Expecting the images

Name: Expecting the images
Start: February 16, 2011
Location: Beirut Art Center

Ken Jacobs

Pedro costa

Caroline Campbell

Fionn Kidney

Morten Dysgaard

Allan Hughes

Mariah Garnett

Karel De Cock

Assila Cherfi

Neil Beloufa

Carine Krecke

Elisabeth Krecke

Emanuel Licha

Christian Merlhiot

Jean-François Rettig

Nasri Sayegh

Nathalie Hénon

Film · Performance & Film · Screening Old Location

February 16, 2011 8:00 pm

This programme revolves around three parts, exploring several aspects of the moving image and different audiovisual practices between cinema and contemporary art, a field where a number of aesthetic, cultural, and political issues coexist spanning our era and our everyday. The three parts will take place in the presence of Nathalie Hénon and Jean-François Rettig, directors of the rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid.

Every year, the rencontres Internationales present an international programme in three cities: Paris at the Pompidou centre, Berlin at the haus der kulturen der welt and Madrid at the museo reina Sofia and the Spanish cinemathèque. The event explores practices between cinema and contemporary art and gathers 150 works from 50 countries with screenings, a video and multimedia exhibition, and daily debates and roundtables. The event is a unique platform in Europe where artists can meet, exchange ideas with a large audience and set up new projects. It reflects specificities and convergences of artistic practices between new cinema and contemporary art, explores emerging artistic forms and their critical purposes, and provides the necessary opportunity for points of view to meet and be exchanged.

For more information please go to: www.art-action.org

Wednesday, February 16, at 8 pm
expecting the images
part 1: fragments

duration: 1:34:26

The first session is constructed in fragments and proposes a diversity of approaches to highlight its richness and issues: the reappropriation of cinema’s images, documentary approaches, interdisciplinary practices, and the questioning of form and identity. Marco Brambilla recreates a monumental fresco of heaven and hell made up of hundreds of clips from films. Laura Kraning films Los Angeles’ last drive-in movie theatre deep in a desolate suburb, an allegory on the last remnants of cinema. Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager explore questions on utopia, on the arrival in and departure from a community. Erwin Olaf presents an enigma: a diptych on dusk and dawn. Almagul Menlibaeva Menlibayeva films the ceremonies of remembrance in homage to the dead and the ancients on the Kazakh Steppe.

The session ends with two works that break the norm by Ken Jacobs and Pedro costa, two artists whose work and questioning are essential.

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Thursday February 17, at 8 pm
expecting the images
part 2: reenactment

duration: 1:33:26

The second session is thematic and explores expectations towards images. Between irony and seriousness, the works offer a direct confrontation between our contemporary society and our relationship to images. Caroline Campbell and Fionn Kidney present a parody dance by an Irish criminal disguised as Mickey Mouse. Allan Hughes films the reconstruction of a radio statement made by Jane Fonda in Hanoi in 1972 during the Vietnam War. Mariah Garnett returns to a scene from a film by Fassbinder censored in Germany in 1985. Karel de cock contemplates stereotypes of women awaiting the imminent arrival of movie stars. Neil Beloufa rebuilds a villa in Algeria out of cardboard and photographs where the neighbours wonder about the past presence of terrorists. Emanuel Licha explores a fake Iraqi village built in California to train soldiers and managed by professionals from the Hollywood movie industry.

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Friday February 18, at 8 pm
expecting the images
part 3: aftermath

Duration: 1:34:00 the screening will take place in the presence of the director Christian Merlhiot and the actor Nasri Sayegh.

The third session joins two films, one medium length and one feature film. Although they both maintain a special relationship with Lebanon, as a location for filming or as a starting point, it is not this geographical similarity that unites these two films, but rather an underground community, a similarity in editing and time, and a vision of decline.

Knut Asdam takes us to Tripoli, north Lebanon, where the remains are of one of the world’s most distinctive building projects: an international expo center, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1966 and abandoned at the outbreak of civil war in 1975. In a form moving between architectural documentary and an incoherent theatrical narrative, the film both describes the place and an undercurrent of the violent history that has set the site in a state of incompleteness and decay. The modernist ruins appear out of joint, and function as a monument to a now distant optimism in the Middle East.

In the film by Christian Merlhiot, a man works on the Arabic translation of the trial of Oscar Wilde in the garden of a villa facing the Mediterranean. Under the light of a summer evening and throughout the course of the following nights, the different protagonists in the trial present themselves to him. He interprets them one after the other and revives the aesthetic and political issues of this battle. This verbal joust would thus appear as his final work, intense and valuable.