ARIANE MICHEL / TOM ACKERS / RASTKO NOVAKOVIC
Recent videos
London premieres, one weekend only
Saturday 3 February 13:00 - 18:00
Sunday 4 February 13:00 - 18:00
Free admission: screenings 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, 4pm & 5pm.
Preview Fri 2 February 19:00 - 21:00
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ARIANE MICHEL Rêve de Cheval (Horse Dream) (2004) 11 minutes
Here they are, sleeping. From one leg onto the other, strong and quiet, hidden in the winter. From far away, a rumour comes up. Ears straighten-up: all of them have heard. In their secret language, they all come to an agreement: they are scared and have to run away. A weird animal will appear in their panic, hybrid, worrisome like an enigma.
TOM ACKERS Adult Education (2006) 16 minutes
A series of scenarios present Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as a site for different levels of performing. Actors devise a range of roleplaying characters, and in various presentations of themselves arouse confusions of perception, self-knowledge and self-alteration around their use or avoidance of cliché.
RASTKO NOVAKOVIC Sundays in Majdanpek: Tri u dva ne ide (2006)
Sundays in Majdanpek: Twice Shy (2007) 32 minutes total
Five shots of the town's disused cinema present a fleeting document of the social space and history of Majdanpek, a devastated mining town in Eastern Serbia. The cyclical gesture of entering the cinema, the expectations in starting afresh, tracing the same route, but each time with different images and sounds, creates an accumulative intermingling of textual and visual historical records. They present simultaneously two contradictory conceptions of history: history as a narrative and history as that which is recorded in a particular medium.
A single uninterrupted shot of Majdanpek's open mine in 4:3 aspect ratio is tilted so that its diagonal fits the 16:9 format - stretching the tension between home video and cinema, the public and private, the lived and the represented, off-screen space and the proscenium. The contradiction between place and sound, and the structurally warped projection of this industrial landscape, elicits an archaeological texture that shifts between dialectical materialism and spiritual meditation.
- Ariane Michel was born in Paris in 1973, and studied at l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Solo shows include Atelier du Jeu de Paume, Paris 2006, and Galerie Où, Marseille, 2005. Her feature length film ' Man On Land ' won the Grand Prize French Competition, FID Marseilles , and will be on general release in France during 2007. Upcoming screenings include at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2007, and Festival of Nonfiction Film, MOMA, New York. She lives in Paris
- Tom Ackers was born in Hong Kong in 1978, and studied at The Slade School of Fine Art London, and Hunter College, New York. Previous shows include Atelier Something, London, 2001 and Garba04, Montescaglioso, Italy, 2004. He lives in London.
- Rastko Novakovic was born in Belgrade in 1981, and studied at the University of Westminster. He is a founding member of Lab no.w.here and Free Cinema Seven . He lives in London.
Ariane Michel is represented by Jousse-Entreprise Gallery, Paris, France.
Thanks to Anne-Sophie Dinant
Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors a film by MATTHEW NOEL-TOD
- Polish cinema revisited - Wajda and Kieslowski reworked -
London premiere, one weekend only
Saturday 10 February 13:00 - 18:00
Sunday 11 February 13:00 - 18:00
Preview 9 February 19:00 - 21:00 (free Polish vodka courtesy of the Polish Cultural Institute!)
Free admission: screenings 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, 4pm & 5pm
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Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors (2006)
Director Matthew Noel-Tod
46 minutes video Polish dialogue with English subtitles
Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors takes as its starting point Polish cinema.
Polish actors were invited to audition in Warsaw with dialogue from a favourite Polish film. The actors in Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors perform a series of moments from the films Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Man of Iron (1981) Dekalog 4 (1988) and Sequence of Feelings (1993). Famous Polish actress Ewa Kasprzyk was invited to join the cast and re-perform her dialogue from Sequence of Feelings . During a process of revision and rehearsals, the words and characters from the original films became recontextualised into a new narrative, including actors and characters inhabiting multiple fictions and dramatic spaces. Aesthetic, sexual, historical and dramatic senses are manipulated to create a video that is a dialogue between artist and actors, between language and image, between past and present.
CAST
Ewa Kasprzyk, Sandra Samos, Juliusz Dzienkiewicz, Robert Mazurkiewicz, Katarzyna Maternowska, Malgorzata Kasprzycka
Produced at a-i-r laboratory CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw through an Arts Council England International Fellowship, 2005
An accompanying 128pp publication with Polish and English texts, is available from Whitechapel Project Space, and from LUX www.lux.org.uk £10
Whitechapel Project Space screening supported by the Polish Cultural Institute, London
Born 1978, Matthew Noel-Tod studied Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, London, Fachhochschule Aachen, Germany and Norwich School of Art and Design, UK.
Solo exhibitions and screenings include, Outpost Gallery, Norwich, UK (2006), Kino.Lab, Centrum Sztuki Wspolczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski / CCA, Warsaw, Poland (2005 / 2006), San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, USA (2005), Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, Dundee UK (2004), LUX Salon, LUX, London UK (2004) and Unit B Gallery, Chicago USA (2003).
His video Nausea (2005) received its world premiere in The Times bfi 49 th London Film Festival, National Film Theatre, London UK (2005) and was selected for the 35th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (2006).
In 2005 he was artist in resident at Centre for Contemporary Art, Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw. His video, Obcy Aktorzy / Foreign Actors (2006) was launched in Warsaw in June 2006.
His video Jetzt Im Kino (2003) is in the collection of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
www.matthewnoel-tod.com