Relation Work, 1976-1979: 14 performances
Contents: Relation in space — Talking about similarity — Breathing in, breathing out — Imponderabilia — Expansion in space — Relation in movement — Relation in time — Light/Dark — Balance proof — AAA-AAA — Incision — Kaiserschnitt — Charged space — Three.
Performance art pieces illustrating art in confrontation with life and the individual versus the universal by early performance artists, Ulay and Marina Abramovic. 1996. 148 min.Read More »
4 Performances by Marina Abramovic, 1975-1976
Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful.
Freeing the voice
Freeing the memory
Freeing the body.
Galerie Mike Steiner, Berlin, December, 1976.Read More »
Synopsis:
A psychedelic re-telling of the biblical story. Salome is the daughter of the second wife of King Herod. The King is infatuated with her and after she fails to seduce the prophet John (The Baptist) she dances for the King in order to ask for his execution. The story is told in a bizarre way of fast cuts, repetitive dialogue and extreme satire.Read More »
Synopsis:
Stavros and Charlotte – i.e. the director and his partner in life and art, Charlotte van Gelder – are wandering the streets of a burdensome reality like immigrants, tracing the world around them through friendships, journeys and political quests. Made with minimal means with a few rolls of black and white film they managed to scrape together, this is a thoroughly unconventional film that defies traditional narrative structures, spectacularly revealing the director’s true vision: a primordial cinema full of imagery that comes out of nowhere and communicates freely, like a small wonder. A large slice of the international film critic community – including Frenchman Louis Skorecki who described the film as a comet – will adore “Coatti” and continue to support Tornes’ lonely path until the end.Read More »
Synopsis:
The Exquisite Corpus is based on various erotic films and advertising rushes. I play on the “cadavre exquis” technique used by the Surrealists, drawing disparate body parts constellating magical creatures. Myriad fragments are melted into a single sensuous, humorous, gruesome, and ecstatic dream.Read More »
Quote:
Lionel Soukaz (1953, Paris, France) at age 20 started making underground short films in Super 8, dealing with homosexuality in line with the Parisian FHAR (Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire; Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action), pornography (Ixe) and social criticism (I Live in a Bush World). He worked as an organizer of many gay film festivals such as the Film Festival of La Rochelle in 1977, and the Fortnight of Homosexual Cinema in 1978 in Paris. This last one was interrupted by the Ministry of Culture when Soukaz was arrested. He made Race D’ep, un siècle d’images de l’homosexualité with Guy Hocquenghem in 1979. Since then, he has pursuited a discreet career as a video filmmaker.Read More »
Twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer’s revered epic poem, The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for THE NINE MUSES, John Akomfrah’s remarkable meditation about chance, fate and redemption.Read More »
In 1973, five men and six women drifted across the Atlantic on a raft as part of a scientific experiment studying the sociology of violence, aggression and sexual attraction in human behaviour. Although the project became known in the press as ‘The Sex Raft’, nobody expected what ultimately took place on that three-month journey. Through extraordinary archive material, and a reunion of the surviving members of the expedition on a full-scale replica of the raft, this film tells the hidden story behind what has been described as ‘one of the strangest group experiments of all time’.Read More »
Synopsis:
Through raw images of cruel and unusual news items, gathered from journalists and amateur video directors, director Huang Weikai and his film Disorder take us into the chaos of a Chinese society scarred by an overwhelming urbanization. The film is made like a mosaic of singular stories restoring absurd and hopeless situations, in an urban environment where the weakest seem to be out of place.Read More »