Screen Matter Research Lab

Friday 5 February 2016, 19:15

@ EYE Film Institute Amsterdam (IJpromenade 1, 1031KT Amsterdam)

The Screen Matter research group is proud to present an exhibition and performative lecture program at the EYE Film Institute Amsterdam.

The exhibition will be open from Saturday 30 January at the EYE exhibition space, and will run through 13 February. It will be composed of works by Alessandro Bertelle, Daniel Jacoby, Graham Kelly and Urok Shirhan.

The lecture program will take place on Friday, 5 February, starting at 7:15pm, in the exhibition space itself, and will count with speakers Alessandro Bertelle, Graham Kelly and Beny Wagner.

The Screen Matter research group is concerned with moving image as it embodies the intersection between material and virtual spaces. The Screen Matter program proposes an understanding of the screen as a moment of transition between virtual and material states. Moving image is seen here as infinitely malleable and fractured material dislocated from any single source, awaiting activation within specific contexts and parameters. In this regard we will engage with EYE as an extension of the screen, creating new points of departure by using material from the archive combined with our own contributions towards new arrangements and interpretations. Here, EYE functions as a material embodiment and selection filter for multiple timelines and potential narratives.

Ben Rivers + Aily Nash

Tuesday 2 February 2016, 19:30

@ Lumière Cinema (Bogaardenstraat 40b, 6211SP Maastricht)

Ben Rivers is an award winning artist and filmmaker represented by Kate MacGarry Gallery in London. Rivers won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; the inaugural Robert Gardner Film Award, 2013; Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42, for Sack Barrow; Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, 2010. Recent solo shows include Earth Needs More Magicians, Camden Arts Centre, London; The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, Artangel, London and Whitworth Museum, Manchester; Fable, Temporary Gallery, Cologne. His work has exhibited in numerous museums, galleries and festivals worldwide. His latest feature film, The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, premiered in the main competition at Locarno International Film Festival. Between 1995 and 2005 he co-programmed Brighton Cinematheque. He is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.

Aily Nash is a curator based in New York. She is co-curator of Projections, the New York Film Festival’s artists' film and video section, and the Film and Media curator at Basilica Hudson. She is a curatorial advisor for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Short Film section. She has curated programs and exhibitions for MoMA PS1, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anthology Film Archives, FACT (Liverpool), Image Forum (Tokyo) and others. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Artforum.com, Film Comment, and elsewhere. Speaking engagements have included Centre Pompidou, Harvard University, Cornell University, The New School, and Universität der Künste. She has taught at Parsons and Bruce High Quality Foundation University in New York. In 2015, she was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Sven Lütticken

Performing Film

Screening of The Big Sleep 2 by Barbara Bloom (1977)

and Ulises Carrión’s The LPS File (1985)

Tuesday 19 January 2016, at 19:30

@ Lumière Cinema (Bogaardenstraat 40b, 6211SP Maastricht)

Bloom’s video, which is a slightly altered version of the film-noir classic, is related to her screening of such films in Dutch cinemas during the late 1970s; Carrión’s video is a fictionalized documentary about his Lilia Prado Superstar film festival in Amsterdam (1984), which featured films starring the Mexican actress. Sven Lütticken will analyse these videos in the context of film screening practices by artists during this period (mid-1970s to mid-1980s), focusing on the shift from the film on the screen to the screening of the film. Tampering with the cinematic apparatus, the artists perform film in ways that stress frames over images, process over product, and context over content. With moving images migrating to ever more post-cinematic platforms, these practices have come to be endowed with a renewed, anachronistic contemporaneity.

Sven Lütticken, born in Kempen, Germany in 1971. Lives and works in Amsterdam. Art critic and historian Sven Lütticken studied art history at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and the Freie Universität, Berlin. In 2004, he was granted the Prize for Art Criticism of the BKVB fund, Amsterdam. Lütticken teaches at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and is editor for the Witte Raaf. He publishes regularly in (inter)national art magazines such as Jong Holland, Artforum, New Left Review, Afterimage, Texte fur Kunst, Camera Austria, and contributes to catalogues and exhibitions as writer or guest curator.

Anna Zett + Julian Ross

This Unwieldy Object

Screening of a Modern Research Drama by Anna Zett

Followed by a conversation with Julian Ross

Wednesday 16 December 2015, at 19:30

@ Lumière Cinema (Bogaardenstraat 40b, 6211SP Maastricht)

In the essay film This Unwieldy Object the animated dinosaurs of Hollywood cinema meet the petrified ghosts of colonial science. You follow the protagonist on a road trip into the dusty heart of the USA, where fossil traders, sculptors and paleontologists are trying to reconstruct the plot of natural history. But the more experts and entrepreneurs she talks to, the more obscure their projects appear. As the protagonist gets carried away by her own theories, the screen itself turns into a virtual dig site for unwieldy objects between science and fiction, trauma and entertainment, the remote past and the near future.

The screening is folloed by a conversation between the filmmaker and researcher, curator and writer Julian Ross.

Anna Zett makes videos, writes texts and performs experiments that deal with the tragicomedy of science and technology. With a background in philosophy and academic research she is now working across the disciplines of cinema, radio, drama and dance. Playfully engaged with the afterworlds and underworlds of modernity, her artistic practice tries to rely on voluntary vulnerability as much as it relies on historical inquiry and an experimental setup. She was born in Leipzig in 1983, lives in Berlin and shows her work mostly elsewhere. Currently she is presenting new work in her solo show Circuit Training at Banner Repeater, London, open until the end of January. Throughout december her film This Unwieldy Object is on view in a group show at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow.

Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer. He is a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Westminster where he is also a sessional lecturer. He holds a PhD at the University of Leeds on Japanese expanded cinema, a topic on which he is preparing a series for Tate Modern. He has curated film programmes and performances at Anthology Film Archives, Eye Film Institute, Art Cinema OFFoff and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and has been an assistant curator for programmes at the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archives and British Film Institute. As a writer, he has published in Sight and Sound, Film Comment and Bomb. He is a member of the short film selection committee at International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Imri Kahn + Beny Wagner

Traveling Sync

A Screening-Lecture

Wednesday 4 November 2015, 18:45

@ Jan van Eyck Academie Auditorium (Academieplein 1, 6211KM Maastricht)

Traveling Sync is a film and video program integrated into a performance lecture which brings together a group of artists and filmmakers who work with moving image. The work addresses the problems of representation through the metaphor of synchronicity. A selection of the artists, writers and artefacts include: Peter Campus, I Love Lucy, Andrew Norman Wilson, Jill Magid, Kimmo Modig, Michel de Certeau, Standard Time, Wendy Chun, Rosi Braidotti, David Lynch, Shirley Clark, Graham Kelly, among others.

Imri Kahn is an artist and writer based in Berlin. He studied screenwriting at the Sam Spiegel School for TV and film, Jerusalem, and fine arts at Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, and at the University of Arts, Berlin. He worked as an assistant for filmmaker Peter Przygodda, and collaborated with Hito Steyerl as a researcher and performer. His work focuses on the experience of remediation through technology and religion. His writing has been published in The New Inquiry, Post Digital Cultures and Kol Hair magazine, Jerusalem. His text “Your text here” is forthcoming from Baca publishing. Winner (with Lior Sharmiz) of “Best feature film”, at Achtung Berlin Festival 2010 and recipient of a Knispel Stipendium 2008.

Beny Wagner is an artist based in Maastricht and Berlin. He graduated from Bard College, New York, in 2008 with a degree in Liberal Arts. He is currently a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, NL. His multimedia practice focuses on the convergence of language, perception, and material. He has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at Import Projects, Future Gallery, Kleine Humboldt Galerie, White Columns. He is the recipient of the Sol Lewitt Award, and Nelson B. Delevan Award. He participated in Labour in A Single Shot with Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann. His work has been featured in Artforum, Spike Magazine Quarterly, Frieze Magazine and Kaleidoscope Press. He has published essays in 60Pages and Block Magazin.