Curated by Linda LAI / 策展人：黎肖嫻

27-31 March 2017 // Art Central, Central Harborfront, Hong Kong

Full essay by Linda Lai [...]

Curatorial Statement:

Thoughts on Early Cinema (roughly 1895-1907) gathered as I put together this program. Or is it just sheer resemblance?

Early Cinema was a moment …
...of spectacles of attraction, before the term “spectacles” turned stigma of empty consumerist visual pleasure;
…of spectacular attraction invoked by fascination with new machines and their affordance;
…of spectacles that “shocked” because they enabled viewers to look and pay attention to the world differently; and
…when slice-of-life actualities, trick effects, tableaux vivants, filmed burlesque and vaudeville numbers were equal in their luring present-ness.
It was a time when images and motion on a screen addressed our senses directly rather than called for comprehension or decoding exercises. It was a time before the Hollywood studio system’s standardization fell in to delimit our imagination to the demand of a “properly told story.”

The Levitated Potentiality series stock-takes the many ways contemporary moving image artists restore the attraction of spectacles with what new technologies afford them. On screen #1 “Dramaticity,” Benson’s Fortitudine performs “affect” as an open drama whereas Leong’s silent Infinite Love holds our breath for emotions in search of unknown landings, and so does Derz’s Wash Hands on screen #3 “Fixation.” On screen #2 “The Invisibles” and #4 “Concrete Places,” familiar locations and recognizable places almost all deliriously open the door to unknown spaces – Choo’s underground world of Hong Kong’s MTR system (Consecutive Breaths), MacNeil’s icy surfaces (Sparrowhawk Single), Derz’s desert (Departure without Return #2) and graveyard (Someone Digging in the Ground) – as they invite us to usual experiences of time by offering our attention differently. Localities nonexistent, invented or mutative, such as MacNeil’s Angle of Incidence (screen #4), Aziz+Cucher’s SB_Etude II (#1) and Haley’s Repose (#4), are spectacles made possible in post-camera moments of creativity. Likewise, the choreographic-graphic magic of Newsome’s Knot (screen #2) is only possible with packaged effects. Ramirez’s Postcard eXotica (#1) looks like a complex story, or one simply enjoys a string of loosely strung together performances for the camera interspersed with found film footage. Schwenk and Raisin remind us not to forget the power of the camera’s presence. Raisin’s Soak I (#4) asserts temporal integrity as the video camera’s signature through “duration” and playfully uses water as a frivolous found lens. Schwenk, in her Five Prison Stories (#4), inconspicuously marks the gap between what we see and what we hear, which upsets the hierarchy we take for granted in sight and sound synchronization. Carey’s visual puns in Flow (screen #4) and Unroll (screen #1) apply “regular” film language to handmade models.

What was formerly known as video art should more appropriately be called “digital imaging”: moving images made with or without a camera, oriented towards composing over recording, and highlighting what is visually potential over what is found.

The “screen” in digital imaging must not be taken for granted. It is a productive device with four frame lines generating magical games of seeing.

These benefits also return to us due questions. How has packaged software in the marketplace delimited our aural-visual experiences? What does it mean to engage with digital tools that conceal rather make transparent digitality as artistic raw material? What should artists do to keep open the infinite aural-visual realm? What is the place of the camera? What is a camera? How have art galleries, a relatively fresh art market for video pieces, shaped the practice of digital imaging? “Levitated Potentiality” has embodied many questions and answers.

SELECTED WORKS

|| 16mm PROJECTION

Guy Sherwin & Lynn Loo Selected works  16mm film projector and photography installation  Courtesy of Christine Park Gallery Installation work showcasing the 16mm film projection and photography works of celebrated artists Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo.
	Guy Sherwin: Metronome (2016/1978)

|| DIGITAL VIDES ON WALL ON 4 SCREENS

SCREEN/SEQUENCE #1 |“Dramaticity” 戲場 – filmed performances, performances created for the camera, performances as screened tableaux…

Owen Leong Infinite Love (2011) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Infinite Love depicts the artist with his mouth kept forcibly open with a dental retractor, as a heart made of frozen milk melts and drips whiteness into his open mouth. This video portrait subverts our relationship to the corporeal through the abject, to disrupt body language and break behavioural codes, exploring the passage between perceptual and physical thresholds of the body. Visceral, ambiguous and poetic, the transformation of the body through fictional selves opens up a space for new identities to come into being.	Liam Benson Fortitudine (2015) Two channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Fortitudine is a multi-channel performance video featuring the artist Liam Benson singing and straining physically in two synonymous moving images. The two figures take turn at random to articulate and withhold their emotions through two different contradicting physical routines. Both series of actions serve to conceal and divulge emotions. The performance is a response to the enduring culture of masculinity, which both encourages and discourages men to physically engage with their emotions.
Diego Ramirez Postcard eXotica (2016) Single channel video Courtesy of MARS GALLERY Postcard eXotica is a 30min cinematic re-enactment of a collection of found photographs. More specifically, vintage American postcards produced circa 1900-1930s that depict Mexican stereotypes. The work seeks to think through the Western gaze by approaching the pictures as movie scenes and revealing the condition of their making –particularly the way they are scripted, staged, lit and filmed. In a broader manner, the video pastiches early cinema, contemporary pop and horror to trace the ways in which these ideas manifest today.
	Total screen time: 43m05s to loop

SCREEN/SEQUENCE #2 | “The Invisibles” 若隱若現 – beyond the spectacles seen, other unseen realities seem to be at work…

Shoufay Derz Depart without return (#2) (2011) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Depart Without return (#2) is death and resurrection. The title is a translation of the Taklamakan desert, which in Turkic literally means ‘Place from which no living thing returns.’ The Chinese refer to the desert as the ‘Death Sea’, which symbolises within the cultural imagination a formidable obstacle that one cannot traverse. Depart without Return imagines the desert as a negative space, a potential space of silence beyond the reach of language and catalyst for encountering the infinite.	Sarah Choo Consecutive Breaths (2016) Single channel video Courtesy of Art Projects Gallery Taking on the role as an anonymous voyeur; Choo observes and re-presents constructed coincidences and happenings on the Mass Transit Railway in Hong Kong. Taking the viewer through time, the artist patrols the space between the real and the constructed, the actual and the imagined; between intimacy and estrangement. Consecutive Breaths depicts a video composite of documented images taken across all the stations within Hong Kong. Through observing actual characters and moments in time, she presents a composite of documented footages; suggesting a potential narrative within an increasingly isolated urban aquarium.
Anna Carey Unroll (2014) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Unroll is a non-narrative film montage which focuses on architectural spaces as a medium to open up an imaginative realm for the viewer, inviting us to enter into the shadows of our stories and of collective memory. Initially inspired by the urban environs of the Gold Coast where Anna Carey was born and has lived until very recently, the artist constructs fragile cardboard architectural models, which she documents as video and photographs to express and access a psychological sensibility beyond the physical façades presented.	Jess MacNeil Sparrowhawk Single (2013) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Filmed outside the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, the work documents the fleeting shadows and traces of a group of skaters playing a hard and vigorous game of Sparrowhawk, their bodies digitally removed and erased so that all that is left are the sounds and marks created by their skates. Both haunting and mesmerising, Sparrowhawk Single explores the way in which we experience the spaces that we inhabit and the ways that we interact with one another.
Aziz + Cucher SB Etude II (2013) Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Begun in 2003, Aziz + Cucher's series of works collectively known as "SYNAPTIC BLISS" explore ideas of a digital consciousness that allows for the simultaneous perception of multiple perspectives and scales, as well as the blurring of the distinctions between the body and its environment, the exterior and the interior, and the organic and the artificial. The works in this ongoing series include a variety of media, ranging from architectural installations, to video projections and environments, as well as digital prints and hand-woven rugs.	Rashaad Newsome KNOT (2014) Single channel video Courtesy of De Buck Gallery The film KNOT combines Newsome’s interest in knot theory, the performative language of the house dance style known as “Vogue Fem,” the design formulas of heraldry, and Baroque architecture. Knot theory, a branch geometric topology, studies the embedding of circles into three-dimensional space. The hand movements, referred to as Hand Performance, that comprise the main elements of “Vogue Fem” are loosely based on a figure eight, or Listing’s knot. The film presents an abstracted, collaged environment informed by the designs of Baroque architecture and created out of commodities like designer high heels. Against this environment, abstracted and multiplied figures dance, sparkle, and morph to an original sound score, creating knot-like forms that are reminiscent of Newsome’s more static collage works.
Total screen time: 43m36s to loop

SCREEN/SEQUENCE #3 |“Fixations” 鍥而不捨 – recurrence, repetition and variation, a timeless moment … locked up views with infinite mobility…

Shoufay Derz Wash Hands (2016) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Words, their meaning, their artistry, their physical form, and the materials and implements of their making, recur in her practice. Many of these elements are implicit in the poignant video Wash Hands with its ‘panning’ for a sense of connection, for a touchstone between estranged individuals. In the video, Shoufay washes a cast plaster replica of her mother’s hand with chinese ink, a poignant and pointless act of longing for familial connection. The ritual hand washing is symbolic of cleansing and a means of healing – with ink a salve, a vehicle for words, for revelation of a hidden common language.

Total screen time: 41m25s to loop

SCREEN/SEQUENCE #4 |“Concrete Places” 落實地 – you must have been there once, or it so seems…

Jess MacNeil Angle of Incidence (2012) Two channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Preoccupied with the lingering traces of human passage through time and particular places, Jess MacNeil’s works such as Angle of Incidence, invite consideration of the complex pre-conditions and subtle repercussions of our encounters. Her video works explore the visible and invisible influences that govern the way we perceive and inhabit the world, presenting an emphatically subjective visual translation of the amorphous ‘shape’ of our relationship to our surroundings and to one another.	Sylvia Schwenk five prison stories (2011) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery five prison stories relays five stories about life in prison in an understated, matter of fact, yet private and almost humourous way. The work gives an insight into a way of living and an area of society that most people have no exposure or experience with. The stories are told in the third person and are set against images and footage of the inside of a prison and cover such aspects as prisoner processing, visiting procedures and sex. five prison stories looks at the notion of what performance in the everyday means for those who live in a space where private and public co-exist - sometimes simultaneously.
Anna Carey Flow (2012) Single channel video Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Flow has a haunting sense of mystery. It is an interior space, a psychological space with no fixed destination, meandering, languid, and suggestive of a hazy childhood memory or dream. The video work presents an unconventional ‘implied’ narrative to reflect the time, the structure and rhythm of the city glimpsed and heard beyond and separated from the languor inside. The video takes you on a journey with no fixed destination, unresolved, meandering, to no finished space or place.	Shoufay Derz Someone digging in the ground (2015) Two channel video  Courtesy of Artereal Gallery Someone digging in the ground’ is set in the Hill End landscape of outback Australia. The work is characteristically cryptic with multiple connotations of burial, of searching, of hidden depths, of excited hope, of desperation, of wonder, of bottomless longing, of eternal quest. The artist states: ‘The terrain of Hill End is full of holes. One cannot walk far without stumbling upon a deep burrow or tunnel. The holes are blank open sites of speculation, enticing one to peer down into the dark unknown. I like to think of these holes as luminous voids where imagination ferments and of one ‘prospecting’ the ground for a sense of the unknown.’
Hannah Raisin SOAK I (2015) Single channel video Courtesy of MARS GALLERY Soak presents video and hand-sewn costume developed on a residency program in outback Australia. Exploring what it is to be a contemporary Australian female in an iconic, yet foreign landscape Raisin offers a scenario where we question our own familiarity with this place that we inhabit.	Stephen Haley Repose (2012) Single channel video Courtesy of MARS Gallery The video Repose is based in a virtual hotel room – the sort of generic, standardized space that is now repeated globally - with surface variations. It was modelled and animated using 3D modelling software, photographic images and resources drawn from the Internet. The title Repose suggests rest, but also to re-pose something – as one would a question, or in rearranging a set piece. The room is filled with references to communications, simulation, virtual space, various theorists and many other contemporary conditions. Strange, dream-like things happen.
Total screen time: 46m25s