7 February - 30 March 2008 / Show opening Wednesday 6 February at 6 p.m.
Marie José BURKI (Switzerland / 1961)
VIDEO INSTALLATIONS
Our ambiguous relationship with an image-saturated world is caught out, since nowadays one image is no better or worse than another. It is only in the interstices, the intervals, the breaths suggested by the juxtapositions and their divergences, that Burki's art reveals to us a perception of reality and the history in its wake.
De nos jours, 2003, Exposure: Studio Light, 2007, De nos jours (un matin), 2008, as well as a new production of the artist (Exposure: Morning, 2008) will be exposed on the first and second floors of the center for the contemporary image.
26 – 28 February 2008
In conjunction with the show devoted to the work of Marie José Burki, we will be featuring a program of videos and artists' films, including Burki's early pieces, which were coproduced by the Center for Contemporary Images. There is one theme that surfaces again and again in Burki's art, the theme of strolling. It is the act that allows one's gaze to wander and construct a fictional story, an imaginative world through reverie. It is also the idea of shifting around forms, concepts and oneself in the end. In this shift the subject is wandering from himself; it is precisely when the body is in a situation where it needs to find its place that the latter notion dissolves. That aspiration to find where we belong propels us to move. To borrow Jean-Luc Nancy's remark, "I'm moving when I'm not where I am."1
1 Jean-Luc Nancy and Abbas Kiarostami, L'Evidence du film.
General admission: 10.-
Reduced admission: 6.-
12 - 14 March 2008
The Decorative film program / SCREENINGS
Carte blanche given to Philippe-Alain Michaud
When we stop thinking of the movie screen as a window onto a fictive depth in order to see it as a surface on which to inscribe things while favoring the plastic dimension of the film image at the expense of its documentary and realist dimension; when we question the implicit presupposition that makes film the opening of photography to movement and time in order to see in the real shot just one possible application of film, then film will be revealed as less an art of the figure than an art of the field and line, that is, as a decorative device.
(P.-A. Michaud)
General admission: 10.-
Reduced admission: 6.-
1st May - 22 June 2008 / Show opening Wednesday 30 April at 6 p.m.
Miranda Pennell (England / 1963)
I AM / WE ARE
Miranda Pennell initially studied contemporary dance in New York and Amsterdam, before going on to explore movement through the prism of cinema and the motion picture camera. While her film work has slowly led her away from contemporary dance, her interest in performance remains central to her art; space, time, the relationship between the human subject and the camera, and the observation of movement and calm are grasped by a precise and distinct choreographic sensibility.
In You Made Me Love You, 31 male and female dancers play cat and mouse with the camera (John Smith). Meanwhile the troupe of ballet dancers tries to maintain visual contact with the camera. "Losing contact can be a traumatic experience." (Miranda Pennell)
In Drum room she underscores that what is beautiful in a musical performance is also the physical presence of the musician and his or her way of occupying the space—sound as a shape that colors silence.
Alexia Walther (Switzerland / 1974) & Maxime Matray (France / 1973)
L'´ÉTÉ
The two artists' collaboration began with the short film Twist(written and directed by Alexia Walther; music by Maxime Matray), which won 12th Biennial of Moving Images Prize in 2008. Their film draws a parallel between an episode of Julius Caesar's Gallic War and a choreographed summary of the twist's history. The film depicts two defeats, a historic one and a more symbolic one, the defeat of a hypothetical liberation of the body through dance, namely the twist. The word, then the dance, or how the word is made flesh.
Since then Walther and Matray have written and codirected another short film, L'Élan, which is currently in postproduction. Shot in the south of France and situated in the present, the film depicts two men who are going to fight a duel.
A brand-new piece coproduced by the Center for Contemporary Images, once again the result of the two artists' collaboration, will be featured in preview screenings at the Center's Saint-Gervais venue.
27 - 29 May 2008
New english creation
carte blanche given to Miranda Pennell
SCREENINGS
10 - 12 June 2008
1,2,3... Avant-Gardes
Polish Film/Art between Experiment and Archive
SCREENINGS
31 October - 14 December 2008
VERSION bêta
Biennial exhibition ART & NEW MEDIA