Wednesday September 16, 2009 at 8:30pm
Entrance: 3 000 LL |
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  About the event |
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Johan Grimonprez
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
1997. Betacam SP transferred to DVD, color, sound. 68 min. English
The acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9/11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960's and 1970’s. By the 1990's, such characters were apparently no more, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases.
Director Johan Grimonprez investigates the politics behind this change, at the same time unwrapping our own complicity in the urge for ultimate disaster. Playing on Don DeLillo's riff in his novel Mao II: "what terrorists gain, novelists lose" and "home is a failed idea", he blends archival footage of hijackings with surreal and banal themes, including fast food, pet statistics, disco, and his quirky home movies.
Johan Grimonprez was born in Roeselare, Belgium in 1962. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Grimonprez first achieved international acclaim with his film essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which premiered at the Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel.
His productions have travelled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, to Tokyo and Berlin. Curatorial projects were hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the Tate Modern in London. Grimonprez's work is included in numerous collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, the National Gallery, Berlin and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Nominated for the Hugo Boss Award in 2005, Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York). Johan Grimonprez lives and works in Brussels and New York.
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