IMPAKT INVITES: LOOP BARCELONA
In the Panorama programme, IMPAKT provides an annual overview of contemporary cutting edge film and video art. The works have been selected by IMPAKT at various international festivals and exhibitions. Consequently, the programme offers a wide variety of visual artists, filmmakers and video artists from all over the world. In the so-called IMPAKT Invites series some Panorama artists are put centre stage, they are interviewed and invited to present a selection from their oeuvre. IMPAKT also invited three organizations to present themselves.
LOOP is a platform devoted to the promotion of video art. It organizes an international event that takes place in Barcelona every year in May. Next to the LOOP Fair, the first art fair specialized in video art, the event includes LOOP Festival, a festival that involves the city of Barcelona and LOOP Panels, a programme with seminars, artist-talks and curated presentations. Emilio Alvarez, one of the LOOP directors and Alexandra Laudo, LOOP Festival coordinator will present a selection of Highlights of LOOP’09 that was organized from May 21 to 31, 2009. www.loop-barcelona.com
The program includes:
Delay Glass – Txuspo Poyo
Spain 2007, video, 08:54 min
Delay Glass makes a reference to the unfinished work by Marcel Duchamp, “The large Glass” in a simulation where scientific contributions, technology, mechanical and erotic acquire a rotating and onanist movement with different artefacts, between fact and fiction.
Van Gogh’s the Midday Sleep and the Thai villagers – Araya Rasdjarm- rearnsook
Thailand, 2008, video, 18:00 min
This video is one out of a series of international encounters between classical paintings and Thai villagers and farmers.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets series explores how narratives of art his- tory are constructed. The series includes film and photographic work recording the responses of Thai farmers to well-known western art masterpieces. Sitting in front of reproductions of works such as Van Gogh’s La méridienne, 1889-1890, local farmers who do not know the cultural value or history of the painting discuss it with a freshness and curiosity not available to those of us familiar with the painting. We hear the farmers trying to interpret the image in front of them, questioning what the protagonists are doing, and why. Rasdjarmrearnsook’s film raises numerous questions: can we have a full appreciation of an artwork even if we don’t have all the information and history about it? To what extent does an over abundance of information and interpretation blind us to the pleasure of looking at an artwork and using our imaginations?
Bade Area – Chen Chieh-Jen
Taiwan, 2005, video, 30:00 min, silent
This film was made in the Bade Area of Taoyuan County, Taiwan. Chen Chieh-jen invited local temporary laborers to wander around the area, and enter office buildings and factory spaces that had been sealed off by the courts due to property right disputes. Examining the objects left behind in these spaces from the viewpoint of these temporary laborers, it muses on the voids and landscapes left behind in Taiwan amidst the torrent of globalization.