silvia Benedetti: “The encounters between geography and art in Perna’s oeuvre primarily
focus on the Venezuelan territory, as he constantly and tirelessly worked to grasp every aspect of the
country and its national identity as a way to understand his own individuality. His investigations amount
to the search for heimat (home) that occupied him throughout his life.”
​
Perna's Urbano/Rural video piece is charged with the local geopolitical landscape, focusing on displacement
from rural to urban areas, which is a process parallel to the changes in artistic practices (from landscape to
modernist geometric art). Urbano/Rural is made up of two films initially shot in super 8, where rural and
urban life are recorded. In the installation (or spatialized) version of this work, urban and rural images are
projected onto a gentleman's suit and a guayabera, respectively. It is a type of pioneering operation in the
context of contemporary Latin American art, where few artists of Perna's generation used avant-garde
languages (such as documentary film) mixed with native themes.
TRICOLOR (NO SOUND)
1973
1 MINUTE, 45 SECONDS
DAY 14 / SEPTEMBER 28, 2022
LONGITUD DE ONDAS (1)
SELECTIONS FROM A VIDEO SHOW ORGANIZED BY JESUS FUENMAYOR
IN 1998
44 MINUTES, 20 SECONDS (ENTIRE PROGRAM)
JOSE ANTONIO HERNANDEZ-DIEZ
SINDROME FRESKOLITA
1997
10 MINUTES
In the years that Hernández-Diez made this work, he concentrated on collecting images of an intimate
dimension. In his persistent effort to translate into a formal language, experiences that belong to the
memories of childhood and adolescence, the artist produced works such as the video Freskolita Syndrome ,
in which he himself is shown throwing a constant stream of the popular soda drink in an obvious reference
to the work Fountain by Bruce Nauman. Perhaps what the artist proposes is a metaphorical way to talk
about the deceits we use to calm the anguish that afflicts us, and expose that empty being that prevails in
our contemporaneity.
MARTHA ROSIER
SEMIOTICS OF THE KITCHEN
1975
6 MINUTES, 9 SECONDS
Performance of the artist for the camera in which she is presenting and naming at the same time different
kitchen utensils with an expression of rage and irony that evidences the condition of social subjugation of
women. The contrast of Rosler's gestures with the stereotypes of permissible behavior in the domestic
environment, accentuates the highly codified nature of the relationship between utensils and femininity
and its dialectic with systems of oppression.
PETER CAMPUS
THREE TRANSACTIONS
1973
COLOR
4 MINUTES, 53 SECONDS
Campus appears in this video, in three sequences. In the first we can see him going through a wall and
through his own body. In the second it appears, thanks to technological gadgets, that he is erasing his
face only to show it again, and in the last image, his face is burned, dramatizing through the video the
distressing impossibility of escaping ourselves.
JAVIER TELLEZ
LA NORMA
1997
COLOR
10 MINUTES
The video shows the artist boxing in front of the camera, partially naked with a hat and a cigarette in his
mouth, as if he were embodying a gangster. In the soundtrack of the video, we hear the soprano María
Callas leading Pamela Herbert in a singing class, singing Bellini's aria “Casta Diva.” We see the boxer
synchronizing his pugilistic movements with the interpretation offered by the student, interrupting them
when Callas makes her critical remarks. In this way the singing "cathedra" is transformed into a boxing
lesson. The degraded artist is the protagonist.
STAN DOUGLAS
I AM NOT GARY (MONODRAMAS)
1991
COLOR
30 SECONDS
The Monodramas are a series of videos that the artist conceived to be broadcast in the same space as
television commercials. In I am not Gary , a video that, like all Monodramas, preserves the dramatic
structure of regular television programming in contrast to its short duration, recounts the encounter
between two men, one white and one black, the first of whom confuses the second with an acquaintance.
Douglas seeks to interrupt the habits of the audience, accustomed as they are to meekly submitting to
mass media messages.
CHERYL DONEGAN
CRAFT
1994
COLOR
6 MINUTES
Using extremely precarious sculpting material, such as thin slices of bread, Donegan appears in the video
creating fragilely composed art objects. His compositions are quite elementary, and, in his use of them,
childish.The extreme innocence of the objects that seem to be the product of a preschool exercise
contradicts the perversion of a medium such as video, one of whose virtues is its promiscuity.
THOMAS GLASSFORD
BESO AUTOGOL (AUTORRETRATO X2)
1995
HI 8, COLOR
1 MINUTE, 10 SECONDS
With a videography that includes works such as the cathodic image showing a rotating gourd-shaped
mirror, Glassford’s work is characterized by a humorous investigation into the problems of autoerotism.
The work Beso Autogol is a video in which the artist appears kissing himself in a mirror.
CARLOS CASTILLO
INTENTO DE VUELO FALLIDO
1982
30 SECONDS
In the video Failed Flight Attempt , Castillo throws a movie camera into the void from the tallest building
in the city (the towers of Parque Central in Caracas). Instead of the gentle mirror, our gaze is fixed on the
void, a vertiginous void. Thirty short seconds is the time we have to build an identity. One of the
strongest metaphors to understand the contemporary individual in the context of their urban and media
relations.
DAY 15 / SEPTEMBER 29, 2022
LONGITUD DE ONDAS (2)
SELECTIONS FROM A VIDEO SHOW ORGANIZED BY JESUS FUENMAYOR
IN 1998
56 MINUTES, 50 SECONDS (ENTIRE PROGRAM)
CHRIS BURDEN
VELVET WATER
1971
5 MINUTES
This documentary video of a performance shows the interest that Burden expresed during the seventies in
problems such as the psychological experience of danger, pain and physical risk, the aggressive abuse of
the body as an artistic object and the exploration of the artist-spectator relationship psychology. In the
video Burden emulates some of his best-known actions, such as the famous performance in which he
appears as the target of a shotgun-wielding assailant or when he “crucified” himself to a car. Velvet Water
shows Burden trying to breathe underwater, or as he himself says, “trying to extract oxygen from the
water”, in an action that, due to its long duration, drives viewers to exasperation.
GABRIEL OROZCO
BEFORE THE WAITING DOG
1993
15 MINUTES
Originally made as a personal record, this video was recorded during sessions in supermarkets that the
artist conceives for the camera. The video is a “documentary” record, like that in quotes, because although
it adheres to the “realistic” domestic quality, as is usual in creators who want to privilege the idea over the
form, it nevertheless invites us to a revelation product of an extremely simple operation. The artist
recorded the video carrying the camera on his back, pointing it in the opposite direction to his path: in
this way the objective and subjective point of view converge (the artist stripped of his entity and
materiality).
CARLOS JULIO MOLINA
HOW DO YOU SAY GOODBYE?
1993
HI 8, COLOR
5 MINUTES
A camera is filmed as it focuses on us, waiting for the right moment to photograph us, while we listen to a
radio commentator and the song “How do you say goodbye?” Reflected in the center of the camera lens is
an eye looking directly at the other camera. Molina places the subject between the two objectives of the
cameras, one, the photographic, frontal, threatening, and the other, the videographic and hidden,
occupying the place of the spectator.
JOSE GABRIEL FERNANDEZ
HOTEL ARIZONA
1998
COLOR CORTESFA DEL ARTISTA
8 MINUTES
The video shows three disks projected through a pink filter, organized somewhat like a traffic light, where
images alternating images appear and dissolve. Each circle describes a segment-detail of the ceremonial
bullfighting attire. The lower disk shows the “boy” or assistant putting the shoe on the matador and
adjusting the sock to his leg, almost like a caress that closes with the mooring of the males. The central
disc reveals a segment of the matador buttoning his satchel and the assistant begins to hug him from
behind to adjust the ribbon-tie around his waist. The upper disc describes the segment of the assistant
adjusting the matador's tie and sewing his shirt. The video is accompanied by a track with two songs by
Toña La Negra. All the sequences take place in privacy, in an erotically charged space. According to
Fernández, it is he himself who hides behind the lens. The images on each disc are slightly distorted to
mimic how the world is perceived through the magic eye.
GARY HILL
MEDIATIONS
1979/1986
COLOR
4 MINUTES, 30 SECONDS
In Mediations , an omnipresent voice emitted through a speakerphone defines its electronic existence as
the very relationship with the viewer, while a hand throws sand on the speaker until it completely covers
it andchanges the tone of the voice. Hill is one of the contemporary masters who have given continuity to
the work of Samuel Beckett and his characters, who struggled in failed attempts to find meaning in
existence.
OTTO BERCHEM
HAND CATCHING SPANISH SAUSAGE
1995
COLOR
3 MINUTES
A hand desperately tries to grasp a slippery Spanish sausage. Among the multiple possibilities of
interpretation (this assumption is one of them), the metaphor of trial and error could be mentioned,
which is simultaneously accompanied by the impossibility of a physical event repeating itself exactly the
same even when the conditions are identical. The work is also a parody of Richard Serra’s infamous 1968
film of a hand trying to catch a piece of lead.
DIANA LOPEZ
QUESCULTURA
1993
HI 8, COLOR
COLECCION IGNACIO Y VALENTINA OBERTO, CARACAS
7 MINUTES
In the video QUESCULTURA, López appears from behind in a beauty salon while a professional hairdresser's
works on her hair. Without her identity being obvious, the long tradition of the artist placed at the center
of the work allows us to conjecture her presence. The main interest is focused on the idea of hiring
someone else to do the physical aspect of the work, and also to include the artist's idea of beauty in the
registry, through the comments of the hairdressing professionals. QUESCULTURA (it can be read
alternatively as What is culture? or What sculpture!) is also one of the rare works of its time and context,
where the sociological phenomenon of the "victims of fashion" is addressed.
STAN DOUGLAS
UP (MONODRAMAS)
1991
COLOR
30 SECONDS
Like the others in the same series of Monodramas, this video was conceived to be broadcast on television.
It shows three characters sitting on a bench and a hand in the lower right corner of the screen. An
authoritative voice orders them to get up; that voice that orders, possibly from a policeman, is also the
voice of the one who hides behind the camera, that of the author, him who reorganizes the composition
of the image.
GEORGE HOLLIDAY
GEORGE HOLLIDAY'S VIDEOTAPE OF THE
RODNEY KING BEATING
1991
HI 8, COLOR
10 MINUTES
This video, infamous and famous, could be considered an antecedent of a new documentary form. In this
document, Holliday recorded an ephemeral event that would otherwise have gone unnoticed by most: the
beating that the Los Angeles police gave to Rodney King, whose identity, from this fateful moment,
became part of our imaginary of contemporary horror.
CARLOS CASTILLO
INTENTO DE VUELO FALLIDO
1982
30 SECONDS
In the video Failed Flight Attempt , Castillo throws a movie camera into the void from the tallest building
in the city (the towers of Parque Central in Caracas). Instead of the gentle mirror, our gaze is fixed on the
void, a vertiginous void. Thirty short seconds is the time we have to build an identity. One of the
strongest metaphors to understand the contemporary individual in the context of their urban and media
relations.
BONUS TRACK
DANIEL GONZALEZ
EL HOMBRE COMO FIN [THE MAN AS THE END]
8 MINUTES, 24 SECONDS
"Instant images projected fleetingly on an unstable and mobile surface, describe the urban chaos of the
population of Caracas in the 1960s. An incipient cosmopolitan city, subjected to the alienating
maladjustment of an environment convulsed by a complex political and social crisis. Enduring flashes of
neon, reflectors and flashing directional lights, like a night mirror of the city, an elastic uterus shakes and
contracts with interrupted spasms, trying to expel, what moves and carries submerged deep inside.
Surprisingly and unexpectedly, this altered thing breaks free, and an anxious, throbbing, distraught
humanoid being rushes out." Daniel Gonzalez
​
El Hombre como Fin is a video in which images of industrial processes, urban landscapes, and a type of
man-chrysalis are in dialogue. At the end of the narrative, the man finally breaks free and dances. With
this suggestion, which combines visual and performance arts, González touches on one of the fundamental
points in the understanding of modernity as an ontological plane: the need for the supremacy of the
human in relation to the era of mechanization, the affirmation of the individual in the face of an era that
becomes marginalized and outdated. The presence of hands, a frequent image in the video, is a sign that
can be read as an invitation to return to oneself, to the manual not as a form of work, but as an identity:
the way we manufacture and make ourselves and we manufacture and make our own reality.
DAY 16 / SEPTEMBER 30, 2022
SERGIO VEGA
PARADISE: REWIRED
41 MINUTES, 14 SECONDS
In Paradise: Rewired , video recording becomes a vehicle for empirical observation as the artist wanders
aimlessly throughout the back roads of Mato Grosso. There is no production team or script, only an old
map and the traveling cameraman determined to record his experiences and observations while searching
for signs of paradise. He is in search of the Garden of Eden in the center of South America as described by
Antonio de Leon Pinelo in his theory from 1650. Thus, the work is constructed as a space of thought in
which chronological time overlaps with the timelessness of myth, history, memory, and literature.
​
Paradise: Rewired begins by interpreting the western myth of Paradise as illustrating the constitution of
the Lacanian symbolic order and continues with the medieval scholastic order of the world (Dante), from
which nature emerges constructed as an archive in the Aristotelian fashion.
​
From the peculiar array of empirical source materials collected in the form of video clips, the artist draws
in numerous artistic and philosophical references. A passage ponders the currency of Parmenides'
conception of the nature of reality as an ontological condition irreconcilable with subjective interpretation
and representation. This notion is then confronted with an exploration of perception as phenomenological
in stream of consciousness and what the artist calls the filmic act. James Joyce's conception of the
cognitive functions specific to the modalities of the visible and of the audible are considered in relation to
the body (among other bodies) in contrast to disembodiment as in Joyce's notion of the diaphanous.
Terrestrial Paradise is thus constructed as a mode of being derived from the subject's state of heightened
perception and self-reflection interacting with the multiplicity of life forms that coexist in the Forest.