LILI_An van. Dienderen, 001200, color, 2015_Courtesy of Argos
Focus on Belgium is a screening program with works by Belgian artists curated by Ingo Starz & Konstantinos Kardakaris in collaboration with Andrea Cinel, Curator & Programme Coordinator at Argos – Centre for Art and Media, presented within the framework of the exhibition Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp.
The screening program Focus on Belgium creates a dialogue with the exhibition, aims on single artists but also on an overview of Belgian media art. It offers a selection of fascinating short videos and films which are connected in different ways – through common issues, artistic collaborations and places.
Every screening will be followed by a presentation or discussion.
Free entrance, on a first come first served basis
[divider]SCHEDULE[/divider]Thursday 19 January | 19:30 – 21:30
Saturday 21 January | 12:00-14:00
Pierre Coulibeuf, Doctor Fabre Will Cure You, 2013
35mm film transferred to HD file
Duration 61’
With: Jan Fabre and Ivana Jozic
With English subtitles
The film of Pierre Coulibeufs features performances of the Belgian artist Jan Fabre, located in Antwerp. A kind of reenactment and more. Jan Fabre becomes an actor in Coulibeuf’s artistic play. The borders between documented performance art and fictive narration are vanishing. “It’s a modern fairy tale”, says the director.
Presentation-Discussion:
19/01/2017 Katerina Koskina, Director of National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST)
21/01/2017 Orestis Andreadakis, Artistic director of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Thursday 26 January | 19:30 – 21:30
Saturday 28 January | 12:00-14:00
ARGOS @ EMST
A screening of works of Belgian artists from the collection of Argos – Centre for Art and Media
Presentation – Discussion: 28/01/2016 The screening program will be presented by Andrea Cinel, Curator and Program Coordinator of Argos-Centre for Art and Media
– Jef Cornelis, Marcel Broodthaers: Musée d’art du XVIIe siècle, 1969 (Black and white 16mm film transferred to digital video, with sound, duration 4;’58’’, Dutch & French spoken, English subtitles)
– Luc Deleu, Filip Francis & De nieuwe Coloristen, Inktpot, 1971 (Super 8 film transferred to digital video, colour, duration 5’ 14’’, silent)
– Jacques-Louis Nyst, L’objet, 1974 (Black and white, with sound, duration 10’ 43’’, French spoken, English subtitles)
– Eric Pauwels, Violin Fase, 1986 (16mm film transferred to digital video, colour, with sound, duration 11’ 44’’)
– Anne-Mie Van Kenckhoven, Dance of the seven veils, 1991 (Video, colour, with sound, duration 6’ 36’’)
-Johan Grimonprez, LOST NATION January 1999, 1999 (Video, colour, with sound, duration 16’ 57’’, English spoken)
– Ria Pacquée, Cantaert Hunter 8906020, 2003 (Video, colour, with sound, duration 3’ 01’’)
– Nicolas Provost, Plot Point, 2007 (High Definition Video, colour, Duration 13’ 39’’)
– An van. Dienderen, LILI, 2015 (Digital video, colour, with sound, Duration 12’ 00’’
ARGOS @ EMST
A screening of works of Belgian artists from the collection of Argos – Centre for Art and Media
Since 1989 Argos is the Belgian leading institute for art film and video. Argos combines the function of an art centre with a fully-fledged collection program—which is absolutely unique. Today, Argos collection comprises circa 5,000 works. Argos covers the entire chain of development:production, archiving, preservation (analogue, digitised and digital-born), making accessible to the public, reflection and distribution. An extensive and varied activity program includes exhibitions, lectures and screenings, and guarantees a unique experience and a voyage of discovery with every visit. In the frame of the exhibition ‘Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp’, a collaboration between EMST and M HKA, Argos presents a screening program highlights a selection of Belgian film and video productions created between 1969 and 2015. It presents the rich and original approaches of some of the most interesting Belgian artists and, at the same time, it gives an insight of the Argos collection.
With more than 200 television programs produced for Belgian television between 1964 and 1998, Jef Cornelis (1941) is the most prolific filmmaker in the Argos collection. Although he made films about modern art, architecture and the Flemish landscape, Cornelis’s work is primarily a dissection of television itself and it shows the controversial relation between television and the visual arts. On the other hand Luc Deleu (1944) and Filip Francis (1944) work in different fields. In fact, if the first is an architect and urbanist, the latter studied painting but works with different media. Their early cinematic work preserves all of its freshness, most probably because it was guided spontaneously by a carefree liberty in the use of the cinematic tools. Among the pioneers of Belgian video art, Jacques-Louis Nyst (1942-1996) produced a very consistent body of reflective, capricious, fantastic, poetic or purely theoretical video work. The concern of how art “functions” is always central and Nyst referred to his work as “rational art”: a confrontation between objects and their representations.
Furthermore, Violin Fase (1986) and Dance of the Seven Veils (1991) perfectly represent the beginning of Argos when the organization was founded to distribute the film and video works created at the intersection between film, performance and audiovisual art. Violin Fase is a solo in two movements: dance and camera. Eric Pauwels (1953) twirls the camera around the body of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker (1960). He creates a new relationship between the camera and the dancer, but also between body and dance, dance and cinema. In Dance of the Seven Veils, Marc Vanrunxt (1960) interprets a fragment of his work Sur scène: he repeatedly performed his solo in a park in Schilde, a little town near Antwerp, and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven invariably filmed the six minutes of choreography in one take. During three successive days, at six in the morning, at noon and at six in the evening, this scenario was repeated. Already from the seventies Ria Pacquée (1954) disguises herself in everyday life. On top of her performance, she records her presence in this world, first on photos and, for several years now, on video as well. During the second half of the eighties she won fame with her ‘Madame’-works, in which she takes on the character of a lonely middle-aged lady. From the ‘Madame’- and ‘It’-characters she has evolved into ‘street rambling’, from graveyards her fascination shifted to the desert, always on the lookout.
During the nineties, a new generation of artists and filmmakers bloomed in Belgium: Johan Grimonprez (1962), Nicolas Provost (1969) and An van. Dienderen (1971) are certainly among the most interesting examples of how the Belgian audiovisual production integrated elements from fields such as television, cinema and visual anthropology. In this respect, Grimonprez’s fascination about the obscure divisions between representation and reality, fiction and documentary, private and public results in narratives that make use of the aesthetic strategies of contemporary mass media. On the other hand, Nicolas Provost’s work is a reflection on the grammar of cinema and the relation between visual art and the cinematic experience, analysing and questioning the phenomenon of cinema, its various elements, its influence and conventional rules. His work intends to walk on the fine line between dualities and balance between the grotesque and the moving, beauty and cruelty, the emotional and the intellectual. Last but not least, the filmmaker An van. Dienderen regularly publishes on visual/performative anthropology. She is a lecturer at the School of Arts Ghent and initiated the international art workspace SoundImageCulture, which helps artists to develop projects in the bordering zone between documentary, anthropology and visual arts.
Curator and program coordinator of Argos-Centre for Art and Media
Andrea Cinel
