Catalogue > List by artist

Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been documenting the selling of the American presidency since 1984, and have expanded and updated the series with every election. Political Advertisement 2000 features ads from the 1950s to the present, including the 2008 campaign. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the TV spot, what emerges is the political strategy and manipulative marketing techniques of the American televisual campaign process. "Political Advertisement 2008" includes many rare spots, some never before seen. Edited without commentary, there`s an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Obama and McCain, who are sold like commercial products.

Examining the media as an instrument of socialization and normalization, Antonio Muntadas¹s internationally recognized videotapes and media installations investigate the contradictory messages projected by print and broadcast media, architecture, and language. Throughout his work, Muntadas re-contextualizes available imagery in order to provoke the viewer into rethinking the meaning of the messages, creating a breach in the uniformly constructed "media flow," a stream of information engineered by advertisers to be consumed whole, unanalyzed by the home audience. In Political Advertisements, (edited with Marshall Reese), Muntadas shows us a land of manipulation?the land of television politics. His Between The Frames focuses on the art world and presents interviews that reveal the interwoven structures delimiting how art communicates, how it is made, bought, and sold.

Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese have been documenting the selling of the American presidency since 1984, and have expanded and updated the series with every election. Political Advertisement 2000 features ads from the 1950s to the present, including the 2004 campaign. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the TV spot, what emerges is the political strategy and manipulative marketing techniques of the American televisual campaign process. Political Advertisement 2004 includes many rare spots, some never before seen. Edited without commentary, there`s an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Al Gore, who are sold like commercial products.

Examining the media as an instrument of socialization and normalization, Antonio Muntadas¹s internationally recognized videotapes and media installations investigate the contradictory messages projected by print and broadcast media, architecture, and language. Throughout his work, Muntadas re-contextualizes available imagery in order to provoke the viewer into rethinking the meaning of the messages, creating a breach in the uniformly constructed "media flow," a stream of information engineered by advertisers to be consumed whole, unanalyzed by the home audience. In Political Advertisements, (edited with Marshall Reese), Muntadas shows us a land of manipulation?the land of television politics. His Between The Frames focuses on the art world and presents interviews that reveal the interwoven structures delimiting how art communicates, how it is made, bought, and sold.

On Translation: Fear/Miedo is a televised intervention aimed at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Combining interviews, documentary footage, and journalistic material, Muntadas seeks to reveal the fear that the border inspires on both sides of the divide, and how this fear is constructed. The interviews feature those who have experienced first-hand the tensions generated by the border. The work was made for broadcast in Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City, and Washington D.C. in 2005.

Barcelona-born, but a longtime New Yorker, Antoni Muntadas figures among a first generation of artists investigating the social and political significance of information and broadcast media. This thirty-year retrospective, first seen at the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, includes several videos from the pre’fiber optic era, such as Video Is Television’, 1989, which magnifies and distorts images from a host of appropriated sources, including several Hollywood films (Poltergeist, Network). Backed by a plunking score, the nearly indecipherable TV images are overlaid with captions such as CONTEXT and FRAGMENT: blunt reminders of mass media’s partiality and its constitutive power. An even earlier interactive installation, On Subjectivity, 1978, invites visitors to comment on media images divorced from their original context and therefore’a critical ‘therefore’ for the artist’shorn of their original meaning.

En el año 2009 Muntadas editó y actualizó la banda sonora Himne dels himnes que realizó junto a Víctor Nubla en 1996 para la exposición Des/Aparicions, que reproducía de manera encadenada, los himnos de diferentes países logrando solo un himno. En esta interpretación realizada en el 2016 revisita los audios de los himnos nacionales y se centra en la imagen que sucede en los comienzos de los partidos de futbol cuando juegan las selecciones por países. De esta manera pone de manifiesto una serie de comportamientos sociales, fortuitos o no, que dan juego a reflexionar sobre la colonización, el patriotismo, la inmigración, la asimilación, la integración y el rechazo.

On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas states, “I am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a cultural sense–how the world we live in is a totally translated world, everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and economic factor… by the media, of course, by context and by history.”

Barcelona-born, but a longtime New Yorker, Antoni Muntadas figures among a first generation of artists investigating the social and political significance of information and broadcast media. This thirty-year retrospective, first seen at the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, includes several videos from the pre’fiber optic era, such as Video Is Television’, 1989, which magnifies and distorts images from a host of appropriated sources, including several Hollywood films (Poltergeist, Network). Backed by a plunking score, the nearly indecipherable TV images are overlaid with captions such as CONTEXT and FRAGMENT: blunt reminders of mass media’s partiality and its constitutive power. An even earlier interactive installation, On Subjectivity, 1978, invites visitors to comment on media images divorced from their original context and therefore’a critical ‘therefore’ for the artist’shorn of their original meaning.

Line of destiny (2006) is Óscar Muñoz?s latest video, where he synthesizes in a very simple action, elements and preoccupations which he has worked for the past years on the relation between fixation and memory. Based on the original idea of the Narcissus myth, a man who stares at himself in the reflection of the water that he holds in his hand ?during the development of this action, the reflection/portrait is as well in a constant making and unmaking of itself? even the theme of photography and its fixation: the video seems to be an intention to reveal and at the same time a liquid and fluid portrait, which at the end detaches itself because of its impossibility to hold the water in his hand.

Was born in Popayán, Colombia, in 1951. He lives and works in Cali. He participated in several group exhibitions since 1980, and in international events such as the XIX Sao Paulo Biennial in 1987; the first Kwangju Biennial, in South Korea 1994; the FotoFest, Houston, in 1996; the VI Havana Biennial in 1997 and the VIII Bogotá Art Biennial in 2002. From the beginning of his career as a photo-realist drawing artist, he has developed his work based on photography. Since the Narcisos series, first shown in 1995 at the La Tertulia Museum of Modern Art (Cali, Colombia) , Muñoz has explored portrait and its relationship with the passing of time. This ork has made him come to inquire, through diverse media and supports, the fundamental elements of image from antagonist opposites like literal/metaphoric, reality/fiction

Un lent travelling révèle des visages et silhouettes colorées dans le noir : fragment de la vie d`une famille nomade sous la tente. Le chant suraigu d`une femme dit l`immensité du grasseland au dehors.

Takeshi Murata continues to push the boundaries of digitally manipulated psychedelia. In Monster Movie Murata employs an exacting frame-by-frame technique to turn a bit of B-movie footage into a seething, fragmented morass of color and shape that decomposes and reconstitutes itself thirty times per second. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation. Takeshi Murata produces abstract digital works that refigure the experience of animation. Creating Rorschach-like fields of seething color, form and motion, Murata pushes the boundaries of digitally manipulated psychedelia. With a powerfully sensual force that is expressed in videos, loops, installations, and electronic music, Murata`s synaesthetic experiments in hypnotic perception appear at once seductively organic and totally digital. Murata has exhibited at Peres Projects, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown`s Enterprise, New York; Eyebeam, New York, FACT Centre, Liverpool, UK; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinatti (all 2004), New York Underground Film Festival (2005), and Smack Mellon. Murata lives and works in upstate New York.

Takeshi Murata employs precise digital processing to create astonishing hallucinatory visions. In "Untitled (Silver)", Murata subjects a snippet of footage from a vintage horror film (Mario Bava's 1960 "Mask of Satan", featuring Barbara Steele) - to his exacting yet almost violent digital manipulations. The seething black and white imagery constantly decomposes and reconstitutes itself, slipping seductively between abstraction and recognition.

In this charmingly self-referential cameo, the static camera zooms out slowly to reveal a section of Hadrian`s Wall. As it does so, we listen to a taped phone conversation between the artist and his father as they finalise their travel arrangements to go and see England play Scotland at rugby in Edinburgh; a journey that involves a stop-off en route to shoot the scene we are currently watching.

Even before attending the Royal College of Art in 2004, Matthew Murdoch`s work had be seen in a number of festivals and galleries around the world, as well as being shortlisted for the National Student Film Awards, and the Beck`s Futures Award for Film and Video. Since graduating with a distinction in 2006, he continues to exhibit in festivals internationally, and was recently selected as a finalist for the 2006 Adobe Design Achievement Award for the film and video live action category. Currently Matthew is pursuing a range of new projects concerning histories of social and economic issues of migration, displacement and identity.

A long-lasting lockdown. The last days of a grandmother. In between, a speculative film diary: a homeland that feels distant, a grieving process altered through light.

Filmmaker & musician. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. Graduated from Audiovisual Arts at the Andrés Bello Catholic University and from The Roberto Mata School of Photography. His short films have screened and won awards at international festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, SITGES FF, Brussels Film Festival, Cinélatino de Toulouse, Uruguay Film Festival, Beijing ISFF, Curtas Cinema Río de Janeiro, Tacoma FF, Cinefest Miskolc, and more. He’s been part of programs such as the Locarno Spring Academy, Cine Qua Non-Lab, and others. He is the co-founder of Maldito Fantasma (Damn Phantom), a production company spread between Caracas and NYC. He is currently developing his first feature.

Something New Under the Sun is the first narrative film by artist Gavin Murphy, and was the result of exhaustive research carried out over a 3-year period. It takes as its subject the IMCO building (a demolished modernist factory) and the lost work of its chief designer Oliver P. Bernard. The IMCO building was during its brief existence, a major landmark on Dublin’s south coast, yet it is all but forgotten today, and entirely undocumented. Similarly much of Bernard’s work has been demolished or replaced. In the film, anachronic image sequences are interleaved with intertextual narration, drawn from a multitude of sources, viewpoints and timeframes: Bernard’s life and work (including his dramatic survival of the sinking of the Luisitania in 1915); IMCO’s owners and various phases of the building and its demolition; the discovery of dry-cleaning; and the words of Henri de Saint-Simon, Blaise Pascal, and American author Lewis Mumford on time and the notion of ‘being out of date’. The film notes the parallel fates of the building’s architecture and the dry-cleaning machinery it housed – becoming technologically and stylistically obsolete – and the symbolic necessity of razing the present to make way for the future.

Gavin Murphy is a Dublin-based artist and curator. His research-based practice encompasses assemblage, writing, still photography and moving image, with an interest in the sculptural possibilities of cinematic structures and mise en scène. Murphy’s work has been exhibited in Irish Museum of Modern Art (Project Space), 2014; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2014; BOZAR, Center for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 2012; Conical, Melbourne, 2009; and Colony, Birmingham, 2007. A monograph/research study, On Seeing Only Totally New Things, was published in 2013. His recent exhibition for the Sleepwalkers series at Dublin City Gallery is to be featured in an accompanying book published by Ridinghouse UK, to include texts by Chantal Mouffe, and Simon Critchley. He is the recipient of various Arts Council awards, and residencies at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne; and he is co-director/curator of the artist-run space, Pallas Projects/Studios. Curated projects include the first solo exhibition of the British artist/filmmaker John Smith in Ireland (The world seems a long way away, Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2011); and he was co-curator/producer of Darklight Compendium Vol. 1– the first Irish-produced DVD collection of experimental shorts, animation and artists’ film (2007).

Various reels of found 35mm movie film are pulled over a light box under the fixed gaze of video capture. Through veils of apparent motion, the movements of characters can be discerned and their motivations artfully speculated upon. An oblique tribute to Pere Portabella`s Vampir-Cuadecuc, narrative and plot in Untitled (time) are progressively subsumed in a switching and swaying abstraction to percussion rhythms crashed out on cymbals.

Julie Murray was born in Ireland and lives in the US. Her work has been included in many festivals including the New York Film Festival, Images, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial and more recently at Irish Film Institute/ AEMI Dublin. Her films are in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive, LA The Museum of Modern Art`s Film Archives, NY as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Prints of her 16mm films are also to be found in the Public Library`s Special Collections, New York. She likes this fact. Murray`s early super-8 films were selected for a National Film Preservation Foundation Award in 2014.

Untitled (earth)is a digital montage of found film material examined over a lightbox. Hazy figures in smudged pink and gold landscapes are pulled past the video lens unraveling the film image. A cinematic experience is reassembled in stop/start motion falling in and out of sync with the video frame rate. Ruined image detail in rhythmic incantation taps a remembrance of familiar forms in the brightly patterned tropes of cinema.

Born in Ireland and living in the US, Murray draws upon her background in art studies and practice to make moving image works in a range of experimental forms. Her films and videos have screened widely and her work is in a number of library and special collections. She is currently teaching at the University of Iowa.

"Beach Time" is inspired by a daily routine that was recorded from the fact that everyone can see. This work will challenge at least two different points of view. First, seen and understood from a modernist perspective, the appearance of swimming women who are wearing veils on a beach would be considered 'not functional' as they should have worn more efficient and practical swimsuits. Meanwhile, the beach is actually a public space that should consider public interest. For the swimming women, wearing veils while swimming is not at all a problem in enjoying the beach. Moreover, swimming at a beach is a new tradition for them. It seems that they translate the swimming habit with their own tradition, namely 'kungkum' (to inundate someone's body in water), which is indeed more spiritual.

The Lighting aims to revisit and clarify the issue of discrimination rooted in technological development and image production through an interdisciplinary exploration. The work comprises three narratives—three professional Togolese photographers explore how to use instruments to compensate for insufficient exposure for dark skin tones; a leading software engineer developing facial recognition algorithms at Taiwan’s MediaTek talks about how they have created a camera algorithm that is highly popular on the African continent; moreover, the artist uses Kodak’s Ektachrome, a popular film in the 70s, to produce a kung fu film in the style of exploitation film, using images of the famous Black martial art film star, Jim Kelly, in Bruce Lee’s movies in the 70s. The work is also interlaced with an animated Bruce Lee as the narrator trained by facial motion capture and a speech recognition algorithm.

Musquiqui Chihying is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Taipei and Berlin. He explores the cultural and social identities constructed through the flow and circulation of audiovisual elements in physical and virtual spacetime. Specialising in the use of multimedia such as film and sound, he investigates the human condition and environmental system in the age of global capitalisation and engages in the inquiry of and research on issues of subjectivity in contemporary social culture in the Global South. His works have been shown in several international institutions and film festivals, such as 72nd Berlinale (2022), Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2021), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2020), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2020), 2016 Taipei Biennial, 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014) etc. He is shortlisted for the 2019 Berlin Art Prize and the winner of the Loop Barcelona Video Art Production Award 2019 from Han Nefkens Foundation in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Miró. He is a member of the Taiwanese art group Fuxinghen Studio, and the founder of the Research Lab of Image and Sound.

According to the French poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, everyday life unfolds in a system of signs, a "car" for example implies "driving pleasure", "progress", or "independence". Baudrillard plays with the re-articulation of theories of structural linguistics and semiotics - terms such as signifier and signified, coined by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Following this approach, one can examine how the aircraft as an object or signifier has undertaken various shifts in meaning since its invention. Once it stood for technical progress and the latest evolutionary step in military technology - and technology per se meant military superiority in a post-industrial era marked by enthusiastic nationalism - then, since about the 70s (a date chosen knowingly arbitrarily), the airplane has been increasingly considered as an object which can be instrumentalised for terroristic activities with relative ease. Cheap flight deals offered by discount air lines, a development that began approximately in the 90ies, have made distances appear smaller and smaller (already before the plane has been co-symbol for globalisation), and in addition stripped "traveling by air" of its hitherto semi-luxurious connotation (the once fashionable term "Jet Set" now appears rather outdated). Finally, the aircraft has become a symbol for the rapidly progressing depletion of fossil fuels - natural resources that were created over geological time frames, now to be extracted in a crescendo of global consumption: the object plane has turned into one of the motors of man-made climate change, and the frequent traveler is confronted with the term "carbon footprint". For the subject or individual an aircraft offers the possibility of rapidly overcoming distances, in return for subjecting oneself to being "locked up" for a certain period - subjugating any sense of individual autonomy to total confidence in technology and the crew operating the aircraft (this can be seen as one of the reasons why the suicide of the German-Wing pilot in 2015 became such a collective traumatic experience). The video piece "Footnote #03: Gold & Clouds" aims to be a meditative reflection on the object "aircraft". It has been conceived during a stay at the Saari Residence in Mynämäki, Southwest Finland, and finalised during a residency at the Brno House of the Arts.

David Muth is an artist, musician and programmer. Having grown up in Salzburg, Austria, he relocated to the UK to study at Middlesex University, where he received an MA in Digital Arts. He currently lives and works in London, Vienna and Turku. His artistic practice combines conceptual and experimental approaches and is informed by his background in architecture. His projects range from installations and responsive environments, through video and photography, to composition and performance of music. Muth's work has been shown on numerous occasions internationally, with venues and events including the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Kiasma Museum of Modern Art in Helsinki, Ars Electronica in Linz, Le Cube in Paris, Laboral in Gijón, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art Salzburg. Institutions he has taught at include Ravensbourne University of London and the Royal College of Art, and he currently lectures at Goldsmiths University of London.

Time and again, the feature film places animal actors at the side of its human protagonists – sometimes as loyal companions, sometimes as fierce opponents. However, its stagings do not only instrumentalise animals to release emotions, but also raise a fundamental question of our anthropocentric self-image: how to deal with the experience of the otherness of the animal?

Christoph Girardet, born in 1966, and Matthias Mu?ller, born in 1961, have been collaborating in film, video, photography, and installation since 1999. They had solo exhibitions at institutions such as FACT, Liverpool, Kunstverein Hannover and West, The Hague. They have participated in group shows at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, among others. Both have taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Oberhausen and Rotterdam. Their work is included in several public and private collections.

An unnamed event starts; continues; has vague highlights; and quickly ends. The video documents this self-referential and explicit happening as an array of random cuts between random space and time orders. Layers of affirmation follow layers of affirmation. It is almost what it is: a workable portrait of an event.

Peter Müller has studied Visual Communication/Fine Arts. Consecutively, he held positions as visiting scholar and artistic researcher. At the moment he is scholarly and artistically pursuing a doctorate. His works, collaborations and projects deal with questions of narration, representation, creation of presence, as well with questions on modes of mass media realism and circles of production.

Kristall creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets. Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters. At the same time it makes them appear disjointed and fragmented. This instrument for self-assurance and narcissistic presentation becomes a powerful opponent that increases the sense of fragility, doubt, and loss twofold.

Christophe Girardet was born in 1966 in Lagenhagen, Germany, and studied in Braunschweig. He has been working in the fields of video, cinema and installations since 1987. Matthias Müller was born in 1961 in Bielefeld, Germany, and studied in Bielefeld and Brunswick. He has been working as a movie theater director, video artist, photographer and independent art curator since 1981. He was also teaching at the Art and Audiovisual media Academy of Cologne.

In Cyrk we meet the Circus Arnardo and the people who work there. The film stylises the life of the circus and its main character. Through the interplay of fact and fiction, the film investigates the tricks and devices used in our various forms of media and our different ways of perceiving the world. Cyrk wishes to challenge our need to understand and find meaning in the things we are asked to take on trust. Exploring the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity, between body and mind, the film conveys both the physical and the emotive aspects of the main character’s story of grief and loss. Thematically, it revolves around the fear of meaninglessness as a human disposition, which we confront by seeking structure in the ideas of religion, ideology and culture. It also raises questions about the way this search for meaning, order and system – on both the private and the social level – can lead to the categorisation and stigmatisation of certain groups and individuals.

Jorunn Myklebust Syversen (b. 1978) graduated from Bergen National Academy of Art and Design in 2005. She lives in Oslo and is working in the field of film and videoart. She has participated in numerous international festivals, screenings and exhibitions and has received several national grants.

The video ? Violent Sorrow Seems a Modern Ecstasy? is sampled by different Shakespeare plays into a new manuscript. Syversen used sentences from Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, cross clipped them and put them together to a new drama. Every reference of names and time is removed. No words are changed or added to the script except grammar in order to obtain a logical structure and coherency. The new story is a dialog between two unnamed young men. X is suicidal Y tries to pursue X that life is worth living. X cannot overcome and he decides to salve his friend from life and he therefore kills him. He thereafter stabs a knife into his own heart and dies. The composer Jan Erik Mikalsen wrote the music to the video.

Jorunn Myklebust Syversen was born in Gol, Norway 1978. She graduated from Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2005. She lives in Oslo and is working in the field of experimental video, photography, and installations. She has participated in numerous international festivals, screenings and group exhibitions and has received several national grants. Last year her work was shown in Paris Photo, Caroussel du Louvre, Paris. Together with artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Johanna Billing, and Miriam Bäckström she has been shown in Malmø, Berlin, and New York in the screening project UNCLASSIFIABLE. She participated in, produced, and curated the video screening ?Behind the Scene? at Frogner Kino in Oslo showing other artists like Miriam Bäckström, Per Teljer, Tova Mozard and Ane Lan.

Insignificant within the immensity of a snowy landscape, a handful of men oppose their physical resistance to the force of nature. United, close together, they tackle the hostility surrounding them by way of a strangely choreographed, hesitant ballet. A visual poem of furious beauty, Despair depicts the mechanisms of a world governed by crows.

Since 1993 Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov have created a large number of projects, which demonstrate a wide range of the artists` interests and their inclination to creative experiments in sphere cinema and of contemporary art. Among them there are experimental films which took part in numerous international festivals around the world (such as Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Clermont-Ferrand, Milan, Hamburg, Montreal, Moscow, Pesaro. Sao Paulo and others). Many of films have won several awards (including Tiger Award for Short Film of 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam and Gran Premio of Asolo International Art Film Festival ); and belong to the museum collections; a number of installations created as joint international projects and presented at some Biennale (such as Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art /Moscow/, The young artist`s Biennial/Bucharest/, KunstFilmBiennale/Cologne/, Biennial of Moving Images/Geneva/. In 2005, Myznikova and Provorov /PROVMYZA/ represented Russia with innovative project ?Idiot Wind? at 51st Venice Biennial. In 2007 they became nominees of Main National Premiums of Contemporary Art ?Innovation? and ?Kandinsky Award?.