The theory of a fourth dimension was pursued hungrily by artists in the early 20th century, with Marcel Duchamp, Theo van Doesburg and many of the cubists tackling the questions – geometrical, philosophical, epistemological – that it raised. Implicitly folding in this history, and guided by a beguiling Victorian text by Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: […]
Into a structure which supports a relatively conventional international competition, the august yet still fleet Oberhausen International Short Film Festival incorporates expansive, invitational thematic programmes and monographic screenings, supported by discursive events. It was as moderator of one such session, intended to unpack curator Shama Khanna’s theme ‘Flatness: Cinema After the Internet’, that I attended. […]
The artist’s biography that opens Laure Prouvost’s The Artist Book is, like her films, an exercise in translation and reception, authorship and authority. Or, rather, an exercise in mistranslation and obfuscation, authorlessness and – with a nod to Georges Bataille, who unwittingly provides the book’s cover – formlessness. Or, as the ‘author’ puts it, in […]
A sense of resourcefulness pervaded Ruth Ewan’s strong selection for the annual Outpost Members’ Show, from the formal economy of the readymade to work which circled source and resource at a political level. Moving image featured heavily, and both Stella Ouzounidou and Scott Massey addressed the market and the flow of capital via performative video […]
The structures and mechanisms of power haunt Marine Hugonnier’s film Ariana. Set in the Pandjshêr Valley in Afghanistan, a fertile, verdant place walled in by the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, what begins as a document of a film being made becomes an allegory for the process of representation itself, and its attendant implications […]