LIGHT IS A KIND OF RHYTHM, Book presentation and screening with Alena Williams
Center_kuda.org and Museum of Contemporary Arts Vojvodina are organizing the book presentation, talk, and screening with Alena Williams, Thursday, March 11th, 2010. in 19:00 in the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina exhibition space, Dunavska 37, Novi Sad. Time travel: 1929, 2009. An interval of approximately 80 years exists between the films of the 1920s and those of the present moment that is discussed in this book. The book began as a series of screenings at the Institut im Glaspavillon der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, which was lead by Heike Föll with Philipp Ekardt, Matt Saunders, Jan Kedves, and Katarina Burin. It traces the relationship of light to the moving image from an early moment in the history of film - seen in the work of Viking Eggeling, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Hans Richter, and Ralph Steiner - to that of the present day. The featured contemporary artists - Jan Hammer, Jutta Koether, Andreas Wutz, Die Tödliche Doris, and Matthias Müller - return to an earlier aesthetic engagement with cinema; in their films, videos, and digital slides, the moving image offers an alternative model for thinking through abstraction. Static paintings, collages, and walls are reconstituted as animate, reflective objects, while transient light effects are extracted from life and assigned entirely new meanings. Keyed to a wider international audience with interests in critical theory, film/media studies, and contemporary art, this book includes an essay setting out a theoretical background for the analysis of the interrelation of cinema and aesthetic reception, as well as three new English translations of seminal articles by the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889 - 1966) and interviews with each of the contemporary artists. It is a Book design by Schroeter und Berger and Christian Werner, Edition of 500 copies, 32 b/w illustrations, 44 pages (10 unbound, hand-folded leaflets), Book dimensions: 30 cm x 30 cm, Sleeve: 32,5 cm x 32,5, Reihe Projektiv, Published by merz&solitude, Stuttgart, December 2009 http://millecompany.com/light-rhythm/ On sale at Printed Matter, New York; Pro qm Berlin; books, Berlin; and at selected events. EVENING PROGRAM OF FILMS AND VIDEOS Ralph Steiner H2O, 1929 35 mm, b/w, silent, 9 minutes Viking Eggeling Symphonie Diagonale, 1921 16 mm, b/w, silent, 6.40 minutes Jan Hammer deep, 2006 video, b/w, 7.06 minutes Jutta Koether Metalist Moment, 2006/2007 digital slide show, 7.30 minutes, loop Die Tödliche Doris Die Gesamtheit allen Lebens und alles Darüberhinausgehende (The Sum of All Life and Everything Beyond), 1987 Super-8, 1.83 – 2.44 seconds (variable), Total run time: 30 minutes AUTHOR Alena Williams is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin. She is currently completing her dissertation “Movement in Vision: Cinema, Aesthetics, and Modern German Culture, 1915–1930” at Columbia University in New York, and is a fellow in the research group “Media of History” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Previously, she was a fellow within the art, science & business program at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Her upcoming traveling exhibition on the land art, films, video, and site-specific installations of the American artist Nancy Holt will open at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia in Fall 2010.