Insomnia
Exhibition: March 22nd - June 16th 2013
Symposium: Friday March 22 2013
Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona
Insomnia explores the complex relationships that have developed between art and cinema. The show brings together a number of international artists and includes works and installations by Peter Kubelka, Hollis Frampton, Lis Rhodes, Stan VanDerBeek, Ben Rivers, Dan Graham and Stan Douglas.
As part of the exhibition, on March 22 there will be held a symposium with the participation of David Campany, theorist and professor at the University of Westminster in London and author of one of the texts of the exhibition catalogue; Alex Garcia Düttman, theorist and Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London; Antonio Alberto Weinrichter, theorist and associate professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid; Neus Miró, curator of the exhibition, and two of the artists participating in the exhibition, Lis Rhodes and Peter Kubelka, who will offer a presentation on their work and its relationship with cinema.
Peter Kubelka presents Monument Film
Tuesday April 9 2013, 18:30h
BFI Southbank
Belvedere Road, South Bank, SE1 8XT London
The Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka has been a vital and uncompromising force in cinema for more than half a century. In a body of work that lasts not much more than an hour in total, he condenses and articulates the essential qualities of analogue cinema, distinguishing film as an autonomous artform. His 1960 film Arnulf Rainer, composed only of the purest elements of light and darkness, sound and silence, remains one of the most radical achievements in film history. In response to that earlier work, his new film Antiphon was revealed in 2012 as part of Monument Film, a powerful testament to the entire medium. With two 35mm projectors situated in the auditorium, each film is screened individually, then combined as double projections, both side-by-side and superimposed upon each other. Throughout this extraordinary projection event, Peter Kubelka will discuss his theories, explaining the differences between film and digital media, and articulating his belief in the survival of cinema.
Monument Film
Lecture screening with double 35mm projection
Peter Kubelka | Austria 1960/2012 | c.90 min
Curated by Mark Webber. Presented with the support of the Austrian Cultural Forum, London.
Tickets: £11 / £8.50 concessions (BFI Members pay £1.50 less)
This performance was originally scheduled for the 56th BFI London Film Festival last October. Audience members with tickets for the original event should contact the BFI Box Office on 020 7928 3232 for an exchange.
This feature-length documentary provides a vivid, eye-opening, and appropriately personal introduction to one of the most important, yet perpetually marginalized, realms of filmmaking: avant-garde cinema.
Xcèntric: The hieroglyphic of movement
Museum's films: the Pompidou Collection
Sunday December 9, 2012, 18:30h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona
At the request of Xcèntric, this season the heads of film collections of the principal international art museums will present a selection, at once personal and representative, of their constituent works. We start this series with a programme from the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, put together and presented by Philippe-Alain Michaud, featuring seminal creators such as Duchamp, Kubelka and Conner.
- Danse serpentine (Luca Comerio, 1897, 30 s [35 mm transferred to video])
- [Eclosion rapide] (anonymous, silent, c. 1920, 16 mm, 5 min)
- Les vers marins (anonymous, 1912, 35 mm, 7 min)
- Anémic cinéma (Marcel Duchamp, 1925, 35 mm, 7 min)
- Adebar (Peter Kubelka, 1956, 35 mm, 2 min)
- Breakaway (Bruce Conner, 1966, 16 mm, 5 min)
- Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Ronald Nameth, 1967, 16 mm, 14 min)
- Watermotor (Babette Mangolte, 1978, 16 mm, 8 min)
- Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1979, 16 mm, 4 min)
- Jewel (Hassan Khan, 2010, 6 min 30 s [35 mm transferred to video])
Peter Kubelka: Monument Film
Screening/lecture. In the presence of Peter Kubelka
Thursday, December 6th 2012, 20h
Palais des Beaux-Arts
Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Bruxelles
In 1960 Peter Kubelka put the finishing touches to his film Arnulf Rainer, which is still today seen as a landmark in the history of cinema. In this radical work Kubelka reduced cinema to its simplest form of expression: light and darkness, silence and sound. Without filming any images at all, while drawing attention to the fundamental characteristics of the film apparatus, Kubelka succeeded in creating, in the screening room, an event at once exhilarating and contemplative, whose beauty and power conjures up thunder, lightning or the succession of day and night.
Fifty years later, at a time when cinema technology is undergoing fundamental change, Kubelka presents his new and highly anticipated work Antiphon as a response to that earlier experiment and as a testament to the entire medium. Antiphon, which is every bit as powerful as its predecessor, is combined with Arnulf Rainer to create a new work, Monument Film, extending and reinforcing the power of the two works.
Following New York, Vienna and London, this unique evening will see Brussels host the premiere of Monument Film. Kubelka in person will present Arnulf Rainer and Antiphon, first separately and then together as a double projection (using two synchronised 35 mm projectors). In this exceptional expanded cinema situation, and with all the passion, enthusiasm, and generosity that all those who were present when he visited BOZAR in 2006 will recall, Kubelka will outline his conception of cinema. The presentation will be complemented by an installation in the Council Room.
Experimenta, the avant-garde and experimental films strand of the London Film Festival returns in its 2012 edition (October 19th-21st) with the biggest and broadest programme to date. The main protagonist of the section curated by Mark Webber with assistance from Shama Khanna, is the presentation in Europe of Peter Kubelka's latest work Antiphon (2012), as part of his lecture Monument Film. Kubelka will also be the protagonist of a full retrospective of his work, and of Martina Kudlácek's latest documentary film Fragments of Kubelka (2012).
The festival opens with the screening of a newly-restored print of Isidore Isou's masterpiece Traité de bave et d'éternité (1951), and will present as always, a selection of the most recent experimental works including the latest films and videos by Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, Luke Fowler, Mati Diop, Beatrice Gibson, Ben Rivers, Laida Lertxundi,... Experimenta will also present present several screenings the precious week coinciding with the Frieze Art Fair, from 10-13 October.
Breaking Ground: 60 Years of Austrian Experimental Cinema
August 17 - September 22, 2012
UCLA Film & Television Archive - Billy Wilder Theater
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Austria’s avant-garde film tradition, arising at mid-century (and thus, relatively later than those of other Western nations) has been among the most sustained and radical of such traditions. As with other Austrian arts, it is a response (in part) to past national decadence and entrenched conservatism; its repository of cutting-edge experimental film and video works is uniquely impressive and progressive, fracturing into ever-newer distinctions.
The programs in this series have been constructed from avant-garde films and videos produced between 1955 and 2010 in which virtually every technique and genre imaginable is employed, from formalist and structuralist works by such globally renowned figures as Peter Kubelka, Peter Tscherkassky and Martin Arnold, to the radical work by performance-based artists such as VALIE EXPORT, Mara Mattuschka, Kurt Kren and the Viennese actionists, as well as the boundary-breaking contemporary output of artists including Siegfried A. Fruhauf, Johann Lurf and Virgil Widrich.
The 3rd edition of (s8) Mostra de Cine Periférico (May 30-June 3, A Coruña, Spain) continues its annual celebration of 'peripheral cinema' and small gauges. Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka will be one of its main protagonists with a screening of his films, the masterclass 'The edible metaphor' and the screening of Martina Kudlácek's documentary film 'Fragments of Kubelka'. The section 'The second life of images' has as its main attraction the programme curated by Gloria Vilches and Elena Duque 'The new monster', dedicated to appropriation and collage film, with individual programmes dedicated to and the presence of Lewis Klahr and Janie Geiser; the manipulated found-footage films of Naomi Uman and the latest creation of Andrés Duque 'Dress rehearsal for Utopia' are the other protagonists of the section. (S8)'s full programme hasn't been disclosed yet.
Plenty 12: Dichtung und Wahrheit Tuesday November 1st, 2011 19h
Event Gallery, 96 Teesdale Street, Bethnal Green, London, E2 9PU
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and truth)
Peter Kubelka, Austria, 2003, 16mm, colour, silent, 13 minutes
“Dichtung und Wahrheit contains collected pieces from publicity films with a common element: they show actors before they start and then begin to play what they are directed to represent. Repeated ready-made takes create cycles of symbolic significance, glorified glimpses of the contemporary human condition: the beauty from a hair conditioner, courting and insemination by chocolate-feeding, labourless birth onto a varnished floor, animal and inanimate companions. It was my aim not to shape the found material perfectly into an unambiguous message but to preserve the full richness of archaeological information. My point of view has changed from the contemporary artist into an observer looking into the distant past." - Peter Kubelka
The screening series Plenty proposes a new way of looking at artists’ films by showing only a single work, regardless of its duration. Each film is given the freedom to unfold on its own terms, and the viewer is given the time and space to consider it. Selected by Mark Webber. The Brief Habits exhibition programme at E:vent is curated by Shama Khanna with support from Arts Council England and the Austrian Cultural Forum.