City Screen 2022

“The Smiler” focuses on the idea of construction and destruction of an imaginary ideal scenario to inhabit created by someone without any place. The title is an invented word that refers to someone whose job is “to smile”. The video portrays a man from Senegal who lives in displacement due to the harsh migrations policies of Europe. This person performs holding a forced smile for an unde_ned amount of time. With his look focused permanently on the camera lens, his face features start experimenting an incongruent mix of emotions which generate a feeling of unease and exhaustion.

The Alalimón Galería, holds the second year City screening with the thematic ‘Through Light and Shade’ This year selected artists are Eduard Fulop, Srah Edmondson, Stephen Gunning, Niamh McGuinne, Thais Muniz, Mark

The exhibition presents two audiovisual works by the artist Ángels Ribé: ‘Caminar sobre el gel’ (2016) and ‘Clouds, Bubles and Waves’ (2019). The first one leans on the spirit of resistance and perseverance, whereas the second one retakes an action carried out by the artist in 1998 in which she interrupts the natural river water flow. Relations between nature, geometry, body and space are again revealed in these apparently useless exercises, yet of great symbolic power that, at the same time, highlight the artist’s coherence regarding the thematic axes that for decades have structured her work.

Through a series of small-format paintings and a puppet show, Daniela Ortiz (Cuzco, Peru, 1985) tells stories of how tropical plants and animals, in alliance with communities from the global south, rebel against those responsible for colonialism.

A selection of video works on time and memory. Cartographies of the body and the territory.

The exhibition “Every Repeated Object Occupies A Unique Space” takes the title of a work by Pere Noguera, an artist who is part along with Pati Hill and Jordi Mitjà of the upcoming Bombon proposal, which will be presented during the Loop City Screen. The exhibition revolves around the photocopy as a means to explore the potential of the copy as an image. (Image credit: Pati HILL, Untitled (bacon), c.1976-79, xerograph, 29,3 x 22,8 cm. unique/ – Courtesy of Air de Paris)

Sofía’s artistic practice focuses on investigating ways of producing images in thought, incorporating various methodologies that link the visual with the sound and action in a space. In “Already the sun has come out”, she reveals a contemplative look at the Can Felipa room, intertwining various layers of sound, contours and lights. The sample records the interstice that takes place between twilight and twilight.

Ābhāsa (Reflection, Splendour) 2021, is a single-channel audio-visual work, produced by Emma Walker in collaboration with media artist Grayson Cooke and composer Matthew Engelbrecht. Ābhāsa is a Sanskrit word that refers to light, lustre and illumination as well as reflection, emanation or that which appears real but is a semblance. These meanings can be viewed within physical, psychological or spiritual contexts. Filmed at a high frame rate, shot at 200 and 400 fps and utilising the dramatic language of chiaroscuro, the film evokes a meditative and atmospheric space in which the viewer can experience a reverie of expanded time.

Four artists who work video and installation formats in an antagonic way. Their interests are mixed and allow to make visible the world in which they move, a world that throws a visual set from which to submit to the image. The four start from the desire to make sense of the images, even knowing that it is not possible.

Contemporary dance video divided into four chapters: 1.Spring 2.Summer 3.Fall 4.Winter

“sssssh – chamber _lm cycle“ is an exhibition and programmed series of screenings inspired by Maya Deren’s idea of “chamber _lms”, a cinematographic practice between the private and the public, the amateur and the professional. In the works by the _lmmakers in this project, each _lm is a room, a chamber that captures the intimacy of the gesture, the briefness of a glimpse. This cycle makes Chiquita Room into that place that, as Maya Deren wrote, is home for the heart: «the breath caught in the early morning because the heart’s eye saw something which the hand could never hold…».

Moment 2 is a site specific video installation by Swiss artist Deborah Joyce Holman. It is the artist’s first solo presentation in Spain. The film, four hours in length, stars artist and performer Rebecca Bellatoni who tirelessly recites excerpts from Shirley Clarke’s charged 1967 film ‘Portrait of Jason’. Holman’s reinterpretation offers a meditation on queer black representation and the politics of refusal.

deader than dead is a multifaceted performance work by choreographer, director, dancer, and performer Ligia Lewis. The performances at Cordova in Barcelona are the first major presentations of Lewis’ work in Spain. Originally developed for Made in L.A. 2020, the work began with an intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion in order to illustrate emotional distance. Utilizing this expression as a type of stasis, Lewis initially developed a choreography for ten dancers that remained expressively flat or dead, resisting any narrative or representational hold tied to a climactic build or progression. Lewis had relegated deader than dead to this corner of the gallery (a kind of “dead” space) where the dance would ostensibly emerge, although deadened in its repetition, limited in its fate, as it ricocheted from wall to wall. – Performances 20h

Stone and material reflects on issues related to extractivist practices, the transformation of the landscape, construction materials and the concepts of speculation and value – the value of a landscape, a raw material, a construction element or the potential use of a site – in relation to the urban projections and civil infrastructures that, to a great extent, define the contemporary landscape. The exhibition brings together the pieces “El capítulo de los áridos” by Bárbara Fluxá, “El ladrillo que no está” and “RestosMetalV” by Clara Montoya and “Construcción de ausentes” by Rafa Munárriz.

By playing Satie’s work inside a camera obscura, Vexations takes a different tone, one that looks at a world that has become unsettling, uncanny, upsidedown. Following Marx, ideology is a camera obscura that reflects an inverted image of social reality according to the interests of the elite, a false truth. In our social order, success is based on possession and dominance over the other, artificial, natural or human, an imagery that captures desires, codifying them into products of consumption that results in an endless dissatisfaction, anxiously waiting for more. We are at a crossroads, crisis or transformation, cooperation or extinction.

“Smoke Signals” referes to the story of the explorer P. Fawcett who collected enough information to believe in the existence of a lost city in Mato Grosso. In 1926 he went into the jungle and got lost in the attempt to find it. The journey that the artist made in 2016 was a way to give continuity to this chain, to build the entrance to this lost city, to be able to see it in first hand. This journey gave rise to a film, a series of drawings and objects. Project realized for the 32nd São Paulo Biennial – Incerteza Viva

Farnesina Digital Art Experience enhances and promotes the Italian excellence operating in the digital art sector through the organization of shows, exhibitions and performances. The project is promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in collaboration with the Embassies, the Italian Cultural Institutes and ICE, the Agency for Promotion Abroad. In Barcelona is supported by the Italian Culture Institute, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Italian Embassy and Consulate and Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture. The organization and promotion are by Immersive Art Experience, Bright Festival with the artistic direction of Stefano Fake.

Commuting Time, or Cum Tempore, C.T. is a video installation that takes place simultaneously in two galleries. Throughout the exhibition, a conversation is 􀋡lmed in thirty takes, using the cinematographic technique of the shot-reverseshot. The peculiarity of this video is that each shot is taken alternately in two di􀋞erent cities, each one recorded 24 hours after the previous one. The artist is always in the middle of the conversation, in the middle of the shot, for which he has to physically travel between these two cities every day.

This exhibition brings together the recent works by Andrés García Vidal on the Muslim memory of the south of the Iberian Peninsula. The expulsion of the Moorish population and its implications in water management and the design of the contemporary rural world searching for its sound traces on irrigation systems and in oral tradition. Connecting García Vidal’s investigations to the context of l’Hospitalet, Mercedes Pimiento will develop a second stage of the exhibition focused on the hydraulic system of the city, based on the remains of the old Canal de la Infanta.

“Anatomies of stone, of wood. Iconicity among the columns of the forest. Afforestation, reforestation of images as living animals. Trees that work on wood. Visionary trees, icons: carvings of an imaginary raised by the same botany that fattens it. Forests with the smile of archaic sculpture. Crumbling stones on the stones. Men who become earth and trees who become man. Reverted figures of unending majesty. And three works, these: “Pedra” [Stone], “Quatre columnes” [Four Columns] and “Un capitell” [A Capital], ready to ambush. Only three works because the works are no longer indifferent to quantity, not anymore.”Perejaume

Carlos Franco – obra sobre papel

Anthony Goicolea, an American artist and photographer of Cuban origin, invites viewers to see a silent _lm inspired by the impressions of isolation.

“What are you doing with our bones?” a Tehuelche man said when he found Count Henry de La Vaulx desecrating his cousin’s grave. His reply was: “I will put them in France in a beautiful glass case, in a great temple called Museum, where a multitude of visitors will come to admire them. They will be much better there than under the ground”. Duen Sacchi and Mag De Santo take up that question as title of the project, part of an investigation based on the desecration and theft of the human bodies in the 19th century who are still unburied.

Ton Sirera was one of the important figures of Spanish photography, from the 2nd half of the 20th century. At the end of the 1950s, he experimented with photography and cinema to reveal the formal beauty of reality. His photographs and films from this period connect him with the artistic debates of the time, with Informalism, and were exhibited in 1960 at the Sala Aixelà in Barcelona.

When everything is over, there is always an after. After the daytime, after the normative timings, after what is allowed and what is productive; multiform, dissonant, relaxed, leisurely, and accelerated times are generated. In the after, time and reality are deformed. What happens when bodies cohabit outside and after the normal spatial-temporal frameworks? After then becomes a collective state/being beyond concrete and finite times, opening the way to other possible temporalities and other ways of relating to each other. After is a proposal by La Escocesa that poses art as a celebration and the exhibition as a party. An expansive journey whose purpose is none other than to celebrate our own collective work.

I sometimes hear a person dreaming is an invisible sound installation that treads around the decisive moment of change and transformation that threatens the co-existence of the human species with its natural and technological surroundings. Taking a recent historical moment, the artist commemorates the Covid-19 unfolding by joining Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook on the Spanish Flu with quantum tunneling principles. The sounds of whispers are manipulated and revealed through the gallery glass front communicating with the indoor and outdoor spaces and invites the audience to take a moment of reflection around their position in the damning repetition of history.

Hitomi escapes home to take refuge in the city’s last existing and abandoned cinema because her mother is losing her sight, and she wishes her daughter to go to a cinema before the last theatre will extinct. Within the space, she will begin an introspection through the screen, as a way to travel through her most cherished memories. These images, which come from her subconscious, will be projected thanks to a strange man, who’s part of the theatre and will use all of his remaining strength to make it work for what it could be the last time.

9.11.2022 19.30h: Metàfora presents two video installations made by two of the most promising students we have currently at the center, Joely Lorenzen and Cristina Reid. Cristina’s See /siː/ is an exploration of the relationship between imagery, the lens, and surveillance in society, specifically the power gaze: who is seeing and what is being seen. It considers the political, the personal, the religious and the technological connotations of this concept. Joely Lorenzen presents Notre Dame on Fire and Entirety, discarding the construct of time & addressing the many as one, in an autobiographical framing of memory.

Wondrous vision is a kaleidoscope. Boundless. Vertical Horizon takes as its catalytic departure point the event of a corner through a sculptural experience of banal 8mm films to posit a new existence beyond a normative, totalising frame. The concertinaed and expanding, recurrent and fleeting stills become vertically read through memory, absence and imagination. In absence the project imagines, “who am I around the corner”? Aurally, it insists on one’s right to opacity as a contrapuntal open field poetics. Exhibited at a hotel – a geography of displacement – it embraces cinema’s etymology: kinema – to move.

This exhibition explores the dichotomy between the physical and virtual states of being. Whether incorporated into the methodology of the artist or their inspiration, digital technologies play an important part in the current trajectory of the art world and make a strong impact on our self-expression. Focusing on the process of creation, the artists featured use a combination of traditional and digital techniques to explore the influences of technology on our identity, body, and environment.

Raccoon projects presents the exhibition “— White, The Mud. Softest Sun Machine”, within the framework of Loop Festival. It presents the videos “Machine White Sun” and “—The Softest Mud That Sees”, which were produced consecutively by Esther Gatón during 2020. They are part I and part II of two narratives that feature the mechanics of two fluids: water and artificial light. Both combine documentary images with footage downloaded from the internet, weaving ambiguous stories, charged with suspense, weirdness, alongside seductive images, hoping to deform the simple act of being attracted to something and looking around.

Iván Candeo focuses and confronts the relationship between movement, time and history, managing to identify a series of contradictions and paradoxes. Question that he makes as an intermediary, passing images through various media and formats. Tiempo Vivido (Lived Time) installation is made up of a moving object, an oil painting and a video reproduced frame by frame. This installation poses the physical dependence of measurable time; practices the relative incidence of speeds and distances in objects, in the video image and in the installation space.

Rare Earths mark the materiality of our time. These metals, named after the difficulty they encountered at the time of their discovery, are present in almost all the technological devices that define our daily lives: from mobile phone screens to electric car batteries. Key components of an increasingly digitalised world. Rare earths are the leitmotiv of this video essay, which develops, through an attentive vision of the author’s place of origin, a poetic reflection on the landscape and the gaze that shapes it.

Suburbia Contemporary presents three works by South African artist Ed Young, produced over the past eight years. The works interrogate current-day speculative thinking and physical re-positioning of real-time daily efforts at existence. Abstractly, the pieces create an arcane fly-on-the-wall glimpse at numerous versions of the age-old mantra, “How did we even get here?”. Collectively, the films provide irrational and impolite interpretations as an attempt to redefine difficult spectrums of current-day thinking.

The project Deferred space is a video-installation made up of closed circuits of webcams and screens. It explores the mediation of interconnected screens, reviewing the way in which individuals relate to their impulses, their own image and the experience of space. “When a machine works efficiently […] one only needs to concentrate on the benefits it generates and not its inner complexity. Thus, paradoxically, it happens that science and technology the more successful they become the more opaque they become” – Bruno Latour

Human Farm is a play on George Orwell’s allegorical novella. Whereas the characters in Animal Farm are self-serving, Van Haver proposes a new model for institutions that actually places emphasis on the workers and the labour behind great ideas. “We lose our history so easy, what is not predigested for us by the NY Times, or the Amsterdam news, or Time magazine…” Audre Lorde. The interviews, sketches, short videos, blueprints and 3D prints are all part of an archive that represents: SCCA, Redclay Studio and Studio Nkrumah Voli-Ni, African Artists’ Foundation, and Cercle d’Arts des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise.

What if the result is a different identity? How do you approach a new way of viewing? The thing is, my video is a cut from identity, infused with love and the art of baking. The idea that a camera works as an eye, then you have curtains as shutters allowing a certain amount of light. Like an oven baking bread. I find this process as a love making process where a lot of negotiative processes contribute to a certain result.

A kind of funerary mask, disquieting in its sterility, suspended in the void and rotating very slowly but rhythmically, steadily. A foreign body that, like the Su  whirling dervishes, obliges us to summon up a mantra that is articulated through two fundamental verbs: “to leave” and “to look”. From the outset an idea imposes itself, taking the form of a memory: that the entire universe rotates, the galaxies and the solar system rotate; equally the electrons and protons within the atoms also rotate. Or, if you prefer, the universe is also circular with the helicoid movement of spiralling DNA structures.

With Oracle by A+G we live in time to enjoy, Balanza in The Little Present Continuum reflects on the reality of time, past and future do not exist. Albert Bayona in Five minutes before the wind blows it all away captures the light of the past to live it again. The life of stones, by Clemente Calvo brings us closer to geological time. Salvador Herrera with Pontifex takes us into a new time through Artificial Intelligence. Lastly, Quatre moments by Enric Maurí records time through video recording. Tempus Fugit by Urban Gallery.

This multidisciplinary exhibition explores the worship of La Santa Muerte through a geo-mapping of street altars in Mexico City followed by an ethnographic analysis of the devotees’ relationships with the saint. I find that this saint has gained momentum among the fast-growing prison population over the last two decades. In contrast to studies that emphasise the desertification of mass incarceration. Rather than a one-dimensional sacred defender of criminals and police, she is adopted by prisoners, prison officers, police and their families as a capricious ‘family member’, embracing the same ambivalence as the forces she helps to navigate.

Zielinsky presents the exhibition “70’s i altres coses” by the artist Vera Chaves Barcellos (1938). The first solo show of the artist in the gallery will exhibit a selection of videos, photographs and documents that have been produced by the artist over the decades 1970 and 1990. Chaves Barcellos’s research takes as its starting point the relationship between the body and time: performing characters and narratives from the past and the future, focusing on stories that were left out of historiography, documenting and collecting materials from local events or personal memory.