La Gaîté Lyrique | A for ALTERATION

MOVING_IMAGE invites Antoni Muntadas for the first letter in our ABC.

Detail of the evening :

Eugeni Bonet Mecanica (retard digital)
Vidéo, couleur, 5’, sonore, 2001

The video is a selection of a few frames from a famous Fred Astaire movie. It is the night when our Fred, tired, comes home with a wistful air. Now the day is over. After the last cigarette that preludes an imminent retreat, he lingers in front of the photo of his beloved. It’s the lightning that rekindles the energy. And what energy. The author likes to exaggerate, with a speed increasing up to the limit of visibility, and this spectacular development, paroxysmal, offers us a doped Fred, combines all sorts of things, to tell us again the paradox of Hollywood and the power of love.

Eugeni Bonet is an artist, writer and curator working in the areas of film, video and digital media. Recent films include the features Tira tu reloj al agua (2003-4) and eGolem (2007-work in progress). Curator of exhibitions and circulating programmes such as “Desmontaje / Demontage (1993), El cine calculado / Calculated Cinema” (1999-2001), “Próximamente en esta pantalla: El cine letrista, entre la discrepancia y la sublevación” (2005) and “Desbordamiento de Val del Omar (2010-2011)”.
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Ivan Candeo El indio y el conquistador (Variaciones sobre Marey)
Vidéo, noir et blanc, 3', sonore, 2011

The video, El Indio y el Conquistador (Variations on Marey) presents a tap dancer waving her body to the beat of a military march. As the legendary Fred Astaire, the character keeps dancing carelessly, stomps, spins and moves his arms, eluding the apparent discrepancy between choreographic performance and martial solemnity of the soundtrack.

Iván Candeo was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1983. In 2004 he joined the workshop of contemporary art of Caracas (TAC), coordinated by Antonio Lazo and Zeinab Bulhossen. In 2008 he received the title of Professor, mention Plastic Arts at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador, pedagogical Institute of Caracas. He has studied photography, Performance art, critique of contemporary art. He made his first individual exhibition in 2009 under the title "DRAGSTER" in Office #1, Caracas, Venezuela. His work has been shown in various group exhibitions inside and outside of Venezuela and in 2012 he was given the prize Young Artist of the Venezuelan Association of plastic artists. Besides, he currently works as a teacher of art.
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Gerard Freixes The Homogenics
Vidéo, noir et blanc, 3’32’’, sonore, 2010

Standardization is making everything alike nowadays, The Homogenics family knows it too well.

Born in Igualada (Spain) on 1978, Gerard Freixes studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Later, while working as commercial video editor, he develops his own experimental videos. His works use public-domain found footage digitally manipulated to generate new narrations related to aspects form mainstream culture.
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Jeanne C. Finley Involuntary Conversion
Vidéo, couleur, 9’, sonore, 1991

This apocalyptic linguistic comedy meditates on the relationship between language, meaning and social decay and is scripted from “double-speak” language found in a variety of media sources. Drawing its title from the Pentagon's term for crash, Involuntary Conversion evokes the hollowness and free-floating anxiety that characterizes late 20th century culture. In a voice that could belong to a hypnotist or a government spokesman, a disembodied speaker recounts a string of events whose common thread is a sense of impending disaster. The mood is suspended somewhere between nightmare and deadpan and is propelled by a narrative as enigmatic as the language it exposes. The iconic shape of a fighter jet floating in a perfect sky has the creepy feel of a video game and the texture of television is used to make the images feel domestically ingrained.

Jeanne C. Finley is a media artist who works in experimental and documentary forms including film, video, photography, installation, internet, and site specific public works. Her work has been exhibited in international institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, SF and NY Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum and the George Pompidou Center. She has been the recipient of many grants including a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Foundation, Cal Arts/Alpert Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Phelan Award.
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Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere Touching From a Distance
Vidéo, 2 écrans, couleur, 4’45’’, sonore, 2008

Touching From A Distance focuses on the fragmentation of public space and the varying uninhibited actors simultaneously occupying the space of Plaza de la Liberación in Guadalajara, Mexico at a particular moment; yet, all the while, touching from a distance in their constituent interests and concerns.
As the Mariachi Ciudad de Guadalajara, dressed in traditional attire, interprets and performs Joy Division's song, Transmission, a protest against the inefficient use of regional public funds transpires. The work vacillates between the spatial simultaneity of performance, protest, and public use, and looks to Plaza del la Liberación as a stage and locale for enunciative acts and musical contravention.

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere’s interests lie in the formation of itinerant, performative and discursive-based social spaces, along with the re-articulation of radio within such locales. Through various media forms, their current projects investigate contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song.
Tevere and Nevarez are recipients of numerous fellowships and international residencies and have been commissioned to produce new projects for biennial and large-scale exhibitions including CASCO, Utrecht, NL; Manifesta 8, Spain; New Museum, NY; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo, Norway; Creative Time, NY; among others. Angel Nevarez is an artist, musician, and Lecturer in the Department of Art, Culture and Technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Valerie Tevere is an artist and Associate Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York / College of Staten Island (CUNY/CSI).
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Fernando Baños Mira el árbol
Video, couleur, 6’50’’, sonore, 2009

In November 1941 the Nazis established a ghetto in the Czech town of Terezín as a part of what they called “the final solution of the Jewish question”. Up until June 1st 1943, the ghetto´s inmates would arrive in Terezín after walking from Bohusovice, where they had been transported by train. In March 26th 2009 I travelled the three kilometers between Terezín and Bohusovice and recorded the experience in a long take video shot. In this video-essay part of the recorded footage relates to a photography taken in secret sometime between 1943 and 1945. Consequentely, some details are extolled and become a believable element for the construction of another story of history.

Chemistry degree by the University of Oviedo (1994). Fine Arts degree and a MFA by the University Complutense of Madrid (2008 & 2009 respectively). Artist and researcher in the Department of Art History III of the University Complutense of Madrid. Participant in the R&D project "Art images and rewriting of the narratives in the global visual culture".
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Diana Larrea Cine Doré
Vidéo, noir et blanc, 3’30’’, sonore, 2004

In Cine Doré Larrea once again reflects on art’s aura and the ways in which we all end up mystifying both the artist and her productions, turning some pieces into true icons that with time generate effects of their own. In this video, the artist presents a “remake” of one of the most famous scenes of Jean Luc Godard’s “Breathless” (A bout de souffle), a film that has become a cult film in our culture.

Diana Larrea works in various disciplines such as installation, video and photography. She has done numerous performances and interventions in public spaces, where she has always aimed to take the non-initiated public by surprise by suddenly installing an unexpected piece within everyday reality.
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Antoni Muntadas Alphaville e outros
Video, couleur et n&b, 9’18’’, sonore, 2011

The dream, the era, the triumph.
Alphaville e outros is a project that explores the relationship between private and public spheres through urban developments called “condomínios fechados” (gated communities) in Brazil. Alphaville e outros is constructed as reality and metaphor from different interpretations and needs of property – house, architecture – and protection – walls, controls and security systems. The interpretation of public space is at the root of this project. The film Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard and the gated community Alphaville as futuristic projects with different intentions. Fiction and economy. This project takes into account texts by Teresa Caldeira, Brazil, and Mary Svampa, Buenos Aires.

Examining the media as an instrument of socialization and normalization, Antonio Muntadas's internationally recognized videotapes and media installations investigate the contradictory messages projected by print and broadcast media, architecture, and language. Throughout his work, Muntadas re-contextualizes available imagery in order to provoke the viewer into rethinking the meaning of the messages, creating a breach in the uniformly constructed "media flow," a stream of information engineered by advertisers to be consumed whole, unanalyzed by the home audience. In Political Advertisement, (edited with Marshall Reese), Muntadas shows us a land of manipulation—the land of television politics. His Between The Frames focuses on the art world and presents interviews that reveal the interwoven structures delimiting how art communicates, how it is made, bought, and sold.
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Antoni Muntadas and Eugeni Bonet will be present.