Istanbul Experimental, Screening Room
June 29 – July 4 2020, Online Programme
Emily Chao, Roger Deutsch, Noé Grenier, Lyra Hill, Margaret Rorison, Gautam Valluri
Curated by Stefano Miraglia
A week of hazy recollections and ghosts. Artists’ moving image as a journey: from a found footage plane flight to a sexually active house. A collection of stories and experiments on home and displacement – with memory as a double-edged weapon.
Monday: Noé Grenier, Flight Memory, 2018, 12’49’’
“They’ll always be there. And you can swim to them any time you need to.”
With Flight Memory, French artist Noé Grenier focuses on false memories and mental dismantling. The project is entirely composed of black and white blow-ups of a 35mm trailer for Robert Schwentke’s movie Flightplan. What once was an advertisement for a Hollywood production is transformed, fragmented, deprived of its colors and given new rhythms and tones in order to bathe the viewer in a world of Markerian reminiscences.
Tuesday: Margaret Rorison, Gowanus Haze, 2012, 5’41’’
Margaret Rorison returns to her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, filming in dramatic black and white the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal. Rorison merges the landscape with a striking soundtrack designed as a series of hazy recollections mixing music, field recordings, her diary entries from when she used to live by the canal, and recordings of her grandfather reminiscing about New York.
Wednesday: Roger Deutsch, It’s About Time, 2019, 8’29’’
“I tell you a story I have never told anyone before.”
With It’s About Time, once again Roger Deutsch revives his fictional alter-ego to tell a story about the time he wanted to be a gentleman farmer in a ramshackle house deep in the mountains of West Virginia.
Thursday: Emily Chao, Bruce Takes Dragon Town, 2015, 14’38’’
“I thought I would find you on Dihua Street, where there have been 35mm screenings for the ghosts.”
A hypnotic film shot in Taiwan during Ghost Month, Emily Chao’s Bruce Takes Dragon Town depicts cinema as the ultimate summoner of souls. An old VHS, empty streets, open-air film screenings for wandering ghosts, and the astounding exploration of the abandoned Futuro Village at Wanli.
Friday: Gautam Valluri, Durbaar, 2019, 8’52’’
Gautam Valluri’s Durbaar spreads its proposal of sounds and images like a peacock in courtship mode: from the sound-only crescendo introduction (where one might imagine the peacock’s long, still collapsed trail) to the colourful, explosive sequence of miniature paintings. In between these sequences: the obsessive contemplation of the lavish chandeliers from the court of the Last Nizam of Hyderabad.
Saturday: Lyra Hill, House Fuck, 2008-10, 5’38’’
Presented by the filmmaker as “a 16mm lust letter to the textures of antiquity, the sensation of home, and the sounds of the filmmaker’s radiator”, Lyra Hill’s House Fuck is a sensory experience, where a house and the act of living in it are depicted as sexually-charged elements. The house as a sensual partner.