switch2013

SWITCHCONTEMPORARY VIDEO ART

edited by Triona Ryan, Harald Turek

SWITCHCONTEMPORARY VIDEO ART

edited by Triona Ryan, Harald Turek

switch 2013

Since 2008, the switch project is a continuing investigation into place, locating art in public space in a contextually focused way. International film and video artworks are back projected for one week onto the windows of shops and other spaces throughout the town. switch locates itself outside of the big city and applies itself to the rhythm of smaller places. The events initiate conversations between artists and audiences, artworks and their sites. Now in its 5th year, switch is an artist-led project funded & supported by the North Tipperary Arts Office.

This years 8 participating artists Yuri A, Bonnie Begusch, Max Hattler, Dave Kemp, Ruairi McKenna, Oli Sorenson, Hing-Kai Tam, Maria Vedder, respond to the theme of Movements.

switch is a project by Triona Ryan and Harald Turek.

3rd - 10th February 2013, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary

“Movements is a word that suggests abundance, processes, styles, forward action, backward motion, activity and even biological function. As idea, the word is concerned with notions as diverse as the rhythms of age, the harmonies of a musical score, the plot development of a story or film in the imagination of its audience, to the precepts of political, social or artistic groups. As action, the word is just as various, describing the bustle of youth and the pace of age, the notes sounded on musicians’ instruments, the flickering images on the movie screen, all of which involve human agency.

Inertia and stasis is the obverse of movements…and a penalty for the lack thereof.“

Eleanor Hooker

Eleanor Hooker is a poet and writer living in North Tipperary, Ireland. Her debut collection of poetry, The Shadow Owner’s Companion (Dedalus Press)

was published February 2012. Her work has been published in Ireland, the UK & Germany and broadcast on RTE Radio. She is a founder member and Vice

Chairperson of the Dromineer Literary Festival.

Movement

It is the form that wrenchesfrom the gloom behind the door,the tick undone on the horologist’s bench,what’s hewn from stone on the artists’ floor and lifts the gloom beyond the door.It is the distinct parts of an allegro,the play on stone on the artists’ floor,where actor’s cast their will to harrow.

It is the distinct parts of an allegrothat attaches harmony to the air,and like the actor’s skill to harrow,will phrase its themes and let it dare

to fasten harmony to the air,add tick to tock on the horologist’s bench,phrase its themes and let it dareto name the form that movement wrenches.

Eleanor Hooker 2012

Yuri A FAMILY

With monthly photos taken during the last 32 years Family portraits four people: A relationship goes to pieces, a new one is made and a family gets started.

In an on-going documentation I continuously take monthly self-portrait photos since 1980. They have been digitalized and animated. The video shows the physiognomic changes of 4 individuals.

Art studies in Düsseldorf (Kunstakademie) Paris (Ecole des beaux-arts and Université Paris VIII) and Chicago (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MFA).Since 1985 artist in Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, Canada and France..

Yuri A lives in Zürich, Switzerland.

Bonnie BeguschMerge

Like the linear string of letters in a word, words in a sentence, or pages in a book, the grid implies a logic of transparency: of plotting, grasping and understanding. This video takes the grid as raw material. As the camera pans across assorted pages of graph paper– traveling across the x-axis, up the y, and back again– these static structures weave together to form shifting, swerving spaces and the illusion of a depth of field. The syntactical arrangements of intersecting lines are in constant flux, like fabric that continually unravels.

Employing the diverse media of video, photography and text, Bonnie Begusch’s works examine the material parameters of the systems within which we construct and negotiate meaning. Drawing from histories of abstraction within experimental film and concrete poetry, her videos highlight the potential malleability of familiar signs and structures, figuring them as open and unstable.

Bonnie Begusch (b. 1981) studied Media Art and Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Recent awards include the Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts, the Arts Research Center Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Studies and residencies at Skowhegan, the Headlands Center for the Arts and Djerassi. Her work has been presented internationally at such venues as the Berkeley Art Museum; Tape Modern, Berlin; Exile, Berlin; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; 92YTribeca, New York and the Courtisane Festival in Ghent, Belgium.

Bonnie Begusch is based in Berkeley, CA, USA.

Max HattlerShift

Taking as its starting point the New Age notion of an apocalyp-tic ‘dimensional shift’ supposed to happen on 21 December 2012, Shift combines science fiction themes through ab-stract stop motion animation of objects and colour. The film is an attempt to visualise higher dimensions and unearthliness, taking into account these concepts’ heightened awareness when attempting to process or predict the end of the world. Looping this short but intense film, Max Hattler is interested in the space between abstraction and figuration, where sto-rytelling is freed from the constraints of traditional narrative. Hattler’s practice contemplates microcosms, moments, and atmospheres: close-ups as reflections on the big picture. While his timed-based works are devoid of dialogue, they ex-plore the relationship between sound, music and the moving image. Shift was commissioned by Animate Projects in asso-ciation with Lupus Films for Channel 4’s Random Acts. It was first presented in Hattler’s solo show at Tenderpixel Gallery.

Max Hattler was educated at Goldsmiths and the RCA. His films and audiovisual performances challenge the tensions between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image, precision and improvisation. He has had solo exhibitions and retrospectives at Lumen Eclipse, Media Art Friesland, Image Forum Festival, Fredrikstad Animation Festival, Go Short Nijmegen, Lago Film Fest and others.

Max Hattler is based in London, UK.

Dave KempWatched

Playing on an well-known idiom of boredom, Watched is an experimental and highly formal video involving a close look at a complex and dynamic transformation between states of matter that is generally under-appreciated and most often unwitnessed.

Dave Kemp is a visual artist whose practice looks at the intersections and interactions between art, science and technology, particularly how these fields shape our perception and understanding of the world. Dave is currently working on his PhD in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Dave Kemp is based in Ontario, Canada.

Ruairi McKennaGloam

Gloam is a short fiction piece about the end of a working day in a lighting shop. The film takes place at twilight, at the point between day and night, and takes the form of a visual poem about the gloaming hours. The piece evokes a sense of endings and new beginnings, the magic of contradictory forces and the power of transformation.

Ruairí McKenna is a Writer, Director and Producer in Film. He graduated from the National Film School in Dun Laoghaire in 2008 and since then his short fiction work has screened in many film festivals in Ireland and around the world. He is currently exploring the world of documentary film.

Ruairi McKenna is based in Tipperary and Dublin, Ireland.

Oli SorensonAntimap [Mapping Buren]

Oli Sorenson has always refused to define his production in terms of artistic discipline, as his practice continually fluctu-ates between several techniques. His choice of subject mat-ter has often gravitated around identity and language, as he first shot to international acclaim under the moniker “VJ Any-one”. Understandably Sorenson describes his approach as that of a remix artist: “I produce art as a DJ produces music.”Now thriving on re/de-constructing narrative conventions via citation and sampling, Sorenson appropriates a wide variety of references from art history to street culture. While his installation piece entitled Antimap has been presented many times in Europe and Canada from 2010 onwards, the preparatory video Study for Antimap has not yet been premiered in Europe. Sorenson here integrates the “mapping” technique – a video effect often seen in festive events – with Daniel Buren’s signature line pattern to generate an installation piece that somehow transcend the limited specificities of both the festival venue and the art gallery. This restrained intervention lays out minimal patterns onto three-dimensional shapes and thus underlines a tense dialog between the warped video projection and the volumetric screens, the latter refusing to act as passive receptacles of content, and instead to “inform” the projection with its changing surface topology...

Born in Los Angeles, Sorenson is currently pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He was previously based in London, UK, between 1999 and 2010 where he combined his art production with curating, to include projects at Tate Britain, the British Film Institute and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in addition to numerous collaborations with musicians such as Block Party, Leftfield, MIA and many more.

Oli Sorenson is based in Montreal, Canada.

Hing-Kai TamUntitled Video, 2011-12

The video Untitled Video, 2011-12 explores the possibility of capturing the duration of “The Decisive Moment”. The concept of “Decisive Moment” was mentioned in the book of the same name by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952. He considered that “everything in this world does have a decisive moment” and the camera is the most suitable tool to freeze that moment. With this project I use video as a medium to capture the moving image investigating the durational element of “The Decisive Moment”. Maybe the moment that the audience feels decisive is caused by the approach of Surrealism. In this video I use the method of photography to capture a very slight and interesting object moving inside the image.

Born in Hong Kong. Tam focuses on art photography. He has participated in various exhibitions in Hong Kong and Mainland China including: “Post Straight” Contemporary Hong Kong Photography Exhibition 2012, “China Ping Yao International Photo Festival 2011 and 2012”, “Chiaroscuro – New Photography Exhibition”, “Up and Go Photography Exhibition (Upper Station Gallery)” etc. He has been the guest instructor in S.H. Ho College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the instructor of “Eye to eye” photography documentation project held by Hong Kong Photographic Culture Association. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in fine art in Hong Kong Art School/ RMIT University.

Hing-Kai Tam is based in Hong Kong.

Maria VedderOut of Nothing [Aus dem Nichts]

The video is a test arrangement for a visualisation of the chaos theory. The chaos theory describes under what condition a system collapses in chaos. It is in use in ecology, sociology, medicine, weather forecast and so on. Here the chaos theory investigates the reason for a traffic jam. The film is a staging and shows a circle, 50 meters in diameter, and moving cars that try to maintain a constant speed and constant intervals between each other. They drive endless in this circle. In normal life they would come to a stop in about 10 minutes because of driving mistakes.

Out of Nothing ties together Maria Vedder’s earlier investigations of film staging and the newer video observations of performances in everyday life. A staging intervention turns a situation that occurs in daily life into a surrealistic situation.

Maria Vedder is a media-artist and has exhibited in Europe, Australia and Asia, her videos have been shown all over the world. Her works are in the collections of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Germany; Tate Gallery, Liverpool, England; Gallery Shimada, Yamaguchi-Shi, Japan; Gallery Scan, Tokyo, Japan; and others.She has spent long periods researching in Asia, where she has also has been a guest lecturer on numerous occasions.Since 1991 she has been a Full Professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany.

Maria Vedder is based in Berlin, Germany.

switch pays a special thanks to local shop owners who have supported the project by loaning the premises for the duration.

edited by Triona Ryan & Harald Turek, © 2013 switch, the artists & the authors, published by switch 2013, www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org

Triona Ryan is a visual artist from Nenagh, Co.Tipperary. Her art practice has included performance, sculpture, photography, video & curation. The exploration of familiar & unfamiliar places is a key part of her practice. www.trionaryan.comHarald Turek is an artist, designer, curator and cultural DIY specialist. He is the founder of the artist books publishing house ‘A Shoal of Mackerel’, and co-organiser of the biennial ‘Glasgow International Artists‘ Bookfair’.www.haraldturek.com

the switch event is funded by

the switch event received further support by

Nenagh,Co.Tipperary

switch2013

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