Film as Sculpture (Wiels)

Rosa Barba, Boundaries of Consumption, 2012. 2 × metal globes, 16 mm projector, 16 mm film loop, film canisters. Courtesy of the artist.

@ WIELS (Bruxelas, Bélgica) 

|| 18.08.2013

Pode um filme ser uma escultura?

O filme apresenta-se como uma colecção de imagens que se reproduzem ad infinitum e a escultura é, quase por definição, um objecto inflexível. Trata-se de uma afirmação demasiada redutora que esta exposição pretende analisar e redefinir, apelando a um novo tipo de relação entre estes dois meios, supostamente contraditórios.

Artistas: Rosa Barba, Zbyněk Baladrán e Jiří Kovanda, Ulla von Brandenburg, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Rachel Harrison, Žilvinas Kempinas, Elad Lassry, Karthik Pandian e Bojan Šarčević.

Curadora: Elena Filipovic

Film as Sculpture apresenta uma nova geração de artistas cujas preocupações coincidem com a ideia base desta exposição: como criar obras que utilizem dois meios aparentemente incompatíveis: neste caso, a escultura – uma das formas mais clássicas da história da arte e a imagem em movimento – filme (ou vídeo). É evidente o interesse crescente, destes jovens artistas, pelas especificidades destes meios, ao criarem objectos híbridos que habitam e questionam ambas as tradições, a escultórica e a cinematográfica. 

A selecção de obras exposta apresenta alguns dos trabalhos mais interessantes realizados, através de ambos os meios, fazendo deles o centro da sua prática artística. Cada um dos projectos, embora sejam todos diferentes, consegue alterar a forma de concepção original do filme – produzir imagens – para outras possibilidades esculturais e espaciais. E vice-versa. A consequência é que nenhum dos meios permanece puro ou inquestionável, em vez disso, tornam-se blocos de construção que configuram novas formas e significados.

Rachel Harrison, AA, 2010. Wood, bubble wrap, cardboard, acrylic, tennis shirt, A/V cart, DVD player, speakers, projector, extension cord, five hair rollers, pack of gum, ear plugs, and American Apparel video, color, sound, 18 minutes (2009). Courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photography by Brian Forrest.

Film as Sculpture looks at a new generation of artists and the ‘problem’ that a number of them seem to be insistently grappling with: how to create works that either sit between or somehow address two seemingly contradictory mediums: one of art history’s most classical forms, sculpture, and its apparent opposite, film (or video). For while film is typically thought of as being essentially moving, temporal and immaterial, an infinitely reproducible collection of fleeting images and flickering light (or, in the case of video, pixels and equally immaterial digital code), sculpture, almost by definition, is a solid, obdurate thing, nothing if not the literal attempt to give lasting form to matter. This group show investigates the growing interest among young artists to think through the specificities of sculpture and film by creating hybrid objects that respond to, inhabit, and question both traditions at once. Indebted to the legacy of 1970s expanded cinema, and resurgent at a moment when the 16 mm celluloid that many of them use is itself facing extinction, the fantastic constructions on view at WIELS foreground the slippery relations between the moving image and the sculptural object.

The response of these visual artists to what we might call ‘film’ or ‘sculpture’ varies considerably from case to case. The selection represents a sampling of some of the most interesting examples from around the world by artists who have seized the task of thinking through both mediums and made it the very centre of their practice. Neither merely filmic nor only sculptural, each of these projects, however different they may be from each other, achieve the critical effect of shifting film from its traditionally conceived (temporal) image-producing function to its (spatial) sculptural possibilities, and vice versa. The consequence is that neither medium remains pure, calcified or unquestioned, instead, they become building blocks to be used in new ways and given new meaning.

Bojan Šarčević, The Breath Taker is The Breath Giver (Film C), 2009. Super 16mm film, sound, colour; perspex 300 × 300 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Modern Art, London.

(C) images: courtesy WIELS, 2013