Els Dietvorst E.D. (2010–2014)

Mystic Transport is an exhibition project initiated through a chance encounter between two artists, Koen Theys and Gülsün Karamustafa. Both are very much intertwined with the city they live in; Brussels and Istanbul and integrate visible and invisible materials and remnants from their immediate surroundings within their practice.

Intrigued by religious parades, the hamam, war propaganda, gender issues and the entertainment industry, Theys and Karamustafa use these phenomena as starting points for their video work, installations and performances. In doing so, both artists sketch a critical portrait of the society and culture in which we live and reside, reflecting on cultural canons and differing socio-economic realities. Mystic Transport thus results in unique crossovers.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness. Lina Selander in collaboration with Oscar Mangione held at Argos, Centre for Art & Media, Brussels, 24.09.2017 - 17.12.2017.

About the exhibition:
For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness features six video installations, most of them made in collaboration with Oscar Mangione. These works take us to Bredäng (a suburb in south-west Stockholm), Berlin, the West Bank, Pripyat and Chernobyl. All of these places are the occasion and the starting point for broader reflections about our present in relation to historical facts. Selander visits these sites and like an archaeologist digs in their past, their monuments, museums and archives. She looks for visual documents, focuses on details and analytically sketches new hypothesis. In this way, she tries to retrace hidden links between distant imageries, correspondences and analogies, in order to create new narratives. In her essayistic approach, Selander combines her own texts and footage along with still images, quotes and archive material. In this way a constant tension springs within these multiple-layered audiovisual works and reminds us that seeing is never an innocent act.

Foundlings, a video film, was shot near Wexford, in the south east of Ireland where she grew up. This visual poem without a particular narrative and full of autobiographical elements is set at a very slowed down pace. Floating images and heavy voices are central to the associative strategy that is at work here. The images allow one to listen to a hypnotic voice, while at the same time allowing the eyes to wander... to daydream... to travel over drawn out time. The images are country images, images of repetitive calm, the kind of calm one finds between awake and asleep. The speed of the sea sets the pace, regular yet irregular. The images are inhabited by people who cannot speak. Who are busy doing nothing, except passing time. Silent brothers and sisters of the sea.

The soundsculpture Unsaid, a joint work by Orla Barry and Portuguese artist Rui Chafes (1964), is very opposite to the film. The film is full of open spaces and bright colours. The sculpture is black, closed and claustrophobic and on top of that it is housed in a narrow tower five meters tall. The visitor has to take place on a rather unconventional chair and put his head in a closed off sphere, surrounding himself by darkness and leaving him with his own heartbeat. A voice addresses the visitor directly on highly intimate terms. The seating is hard and uncomfortable. One has to be strong to experience this piece that is a perpetual struggle between body and mind.

At the occassion of Barry’s show argos editions published Foundlings, a combined artist book and catalogue that can be ordered through argos. The book includes a DVD.

Orla Barry (1969) is an artist who centres her practice on language, written and spoken. Her work is strongly poetic and lyrical, crossing a wide variety of media. Barry was born in Ireland, and the rhythm of her phraseology, the pictorial and narrative vernacular on which she draws, somehow evokes her homeland’s topography, climate and literary heritage. At argos the artist presented two new works.

The publication Actors & Extras appears following the exhibition of the same name at Argos. Five authors highlight the theme of characterisation from various angles. Georges Didi-Huberman’s contribution People exposed, People as Extras explores how cinema represents the masses. Sven Lütticken highlights the performance tradition in the visual arts in relation to the producing of subjectivity. On the basis of the classic cinema, in Figures of the Extra, Paul Willemsen composes a typology of the extra and subsequently gives attention to the aberrant status of the extra in modern cinema and contemporary art.

Thomas Trummer’s Volonté Générale. Extras in Film and Democracy questions the responsibility of the anonymous individual. With The Passing Actor: Sketch of a Renaissance Jean-Louis Comolli analyses how the concept of acting in a documentary has a different interpretation than in a fiction film. The last part of the publication describes the selected works in the exhibition.

Texts by: Clemens von Wedemeyer, João Onofre, Mark Lewis, Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller, Irina Botea, Christian Jankowski, Aernout Mik, Krassimir Terziev, Julika Rudelius

This special, limited-edition issue of Plaster celebrates Akomfrah’s commission for the British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. The linen presentation box contains: an essay by Akomfrah’s long-time friend and collaborator, the BAFTA-winning film curator June Givanni; an interview with Akomfrah by Harriet Lloyd-Smith; original portraits by photographer Siam Coy and a fold-out poster featuring an exclusive still from Akomfrah’s film installation, Listening All Night To The Rain, now screening in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

With creative direction by Constantine // Spence and design by Emma Ralph.

Collected writings, artworks and manifestos outlining the developments in Indigenous cinema and its most adventurous practitioners. 

Founded in 2018, COUSIN Collective is dedicated to promoting Indigenous artists working with the moving image. Temporal Territories is the collective's critical anthology on Indigenous experimental cinema, bringing together new works, reprints of key writings, theoretical interventions, artist portfolios, intergenerational dialogues and manifestos. With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the volume surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come.

As COUSIN writes in their introduction, "We hope this collection can be something like a celebration, a point along your path that fosters conversations and connections. ...There are no rules to this thing, and you are not alone."

Contributors include: Raven Chacon, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Lou Cornum, Grace Dillon, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Miguel Hilari, Sky Hopinka, Kite, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Pedro Neves Marques, Fox Maxy, Michael Metzger, Jas M. Morgan, Caroline Monnet, Shelley Niro, Adam Piron, Tiare Ribeaux, Diana Flores Ruíz, Walter Scott, Girish Shambu, Paul Chaat Smith, Adam Spry, Elizabeth Weatherford.

This book was published in conjunction with COUSIN Collective.

This publication departs from three video works by the artist Hu Wei, exploring the possibilities of devising new scripts within the manifold connections between materials for creative works, images, and texts.

The first part of the publication transcribes and recompiles the narrations in his videos into three sets of juxtaposed scripts. Each of these textual fragments showcases an “anatomical section of an era” from disparate geopolitical contexts: a family letter from Sabah, a set of Rashomonian testimony, and an anecdote about the anonymous.

The second part is a notebook-like atlas that unfolds following the clues of three keywords: “Fabrication,” “Anonymity,” and “Boundary.” Within this section, different types of images and texts, including factual materials, embodied research and survey records, as well as fabricated documents, interlace with each other. They serve as an interrogation, extension, reconstruction, and reassemblage of three muted histories or events.

Compiled on the occasion of a Sandra Lahire retrospective at Courtisane festival 2021. This cahier was developed in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian). Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter.

Living on air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Sandra Lahire and brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by herself, with contributions by Gill Addison, Jo Comino, Pam Cook, Laura Guy, Maud Jacquin, Julia Knight, Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill, Irene Revell & Kerstin Schroedinger, Lis Rhodes, Selina Robertson & Ricardo Matos Cabo (with So Mayer), Vicky Smith, Sarah Turner and Ana Vaz.