.: Eager
“Traditional clay-mation and stop-motion animated film. Cinematography by Helder K. Sun, music by Aaron M. Olson.”
.: Moth
“Gnossienne No. 1 written by Erik Satie, performed by Nedelle Torrisi. MOTH is a traditionally animated, hand painted, gouache-on-paper film. It is animated mostly straight-ahead, with frames painted on paper almost daily for 14 months. The film seeded and bloomed from a moth hitting my studio window and continues as a wandering through the emotions of birth, motherhood, body, nature, metamorphosis and dance.”
.: Purple Mountain
“Hand-painted gouache on paper animation. Film by Allison Schulnik. “Purple Mountain” song composed by Aaron MF Olson, performed by The Musical Tracing Ensemble. An ensemble of musicians is gathered in a performance space. Each musician has their own instrument, means of amplification (if needed), and pair of headphones. All musicians’ headphones are plugged into one outputting sound source (usually an iPod with many headphone splitters). Music (usually a well known song from the popular music canon) is played from the sound source and the musicians are instructed to play something, anything that they hear in their headphones as accurately as they can on their own instrument. The musicians never know what songs or sounds they will be hearing in advance. The audience only hears what the musicians are playing and none of the original sound source, thus creating a “tracing” of the sound source material.”
.: Pierre Huyghe in “Romance”
“‘As I start a project, I always need to create a world. Then I want to enter this world, and my walk through this world is the work,’ says Pierre Huyghe, who lives in both Paris and New York. Huyghe’s films, installations, and public events range from a small-town parade to a puppet theater, from a model amusement park to an expedition in Antarctica. ‘I’m trying to be less narrative, it’s more an emotional landscape that I’m trying to reach here,’ he explains. Huyghe describes how, through the documentation of his scripted realities, he is ‘building a kind of mythology.’ Huyghe believes that his exhibitions are not the endpoint, but rather ‘the starting point to go somewhere else.’”
.: “Anlee” Pierre Huyghe
“French artist Pierre Huyghe discusses his use of Anlee, a Japanese manga character whose copyrights he purchased and loans out to other artists. ‘Normally this kind of sign [Anlee] is bought by people to make advertising or cartoon. It’s a support for narrative,’ says the artist. ‘We give this character to different artists. Different authors speak through this character, in a certain way.’ Anlee has been featured in Huyghe’s One Million Kingdoms (2001), Two Minutes Out of Time (2000), and as part of No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2003), a collaboration with artist Philippe Parreno.”
.: “The Bell Project” Hiwa K
“Kurdish-Iraqi artist Hiwa K discusses his desire to make artwork that is understandable to a wide audience. Describing his video and sculpture installation, The Bell Project (2007–2015), the artist explains how he spent years following and filming a Kurdish scrap yard owner named Nazhad, who collected the U.S. and European military waste that was sold to and used in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars. Melted down into bricks of raw metal, these weapons of war took on new life and became, as the artist states, ‘possibilities of transformation.’ Inspired by the fact that church bells were often melted down to make cannons during times of war in pre-industrial Europe, Hiwa K explains how he became interested in swapping this process by making a bell out of melted down weapons. The artist had Nazhad’s metal bricks sent to Italy, where a foundry cast the material into a large bell, adorned with Assyrian imagery. The bell, installed at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York alongside the artist’s videos of Nazhad’s scrap yard and the Italian foundry, becomes a simple but potent depiction of the circulation of materials and how countries are linked through warfare. Expressing his own difficulty with the art often exhibited in museums and his intention to make his work intelligible to all viewers, Hiwa K states, ‘I have an affair with knowledge, I don’t have a relationship with knowledge. I don’t want to overdose my work with philosophy.’”
.: “the event of a thread” Ann Hamilton
“From Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, artist Ann Hamilton discusses her installation, the event of a thread (2012), which occupied the Armory’s cavernous drill hall. Hamilton, whose artwork often deals with the connection between text and textiles, was present at the Armory every day during the installation’s one-month run. During that time she was able to witness the various ways visitors chose to engage with the different though interconnected elements of the artwork. ‘It’s very intimate, and yet, it’s very large and anonymous—this quality of solitude and being in a congregation or group of people,’ says Hamilton. ‘The feeling of that is actually very comforting, and something that we need.’”
.: Susan Philipsz in “Berlin”
“Susan Philipsz treats audio as a sculptural object, using historically-resonant sources—like an orchestral work by a composer who was interned in a German concentration camp in the 1940s—to create unexpectedly haunting and lyrical installations. Philipsz develops a series of projects across Germany and Austria, including the rehearsal of World War II–damaged instruments in a small German town and a new work connecting one of Vienna’s best-known public squares to its fascist past.”
.: Conversations with Noise John Akomfrah
“Known for his visually stunning, multichannel video installations, artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah shares a lesser acknowledged, but equally vital component of his work: sound. From his London studio, the artist discusses the transformative and essential role that sound has played in both his artwork and his experience of the world. Between sessions editing recently-shot footage, Akomfrah recalls his early experiences with sound. The artist witnessed the ways that music fostered the social connection at the nightclubs of his youth and co-founded the artist group Black Audio Film Collective, which saw itself primarily as an experimental auditory outfit. His seminal experience with sound came as a university student, when Akomfrah heard the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt for the first time. Pärt’s music reconfigured Akomfrah’s understanding of time and of himself within it, motivating his filmic work which weaves together footage from divergent time periods, histories, and themes. While aware that early critics of his work found his use of sound and music “vulgar,” Akomfrah retorts, ‘I like the vulgarity of it.’ ‘That’s the point,’ he adds. ‘The new comes into being via the pathway of vulgarity.’”
.: Writing & Difficulty: Jenny Holzer
“Jenny Holzer discusses her difficult relationship to writing during the installation of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. ‘I have no idea whether I’ll write again,’ says Holzer. ‘One reason why I left it is because I tend to write about the most ghastly subjects. So it’s not just the difficulty in having something turn out right, it’s the difficulty of staying with the material long enough to complete it.’While multiple factors have contributed to Holzer’s writing hiatus, her body of work remains as poignant and provocative as ever. Whether questioning capitalist impulses, or describing torture, Holzer’s art expresses concepts and questions through subversive lightworks which present her queries through projections or streamlined LED marquis. ‘My work might be like theater in that I hope there’s an audience,’ says the artist.”