Screening programme: The Tear Down curated by Anca Rujoiu & Vera Mey

Dublin Core

Title

Screening programme: The Tear Down curated by Anca Rujoiu & Vera Mey

Description

5 Apr 2014, Sat 2:00pm - 3:30pm
6 Apr 2014, Sun 2:00pm - 3:30pm

The tear down
refers to that period of change after the exhibition has finished – the moment of de-installation and erasure. Thinking through the exhibition as an architectural ruin where residue remains and resonance cannot evaporate, the artworks in this selection try to make sense of traces in an on-going reflection on the old and the new.

With works by Cyprien Gaillard, Mona Vatamany & Florin Tudor, Malak Helmy, Deigo Tonus, Marie Shannon

Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion (2007) is a three-part meditation on the failed utopias of the past and present with reference to the Eastern Bloc. The first section of the video navigates from a monumental triumphal arch in Belgrade, Serbia to a battle between two hooligan gangs in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg. The second part captures the façade of a high-rise block in Paris with lights projected on.

This grandiose staging, usually saved for historical buildings, ends abruptly with the building collapsing. The last section wanders through Desniansky Raion, a district in the suburbs of Kiev where the circular arrangement of communist blocks recalls the megalithic monument of Stonehenge, England. Desniansky Raion unwinds to an electro-lyrical composition by artist and musician Koudlam.

In the filmed performance of Vacaresti (2006) by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, “Florin Tudor traces, with string and small wooden sticks, the outline of the church from the Vacaresti Monastery in Bucharest, Romania demolished by the communist regime in 1986. Retracing the shape of the lost building functions as symbolic recuperation and gains resonance in relation to current plans to build a commercial mall on the same site, situating the work between an unclear ‘then’ and a problematic ‘now’, pointing at loss and at the entropy that architecture ‘constructs’ while it seeks to embody power, be it political or economic.” (Mihnea Mircan)

Malak Helmy, Keyword searches for dust (2009) is a narrative of dust in its mutable forms investigates and it, itself, gets caught in a symptom. A condition. A form sheds its properties and characteristics, becoming contagious: an avalanche razes a populated residential plateau; spontaneous combustions erupt in both a people’s assembly archive and a national theatre, in the countryside a home-bound train catches fire.

Diego Tonus, Hour of the wolf (2010) is a film disclosing the backstage of The Collectors, a project curated by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset for the Danish and Nordic Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art, 2009. The video shows the exhibition’s dismantling and demolition, the fictional dimension of the set design as well as the collapse of illusion between the staged objects, suggesting a different vision of them.

Marie Shannon, What I am looking at (2011), takes its title from Julian Dashper’s work, What I am reading at the moment (1993)- a library chair with a pile of every issue of Art Forum to 1993. The video uses rolling text with simultaneous voiceover to describe the contents of an artist’s studio and the work that needs to be done to make sense and create order once the artist is no longer there. The text describes categories and lists of objects: the precious, the mundane and the baffling.


A public programme of The Disappearance.

Date

5 - 6 April 2014

Contributor

Programme Item Type Metadata

Short Description

Thinking through the exhibition as an architectural ruin where residue remains and resonance cannot evaporate, the artworks in this selection try to make sense of traces in an on-going reflection on the old and the new.

Programme Type

Audience

General

Location

Onsite (CCA)

Collaboration

No

Commissioned Work

No

Education

No

Collection

Citation

“Screening programme: The Tear Down curated by Anca Rujoiu & Vera Mey,” NTU CCA Singapore Digital Archive, accessed March 28, 2024, https://ntuccasingapore.omeka.net/items/show/2089.

Item Relations

This Item Is Part Of Item: The Disappearance
Item: Anca Rujoiu Is Part Of This Item
Item: Vera Mey Is Part Of This Item