Author Archives: yazo

#VOICEOVER: Screening
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
March 10, 7–9 pm

A related screening event curated by Shama Khanna will be held at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, on March 10, accompanied by a public conversation with featured artist Richard Sides. Featured video works include:

• Ed Atkins, Even Pricks, 2013, 8′
• Steve Reinke, Great Blood Sacrifice, 2010, 4′
• Peter Wachtler, Untitled, 2013, 11′
• Richard Sides, The only way she could ever look good is with distance, 2011, 8′
• Laure Prouvost, Monolog, 2011, 9′
• Andrew N. Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex, 2010, 11′
• Pilvi Takala, Drive with Care, 2013, 13′

#VOICEOVER: Screening
Kaleidoscope Project Space, Milan
March 14, 6–8 pm

A related screening event curated by Shama Khanna will be held at Kaleidoscope’s newly opened project space, Milan, on March 14, accompanied by a public conversation with featured artist Andrew Norman Wilson. Featured video works include:

#VOICEOVER: Essay
Under the Skin words by Shama Khanna
From Kaleidoscope Issue 20 (Winter 2013/14)

The memorable reveal of the man behind the curtain twiddling knobs and simulating the booming, god-like voice of Oz by rascally Toto the dog is an apt metaphor for how the authority of the voice-over crumbled towards a post-historical pluralism of voices. The persistence of enlightenment theories of the West, however—where objective knowledge of the world is key to the progress of civilization—signaled that a hierarchy between the mind and body, and the attitudes and cultures that subscribe to this way of the world, still remained: “It is the confrontation of mind with matter which brings the object into being,” reads a female voice in Duncan Campbell’s recent film It For Others (2013), underlining this power relation. Contemporary artists working with the moving image analyze this separation of mind over body. Read more.

#Voiceover

#VOICEOVER is an online extension to a themed survey published in Kaleidoscope‘s issue 20 (Winter 2013/14), dedicated to the deployment of off-camera commentary as a conceptual device in the moving image works of a new generation of artists, including Ed Atkins, Laure Prouvost, Pilvi Takala, Hito Steyerl, Helen Marten, Camille Henrot, Ian Cheng, Mark Leckey, and Oliver Laric. The following selection of featured videos, exceptionally made available for online viewing, explores how these artists resort to the disembodied voice to find expression beyond language, elevate sound from background element to a character in its own right, and tackle issues of neutrality, animism and miscomprehension. Referencing the films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard while also drawing from advertising and text-to-speech, these artists use voiceover to analyze the separation of mind over body, lending the works their alternating intimacy and alienation.
Enjoy the video program.

In partnership with:

#FRANCESCO VEZZOLI

#FRANCESCOVEZZOLI
Curated by Shama Khanna

Sitting between the traditions of cinema and visual art, the work of Chinese artist Yang Fudong resonates with the cinematic and photographic tropes of a city and society that is also “in between”: the decadent aura of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s—colonial and colonized, modern and feudal, progressive and nostalgic. Indebted to the Fifth and Sixth generations of Chinese filmmakers, to European auteurs of the like of Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni, and to American peers such as Jim Jarmusch, Fudong’s crisp blackand- white 35mm films enact a subtle interplay between the political and the abstract, revealing the artist’s passionate attraction to beauty and a rarified approach to the haunting questions of contemporary life.
Sitting between the traditions of cinema and visual art, the work of Chinese artist Yang Fudong resonates with the cinematic and photographic tropes of a city and society that is also “in between”: the decadent aura of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s—colonial and gressive and nostalgic. Indebted to the Fifth and Sixth generations an auteurs of the like of Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni, and to American peers such as Jim Jarmusch, Fudong’s crisp black-and-white 35mm films enact a
subtle interplay between the political and the abstract, revealing the artist’s passionate attraction to beauty and a rarified to the haunting questions of contemporary life.