VIDEOBRASIL: 16TH INTERNATIONAL ELECTRONIC ART
Artists: Group
Curator: Solange de Oliveira Farkas / Assisted by Alita Mariah
Dates: 30 September to 25 October, 2007
Websites: www.sescsp.org.br / www.videobrasil.org.br
The 16th International Electronic Art Festival_SESC Videobrasil will be held for the first time ever at the SESC Avenida Paulista provisional unit, taking over all five floors of the building with video and film screenings, exhibitions, installations, lectures, debates, meetings, and workshops. Guests will include some of the greatest pioneers in the fields of experimental filmmaking, expanded cinema, and video art.
The ties between video, cinema, and the visual arts are the object of investigation of the 16th International Electronic Art Festival_SESC Videobrasil, to be held at SESC Avenida Paulista, in São Paulo, from September 30 to October 25, 2007. Synthesized in the curatorial theme Limite: Movimentação de imagem e muita estranheza (Limit: image movement and lots of strangeness), the relations among those fields, which unfold into expanded images and multiple narratives, are present in all sections of the Festival, from the competitive exhibition to the special curatorships, from the conferences to the participation of guests Peter Greenaway, Marcel Odenbach, Kenneth Anger, Arthur Omar, Carlos Adriano, Edgard Navarro, Eder Santos, and Detanico Lain.
The theme of the 16th Videobrasil was inspired by the feature film Limite (1930), by Mario Peixoto, which caused surprise by introducing, into Brazilian cinema and audiovisual production, all sorts of hybridizations and experimental strategies, using a camera that assumes its own visibility and the intentionality of writing. The film will receive a special tribute at the Festival, and is one of the subjects of the third edition of the annual publication Caderno Videobrasil, to be released during the event.
Southern Panoramas
Curated by Solange Farkas, director of Associação Cultural Videobrasil and of the Museum of Modern Art - Bahia, the 16th Videobrasil will bring together, in the Southern Panoramas competitive exhibition, sixty-six works produced during the last two years in seventeen countries in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. The selection was made from 791 works submitted, and includes both productions by artists with a background in the field of electronic art, and those who use video as a research tool.
The exhibition will feature work by the Brazilians Eustáquio Neves, Wagner Morales, Cao Guimarães, Giselle Beiguelman, Marcellvs L., and Nuno Ramos, the duo Maurício Dias (Brazil) and Walter Riedweg (Switzerland), the Argentines León Ferrari, Andrés Denegri, Gustavo Galuppo, Marcello Mercado, and Federico Lamas, the Australian John Gillies, the South African Gregg Smith, the Lebanese Akram Zaatari, the Chilean Claudia Aravena Abughosh, the Moroccan Bouchra Khalili, and the Mexicans Marco Casado and Salvador Ortega.
Divided into the sections State of the Art (for the production of established artists), Contemporary Investigations (for research processes), and New Vectors (for emerging artists), Southern Panoramas will highlight proposals that use cinema as raw material and/or "data bank," remixing sequences, recontextualizing scenes, and reprocessing classic images by Hitchcock, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, and Godard.
Guest artists
The quest for a deterritorialized cinema, the procedures of which are in line with contemporary artistic practice, has also determined the choice of guests such as Peter Greenaway, who will bring to the event new developments of Tulse Luper Suitcases, his project-manifesto on the future of cinema. His participation includes a live image session, an installation, lectures, and a blog http://blogdovideobrasil.blog.uol.com.br . The German video art pioneer Marcel Odenbach will have his largest exhibition to date in Latin America, featuring installations, films, a lecture, and a previously unseen work, commissioned by the Festival. Kenneth Anger, one of the inventors of underground cinema in the United States, will have a retrospective screening of nine short films produced between 1947 and 1972.
The Brazil Axis will feature artist Arthur Omar, who has been breaking down borders between different artistic territories since the 1970s, as he travels between film, photography, video, installations, and Web art; Edgard Navarro, from the state of Bahia, whose résumé includes some of the most irreverent and original videos in the history of Brazilian visual art; filmmaker and master in cinema Carlos Adriano, who operates between documental and experimental film; Eder Santos, one of the foremost Brazilian electronic artists; and the duo Detanico Lain, which is also responsible for the graphic identity of Videobrasil.
Marcel Odenbach
Regarded as a video art pioneer, the German artist will have the largest ever exhibit of his work in Latin America, featuring installations, film screenings, a lecture, and a never before seen work, Disturbed Places – Five Variations on India, to be commissioned by the Festival and by SESC Sao Paulo. Political and social issues lie at the core of Odenbach’s recent work, which has featured at the MoMA New York and at the Documentas
6 and 8, in Kassel. His productions use excerpts from classic movies, newsreels, and personal photographs to explore the formative role of past images in the perception of the present.
Peter Greenaway
The British filmmaker will bring to SESC Avenida Paulista new unfoldings of the Tulse Luper Suitcases project, which he has been developing for nearly ten years. Centered on the story of a writer who lived from prison to prison and disappeared in 1989, leaving his testimony in ninety-two suitcases, Tulse Luper seeks expanded models of cinema: it involves exhibitions, films, Web sites, games, and VJ sessions. The participation of the maker of The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover (1989) in the 16th Videobrasil kicks off with a live image performance, and will include the Tulse Luper Suitcases installation, a lecture, and film screenings. In the blog Peter Greenaway no Videobrasil (http://blogdovideobrasil.blog.uol.com.br), which is open to readers’ comments, the artist discusses his participation in the Festival with the board of curators, and talks about the Tulse Luper Suitcases.
Kenneth Anger
One of the inventors of U.S. underground cinema, Anger pioneered the use of images edited from pop music, and created the cuts that would later become the foundation of music videos. His surrealistic films are filled with gay fetishes and references to the occult. At the Videobrasil, his work will feature in a retrospective never before seen in the country, comprising nine short films made between 1947 and 1972, including Fireworks, which he shot when he was twenty years old. Alongside works by Jean Genet, Luther Price, Derek Jarman, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, and Isaac Julien, the retrospective comprises the curatorial framework A Handful of Pleasant Delights by Rodrigo Novaes, dedicated to artists
who explored the boundaries of film and were marginalized by the film industry.
Arthur Omar
A filmmaker, photographer, multimedia artist, his career has broken down borders between different artistic territories ever since the 1970s. Omar worked with film, photography, video, installations, and Web art. His more recent works were shown in Zooprismas, a solo exhibition held in Rio de Janeiro, which redefined the dialogue between cinema and visual arts.
Edgard Navarro
At nearly sixty years of age, Bahia-born Navarro has made some of the most irreverent and original videos in the history of visual arts in Brazil. The Festival will present titles known almost exclusively by the public that attends festivals in Bahia, such as the short to a famous scatological sequence. An iconoclast, Navarro became more known after his first feature film Eu me lembro was the grand winner of the Bras’lia Festival in 2005.
Carlos Adriano
Adriano is a filmmaker, holder of a master’s degree in cinema from USP, and organizer, along with Bernardo Vorobow, of the book Julio Bressane: CinePo?tica. His oeuvre transits between Public Library), made in 1997, rescues the eleven frames in the oldest existing footage in the
history of Brazilian cinema, and elaborates a study in aesthetic ecstasy that discloses the creative myth of our cinema. His A voz e o vazio: a vez de Vassourinha won a prize for best short documentary film at the Chicago International Festival (2000). More recently, he made O papa da pulp and Militância.
Eder Santos
One of the greatest Brazilian electronic artists, Santos straddles the boundaries between video, installation, and performances, using electronic image as a powerful element in scenic design and narrative. He participated in the 23rd Bienal de Sâo Paulo, with the installation Mem—ria de ferro (1993), and in the Biennial’s fifty-year-celebration exhibition, with Planetarium (2001), as well as in festivals and exhibitions in Mexico, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States.
For more information on the 16th International Electronic Art Festival_SESC Videobrasil and other Associação Cultural Videobrasil activities, visit: www.videobrasil.org.br
Team
CURATOR AND GENERAL DIRECTOR
Solange de Oliveira Farkas
Assistant: Alita Mariah
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Ana Pato
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Camilla Ribas
EXHIBITION NUCLEUS/PROGRAMMING
Assistant curator: Rodrigo Novaes
Producer: Adriano Alves Pinto
Programming Committee
André Costa | Christine Mello | Eduardo de Jesus | Ivana Bentes | Marcos Moraes | Paula Alzugaray
VISUAL IDENTITY
Detanico Lain
SOUTHERN PANORAMAS COMPETITIVE NUCLEUS
Producer: Carol Ribas
Assistant producer: Rafael Moretti
Production trainee: Anna Turra
Selection Committee
André Costa | Christine Mello | Paula Alzugaray
REFLECTION NUCLEUS
Producer: Dulce Maltez
COMMUNICATIONS
Teté Martinho
PRESS RELATIONS
Solange Viana Notícias
WEB SITE
Sílvia Oliveira
Trainee: Cynthia Pimenta
VIDEOTHEQUE AND DATA BANK
Carlen Bischain
Marina Torre
Tatiana Blass
Trainee: Juliana Costa
CONSTRUCTION
Architectural project: André Vainer and Guilherme Paoliello Arquitetos
Producer: Loren Novoa
Technical manager: Paulo Fontes
MANAGEMENT
Glaucia Santana
FINANCIAL
Jô Lacerda
Venue:
SESC Avenida Paulista
Av. Paulista, 119 CEP 01311-903,
São Paulo, SP
Promotion: SESC São Paulo
Concept and production: Associação Cultural Videobrasil
Website: www.sescsp.org.br or www.videobrasil.org.br
Image Credits
(1) Casa de Nagô - 1998, © Luiz Braga
(2) Bar Azul - 1996, © Luiz Braga
