sgg* (saint-gervais genève) [PROGRAMME]

Two Prix Saint-Gervais Genève (two times CHF 2'500.-):

Arise! Walk Dog! Eat Donut! by Ken Kobland, United States

and

Sein Zeit by Nicolas Fernandez, Germany

The 8th Biennial of Moving Images took place at the Centre for Contemporary Images from November 5 to 13, 1999. 280 films and videotapes were screened, and the group show of 5 video installations will last till December 12, 1999. The public amounts to 5'000 people; 50 journalists were accreditated.

The Jury of the 8th Biennial of Moving Images, composed of:

Michel Ritter, director of Fri-art, centre d'art contemporain,Fribourg (CH), president of the jury
and of
Dunia Blasevic, director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Sarajevo (Bosnia)
Corinne Diserens, art historian, free-lance curator (CH/F)
Elizabeth Janus, art historian and critic (CH)
Chris Dercon (B), director of the Bojmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam

has viewed the 36 videotapes in competition and has attributed the following prizes:

the Grand Prix de la Ville de Genève (CHF 10'000.-) to

The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs by Walid RA'AD, Lebanon/USA

two Prix Jeune Créateur du Département de l'instruction publique du canton de Genève ex aequo (two times CHF 2'500.-) to

Performing the Border by Ursula Biemann, Switzerland

and Die 3. Generation des Wohlfühlens by Rainer Hallifritsch, Ulrike Hemberger and Karl Hoffmann, Germany

two Prix Saint-Gervais Genève (two times CHF 2'500.-) to

Arise! Walk Dog! Eat Donut! by Ken Kobland, United States

and to

Sein Zeit by Nicolas Fernandez, Germany

The prizes are kept in the Médiathèque of the Centre for Contemporary Images. The Médiathèque provides free public access to the whole collection of the Centre, amounting to more than 1'100 titles, and being the most important collection of videotapes in Switzerland and one of the most important in Europe.

If painting was once one of the most important domain representing certain subjects in art, today the narration of these same subjects has been largely taken up by photography and video. The influence of cinema and television on art has produced what has been called a "part-cinema": a resulting form that is neither traditional nor experimental but rather a still evolving and as-yet-defined "something else" that suggests that audiovisual space has become the privileged space to negociate the tension between the public and the private, between the physical and the social body.
The impulse to narrate living experience is as basic to human nature as the wish to belong to a collectivity, which at present no longer defines itself according to the idea of the polis, an entity in which each individual is expected to participate to the greater good of the whole, but more like what has been termed an "audience-culture" - one in which individuals are tied together not by a sense of common roots and purpose but by a fairly sophisticated visual literacy, simultaneously complex and seemingly mindless, which is based on a compendium of gestures, images, sounds and characters emanating from the television and cinema screens.
Thus this year's prizes lean towards the independant documentary, which as a form has re-emerged as the tool par excellence in the seemingly untenable battle against an imposed hegemony as well as an alternative to the highly "mediatized" presentations of war and political and economic upheaval.
Rather than heavy-handed moralism, Walid Ra'ad's "The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs" "fictionalizes" the documentary form itself by retelling the story of the war in Lebanon through individual accounts in a style reminiscent of Borges', where the demarcation between the invented and the real is fuzzy at best. He negociates emotionally-mined territory through image and text, leaving the viewer to invent his/her own version of a story that despite having traumatized an entire generation has largely dissolved into a general indifference by the rest of the world.
The second prize, shared by Ursula Biemann's "Performing the Border" and "Die 3. Generation des Wohlfühlens" by Rainer Hallifritsch, Ulrike Hemberger & Karl Hoffmann, repressents two different takes on the ravages of unchained capitalism as expressed by the corroborated relationships between males and females, the working place and the sexual body. The first, using a more classic interview style to give it a human face and individual voices -- those of the women working in the maquiladores or multinational factories dominating Mexican border towns, which are a consequence of the opening up of trading (but not migratory) borders after the Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) between Canada, the United States and Mexico; the second is, on the other hand, a short, concise, tighly-constructed and excruciatingly self-incriminating vision of corporate culture's orgasmic triumphalism in Berlin, exemplified by Mercedes Benz' development of Potsdamerplatz into a consumer haven conceived by a mix of marketing specialists and product-development analysts, thereby destroying the very notion of public space.
A more poetic evocation of the complexities of the present, those defining migratory experience moving between east and west, is found in videopioneer Ken Kobland's "Arise! Walk Dog! Eat Donut!", which balances the tendency towards pure documentary with an aesthetics melding a simplicity of means - a bare minimum of image, sound and writing - to evoke a space of transit that is left open and ready to be filled with meaning. A more lyrical version of reality, the piece is closer to abstract rather than representational painting where time, concentration and a visual understanding are all brought to bear on the final impression.
Nicolas Fernandez' "Sein Zeit" diverges from the other choices in that it is neither a strictly-defined narrative nor a documentary per se; instead it uses a consciously low-tech style and minimal means to to recreate those simple gestures and actions - those on the margins of life- that have been ingrained into our collective unconscious through the cinematic conventions that our culture has been bred on. More like a pantomime of a self-portrait than a theatrical representation of private experience, it opens up a new way of seeing fiction by eschewing imposed patterns of storytelling to teach us to see differently and to find a new way of visualizing our own interior lives.

8th Biennial of Moving Images
Centre for Contemporary Images
Saint-Gervais, Genève
5, rue du Temple, CH 1201 GENEVA
(++4122) 908 20 00
www.centreimage.ch/bim

Press office: Lysianne Léchot Hirt, Sabine Dufaux, direct phone (++4122)908.20.69