Image credit: Phillip Warnell, still from Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air, 2014, 71 minutes. Image courtesy of the filmmaker. Ming of Harlem is distributed in the UK by Soda Pictures.
Curator Mihnea Mircan presents a programme of recent artists’ moving image work:
Susan Schuppli, ‘Can the Sun Lie?’, 2013-2014
Jonas Staal, ‘Nosso Lar/ Brasilia’, 2014
Fabien Giraud and Raphael Simoni, ‘The Unmanned, 1834, La mémoire de masse’, 2015
Daniel Steegmans Mangrané, ‘Spiral Forest’, 2015
Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, ‘Rite of Spring’, 2010
Phillip Warnell, ‘Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air’, 2014 (fragment)
Laure Prouvost, ‘Lick in the Past’, 2016
Spiral Shots borrows its title from Daniel Steegmans Mangrané’s film, a 360-degree shot of a forest, executed by a machine whose movements are driven by the same engine that powers the camera. Like Spiral Forest, the films in this selection work as idiosyncratic maps for fissures in the contemporary, thresholds between categories, entanglements of technologies, intersections of human and non-human spaces. Astrophysical hypotheses originating in ‘primitive’ observation and ‘advanced’ science, models of urban organization predicated on ideological subjugation or dispossession, animal birth and the ‘conditioning’ of CGI golems, an apartment and a zoo in architectural and ontological disarray, the digital and the visceral – these experiences move over the course of the screening from a bird’s eye view to the accelerated perspectives of intimacy, weaving around object and subjects a net of possible viewpoints, figural avatars and approximations. Pressing together distinct vanishing points, contrasting takes or contradictory timelines, the films share a preoccupation with anamorphosis, an operation that reveals and abstracts to equal extents, that collages moments of transparency and patches of opacity.
Mihnea Mircan is an independent curator and writer based in Leuven, whose recent work explores anachronistic or allegorical figures eroding the distinctions between the mythological and the rational, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘scientific’, ‘the contemporary’ and that which precedes it.
Mircan was artistic director of Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp between 2011-15 where he curated A slowdown at the museum, The Corner Show, 1:1. Hans van Houwelingen and Jonas Staal, the series Cross- examinations, and Jean-Luc Moulène, Endwards. His recent work includes the long-term research project ‘Allegory of the Cave Painting’, which debuted with an exhibition in 2014 and a reader published in 2015. Mircan has also curated exhibitions at institutions including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Museion, Bolzano; Stroom, Den Haag; Spinnerei, Leipzig; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Fondation Ricard, Paris; Project Art Center, Dublin; and the Venice Biennale, as curator of the Romanian Pavilion in 2007. He was the editor of the books Hans van Houwelingen: Undone (2012) and Cross-examinations (2015), and has contributed essays to monographs on Pavel Büchler, Nina Beier, Patrick Nilsson, Jean-Luc Moulène and Laure Prouvost. His writing also appeared in exhibition catalogues and journals such as Mousse, Manifesta Journal and Afterall.
*Please note time change from original notification. The event starts at 4.30pm NOT 4pm*