Let’s Get Lost
Bernd Lützeler | Anne-Marie Bouchard | Kevin Obsatz | Michael Heindl
Anna Kipervaser | Johannes Gierlinger | Taisha Carrington | David Gifford
March 18 to April 16, 2023
An international array of moving image artists (re)imagine the unchartable in this online exhibition. From desert islands to mountain peaks to total immersion in urban chaos, the artists lose themselves (and us), journeying far from familiar referents. The works in Let’s Get Lost deny resolution, submerging identity for the wonder of the unexpected, unexplored, unimagined.
The Voice of God comes with instructions to not impose subtitles of any kind on the film. Without the referents of known language we are subsumed by the megalopolis—in this case, Bombay—and its perambulating chaos. If the concept of God wasn’t disorienting enough, here it is overlaid by endless permutations of “the high density shopping experience,” arcing towards some sort of urbane transcendence.
How do we discern opportunity from subjugation when the journey itself lulls us into compliance? Anne-Marie Bouchard examines the nature of employment via the effects of commuting. Do the trances induced by velocity and repetition contribute to the erasure or discovery of self?
The filming of a mountain ascent is left to chance and physical processes. Movement, ever upward, becomes a meditative approach to holistic filmmaking. “One frame per breath…as we slowly made our way to the peak, at roughly 10,000 feet in altitude.” Footage was processed under starlight with results unknown until after the descent.
On a desert island Michael Heindl repurposes a flotation vest and aviation safety card into a repository for history and future. The objects have been fashioned into a hollow facsimile of a Reclam paperback (the Penguin Classics of mittel Europe). This volume, Air Crises, is one of 30 in the series The Art of Restless Swimming.
Where do we exist? In the eyes of others? Are we free when they are closed or open? Anna Kipervaser lovingly explores un-places—states inbetween—as the loci for magic and possibility. Chora is an invocation of the power of margins where things fade into other things and camouflage irradiates awareness.
In A subsequent fulfilment of a pre-historic wish a lone woman dances for the Orishas, through the interwoven stories of Ana Mendieta, leaving, displacement, islands: revolutions both personal and political, roiling the “sea within herself.” How secure are we within our own narration, adrift in the mysteries of life and death? Is she her own lost artwork?
Taisha Carrington transforms herself into an island on an island: her own performance a demarcation between the questioned “here” and permeable “there.”
In 1570 Abraham Ortelius completed the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, a marvel of cartography. The cosmographer for King Phillip II of Spain created the most comprehensive atlas of the time via an exhaustive and annotated compilation of 87 existing maps. David Gifford has put the theatrical back into the orb of the world: a reminder that even the best information at hand, updated with alacrity, can still add up to nothing very exact.
the Voice of God
Bernd Lützeler, India/Germany, 2011, 10 min
If God came down to earth and tried to earn a living in Bombay, he would probably be successful as a voice-over artist, lending his talents to hindi movies, documentaries and public service films. A melo-dramatic docu-drama with voice-over in stop-motion and time-lapse.
For the Voice of God I shot long-exposure time-lapse with a 16mm camera in the most crowded places in Bombay (aka Mumbai). Placing a cluster of camera, release control, wires and batteries in a Bombay traffic jam for several hours requires a multitude of irrational strategies, because every inch of asphalt in this city is exploited commercially. When the rush hour starts, it‘s an opportunity for thousands of hawkers to set up their shops right in traffic. This attracts even more people who seem to enjoy their high-density shopping experience. Whatever seems like a good spot to put a camera in the morning, will be overrun by an avalanche of metal and organisms a few hours later.
Artist and filmmaker Bernd Lützeler lives and works between Berlin and Mumbai. In his works he explores techniques of moving image production and presentation in relation with their form and perception. Loops, found footage and jugaad (DIY) technologies are an integral part of his films and expanded cinema works. His travels to Mumbai have a strong impact on his work, which often explores the aesthetics of popular Indian cinema and mass media within the urban context. His films have been shown at venues and festivals worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Views from the Avant-Garde and many more. Bernd is an active member of the artist-run analogue film lab LaborBerlin.
Nous embauchons (We’re Hiring)
Anne-Marie Bouchard, Canada, 2022, 2 min
Change of career or change of city? Permanent or temporary change?
Frequency changes, changes of direction.
Changing colours and changing sounds.
We’re hiring: an opportunity or a trap?
Is it a new start toward a better life, or a mirage of wealth,
a dead end that opens only on the repetition of the same burden elsewhere?
We’re hiring: Who? With what skills and to do what?
We’re hiring: under what conditions?
You see the… You see the… You see the round of negotiations.
Change of pace and tone.
From day to night.
Am I becoming a zombie?
Superficial change or real change?
Anne-Marie Bouchard lives and works in Québec City. She has directed several experimental videos and installations. Her work is about exploring the mysteries and wonders of the world and questioning the way we perceive and analyze it. To sense, to feel, to be immersed and to question: her cinema is poetry.
Big Agnes Ascent
Kevin Obsatz, USA, 2012, 4 min
This film was created with primitive 16mm pinhole cameras, on extremely slow high-contrast film stock, while climbing to Big Agnes Peak in the Colorado mountains, as part of the Handmade Film Institute’s Wilderness Filmmaking Expedition. The cameras were constructed by hand using two 100-foot plastic 16mm film containers, and there was no frame registration at all: we judged by intuition how much to advance the frame with a simple hand-crank and guessed at exposure time for each frame. The film has a very low ISO and in the bright mountain sunlight, exposure time was roughly one second per frame.
Filming in this way became a sort of meditation practice in itself. One frame per breath, holding very still for minutes at a time, performing extremely deliberate pans or camera moves as we slowly made our way to the peak, at roughly 10,000 feet in altitude.
After we reached the peak, and I finished the roll, we processed the negative at our campsite. The expedition had been timed to occur during a new moon, otherwise moonlight itself would expose the film. But, under starlight, we were able to process the film in chemistry that we had brought and heated over our campfire. I wasn’t able to see the results of this roll until days later, when we returned to the home of Robert Schaller, who runs the Institute.
Although this piece is in some ways very different than a lot of my more narrative work, it shares a sense of the holistic practice of filmmaking—a project that embraces the idea of whole-body engagement and a willingness to merge with the equipment and the materials, to really “feel” the film as an experience and of course as an experiment.
Kevin Obsatz is a filmmaker, curator and writer who teaches in the Media Studies department at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. From 2014–2022 he was the lead programmer of Cellular Cinema, a Minneapolis-based experimental film screening series at the Bryant Lake Bowl Theater. Kevin has worked extensively with hand-processed 16mm and Super 8 film, both in colour and black and white, and has taught some of these processes at the University of Minnesota’s Regis Center for Art, where he received his MFA in 2015.
Air Crises (from The Art of Restless Swimming)
Michael Heindl, Tanzania/Austria, 2021, 4 min
Does the life jacket under the airplane seat really have a saving function when a plane crashes into the sea from an altitude of 14,000 meters? Or is its purpose here more symbolic, serving to suggest control and safety, while in reality one would be relatively helpless in the event of an emergency? Would the subjective feeling of safety be the same without a vest under the seat? The work The Art of Restless Swimming is an attempt to think further about the life jacket in its symbolic meaning. The practical and life-saving form is taken apart and translated into a theoretical and poetic equivalent of the vest.
Part of the work is the film Air Crises, in which a vest stolen from an airplane and the accompanying sheet of safety instructions are examined and edited for their possible uses. These materials are disassembled and reassembled, based on the form of Reclam paperbacks. A cuboid folded from the safety sheet serves as the hollow core of the object. This is covered with the signal yellow fabric of the vest. The instructions for use and pictograms printed on it serve as material for anagrams, from which the title of the book object is derived. By repeating the action with vests from different airlines, a series of further objects was created beyond the film.
“Have you ever seen the safety vest under your airplane seat? For what it entails, I hope you didn’t. Would it have helped though? Catastrophes are not the only way of accessing catastrophic objects, you can also silently take them with you. Steal, as they say. Or at least Michael Heindl can, and he can make a film in which he takes a vest and makes another object from it, an object very far from its original shape. But is it far from its own objecthood? There, alone on his island making anagrams out of disasters, is Heindl our Robinson Crusoe?” (Lucía Salas, VIENNALE 2022)
Michael Heindl was born in Linz in 1988. He lives and works in Vienna and Scharten (Upper Austria). In his work, Heindl is primarily concerned with the possibilities of art in public space. His works are mostly realized in the form of targeted actions and interventions. The starting point is often everyday objects and phenomena, which he transforms into subtle conceptual art. His works have been shown in Vancouver, Hong Kong, Cairo and London, among other places, and have received several awards, such as the Jury Prize at Vienna Shorts (2021) and the Lentos Kunstpreis (2016). From June 2023 he will be artist in residence at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Chora
Anna Kipervaser, Ukraine/USA, 2014, 9 min
Chora (Greek: χώρα) can mean one of several things. A place outside of place. Or an interval. The between. Where things are born. Or.
Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has been shown at festivals internationally, including Slamdance, Full Frame Documentary, Crossroads, Edinburgh International, San Francisco International, Alchemy, Light Field, Antimatter, Fracto, Imagine Science, Big Sky Documentary, Milwaukee Underground, Chicago Underground, Athens International, Indie Grits and Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others. Anna’s work also screens in classrooms, galleries, museums, microcinemas, basements and schoolhouses! She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator and programmer of screenings.
A subsequent fulfilment of a pre-historic wish
Johannes Gierlinger, Austria, 2015, 9 min
A subsequent fulfilment of a pre-historic wish is a film about the suspicious demise of a female artist. A nameless narrator sets out in search of traces, wandering through fragmentary sequences of ritual, shamanism, nature and death, finding nothing but the pieces of a broken memory. The film refers to Ana Mendieta and to the meaning of death, escape, spirituality, belonging, as well as to political realities. A connecting trace, a time loop, between the death of an artist and the questions around loss within the historical and present political circumstances. The incomplete as a connection to the mysterious unexplained end. A film as a search for traces.
Johannes Gierlinger lives and works in Vienna, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. In his work he deals with historiography as well as forms of memory, remembrance and resistance. He explores readings, doubts and possible future images in the form of essayistic work. His films have been shown at national and international festivals and institutions, including Vision Du Réel Nyon (CH), Belvedere21 (AT), Werkleitz Zentrum für Medienkunst (DE), IMPAKT Festival (NL), CPH:DOX (DK), Filmmakers Fest Milano (IT), Edinburgh IFF (GB), FIC Valdivia (CL), rotor Graz (AT), Bergamo Film Meeting (IT), Salzburger Kunstverein (AT), das weisse haus wien (AT), Callirrhoë (GR) and Diagonale Graz (AT).
State (of Mind)
Taisha Carrington, Barbados, 2022, 2 min
This work began with an interrogation of the language around our state (nation) and how it impacts our state of mind/psyche. Words and phrases like “just a small country,” “developing nations,” “island” (and its connotations of “isolation”) and how this can subconsciously affect ideas of self. During this performance, done alone on an uninhabited islet, I made a new space for myself as a reference point—a moment in time—where I separated state and state of mind. With the empty island acting as a blank slate, I traced myself, dug out my negative shape and filled the space with my body, creating a new landscape and connection with an “imaginary” place outside of my nation. With my recent work I continue to think on themes of transience, isolation, agility, resilience and adaptation as it relates to the Caribbean.
Taisha Carrington is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, installation and sculpture. Born in Barbados, she focuses on place making, adaptation and choices that drive immigration while proposing methods for reimagining the value of Caribbean people and communities. Taisha graduated from Pratt Institute in 2018 with a BFA in Jewelry Design. Her awards include the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s CFDA+ Design Graduate, NYC Jewelry Week’s One for the Future Award and Art Jewelry Forum’s Young Artist Award Finalist 2022. Her work is in the collections of The Dallas Museum of Art and Montreal’s Stewart Program for Modern Design.
Theatre of the Orb of the World
David Gifford, Canada, 2022, 1 min
Act 1: Can you see me waving? And you are off! Riding the gutter to knock the nose off of the statue, you deflect off a deformed bronze tray and fall into the dirt. Everyone looks funny from down here.
Act 2: You grasp for the door handle and exhale. All perspective has shifted as you align the key perfectly into the keyhole. Your meditation is absconded by work and recreation, turning the door on the key.
Act 3: The invisible curtain is drawn to stage right and an umbrella arm flicks a weighted washer into a downward spiral of the auger. The golden orb opens the dam and charges an aquifer, triggering the final step. A grading rake pushes a 5,000 piece puzzle from the drafting table into the dirt and makes a cloud of dust.
End Act 3
Notes: The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, made in 1570, Antwerp, is considered to be the first true modern atlas. (wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatrum_Orbis_Terrarum)
David Gifford makes Causality Assembly Machines in his back yard modelling the global, inevitable, cumulative and irreversible. A co-founder of the Ministry of Casual Living artist-run centre, and one half of the noise duo Puppets Forsaken, he is a lecturer of drawing and colour theory. Demonstrations of studied mysteries can be made by appointment with the artist.