Thursday, February 28th - 7pm

Tonight's screenings include examinations of identity construction and New Cosmopolitanism in the 21st century. Grace Ndiritu's almost impossibly elegant "The Nightingale" presents one extended gesture that touches upon issues of recognition, stereotypes, feminism, beauty, enclosure, and torture. Together, Koken Ergun's "I, Soldier" and Martin Brand's "Station" show two very disparate groups of people conforming to predetermined codes of behavior and appearance, dictated by the military in Ergun's video and by youth counterculture in Brand's work. Through language and imagery, Minette Lee Mangahas and Miyuki Nishiuchi examine individual responses to the concept of hybridity. The variety of approaches to time-based media are exemplified by Ryan Trecartin's video with its acid colors, warped sounds, and overly mannered actors portraying chat-room personas and Michael V. Smith's personal narration about gay adolescence.

Within the "New Cosmopolitanism" group, Jeroen Kooijman's "Cargo" and John Smith's "Dirty Pictures" examine how a city exists and re-constructs itself following dramatic and destructive events whereas Mike Stubbs' work reveals the challenges and failure of urban planning projects. Casper Stracke's "No Damage" and Semiconductor's "Acousticity" look at the dynamics and elasticity of the metropolis as a subject. The pattern and flow of imagery and sound are woven together in both Blake Carrington's "Sky and Wires," - a digital diary of nomadic life - and Jennifer Schmidt's "Tulipmania/Everquest," which by fusing the curious obsession with tulips in the 17th century with the look and feel of videogames provides commentary on the mercurial quality of assigning value to nonpermanent or intangible things.

Program One:
Identity Construction: Social, Political, and Personal

Grace Ndiritu: The Nightingale
Minette Lee Mangahas: Kiss My Hyphen | On Love Across Margins
Ryan Trecartin: (Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me)
Michael V. Smith: Invitation
Miyuki Nishiuchi: Identification
Koken Ergun: I, Soldier
Martin Brand: Station

Program Two:
The New Cosmopolitanism: Civilization, Urbanism, and Isolation

Casper Stracke: No Damage
Semiconductor: Acousticity
Blake Carrington: Sky and Wires: At Home and Homeless
Jeroen Kooijmans: Cargo
Mike Stubbs: Cultural Quarter
John Smith: Dirty Pictures

Installation:
Jennifer Schmidt: Tulipomania/Everquest

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Grace Ndiritu: The Nightingale
2004, UK, 7:00 Minutes

This piece deals with issues of racial stereotyping since Sept 11. In this the protagonist is transformed in various guises by using a simple piece of cloth.

Biography:
Grace Ndiritu was born in the UK in 1976. She received her BA (Hons) at WSA and then attended the Postgraduate studio residency De Ateliers in Amsterdam (1998-2000). Her work, which combines advertising, documentary and music video strategies within the framework of performance video art, has been exhibited internationally, including recent installations at the 2005 Venice Biennale and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Several of her videos are now distributed by LUX and her first major solo show was at the Chisenhale Gallery in 2007.

Text: Lux online catalogue: http://www.lux.org.uk.
Reprinted with permission by Lux.

Minette Lee Mangahas:
Kiss My Hyphen | On Love Across Margins
2007, USA, 5:00 Minutes

Kiss My Hyphen arose from numerous serious and playful dialogues between my partner, Hank, and myself as we worked intensively together while in residency at the Cite Universitaire des Artes in Paris. An Asian-American - African-American couple, we found ourselves surrounded by a sea of mixed-race couples, African and Asian immigrants displaced by the colonial legacy of Western powers. As Americans, we found ourselves re-contextualized within a global movement of diverse people that was different from the one we experienced at home.

This experience called into question the entire American paradigm of racial "identification," and we began to tease out the many strands of tension that lie beneath the surface of American culture - in particular between "black" and "oriental" people. People who have been colonized and integrated into the fabric of America in different ways, and whose identities are built on the bent backs of their histories. How is it that we see ourselves and each other? Where does our point of reference come from? How will that point of reference change for our children?

Biography:
Minette Lee Mangahas (b. 1977) is a visual and performing artist who applies the playfulness, philosophy and physical discipline of East Asian ink painting to create multi-media works that explore hybridity and freedom. Born in Hawaii and raised in Hong Kong and the Philippines, she completed her Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and Political Science at Duke University in 1999. She taught herself ink painting while studying with the eminent Japanese calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi for seven years. She has participated in festivals, solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad, most recently at the 2007 APAture Festival in San Francisco and the 1er Fadao Festival for Dance and Urban Art at the Museo de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo in Costa Rica.

Ryan Trecartin: (Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me)
2006, USA, 7:15 Minutes

Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a Jewish lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles.

Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the characters are constantly communicating with one another on the phone or online. Their e-mail exchanges and Internet searches are channeled into bright animations that intersect with the "real world" locations. The story moves from person to person like a browser surfing through Web pages. Engrossed in manic electronic interactions, the characters become increasingly isolated and solipsistic.

Biography:
Ryan Trecartin was born in 1981 in Webster, Texas. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island in 2004. His works have been seen in group exhibitions including the 2006 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; USA Today: Works from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Moore Space, Miami, Florida; The Getty Center, Los Angeles; New York Underground Film Festival, New York; Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chicago; and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at QED, Los Angeles and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York.

Text from EAI Online Catalogue: http://www.eai.org.
Reprinted with permission by Electronic Arts Intermix.

Michael V. Smith: Invitation
2007, Canada, 4:00 Minutes

Continuing his performance-based documentary work, Michael V. Smith has created a confessional nude dance video. Invitation chronicles the artist's relationship to his body, welcoming the audience to celebrate and bear witness.

Biography:
In his video work, Michael V. Smith explores the intersections between sex, gender and identity. His novel, Cumberland, was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Not your usual writer, he is also a zinester, comedian, sex artist and, occasionally, Miss Cookie LaWhore.

Text: Video Out catalogue: http://www.videoout.ca.
Reprinted with permission by Video Out.

Miyuki Nishiuchi: Identification
2007, USA, 5:00 minutes

Different cultures use different ways of representing a person's identity. Two forms of signs, a signature and a seal result in different images when they represent the same name, though they were meant to function similarly. By animating them, the work analyzes the process of identification, and places different concepts/images of the self in question. How is it possible to grasp a self in each culturally determined form of a sign?

Biography:
Miyuki Nishiuchi was born in Japan, and lived there until she moved to the United States in 1996. She received her MFA in fine art from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2005. Currently she lives and works in Richmond, VA.

Koken Ergun: I, Soldier
2006, Turkey, 7:14 Minutes

"I, Soldier is the first part of a video series in which I am dealing with the state-controlled ceremonies for the national days of the Turkish Republic. The nationalistic attributes attached to these large-scale ceremonies are underlined in a non-descriptive and almost voyeuristic point of view. I, Soldier was shot at the National Day for Youth and Sports; the day that marks the start of the independence war of the Turkish public under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, against the Allied Forces back in 1919. The annual ceremony held at the biggest stadium of each city consists of figurative dances by high school students, choreographed in a timeless socialist-realist manner. In the last decade, popular songs replaced the usual military marches, which accompanied the choreography. In this video a nationalist hip-hop song is played during the gymnastic demonstrations of the military school students backed by a stern poem from a high-ranking soldier about the virtues of "The Soldier"." --Koken Ergun

"Koken Ergun makes a very direct but discrete visualisation of an event, an artistic commentary to the specific political context of Turkey which becomes a universal commentary on ultra-nationalism. His visual strategy enables a new reading of the surviving imagery of 20th century state rituals."
-- Videomedeja 2007 website

Biography:
Born in Istanbul, in 1976, Koken Ergun studied acting at the stanbul University and completed his postgraduate degree in Classics at King's College London, followed by an MA degree in Visual Communication Design at the Bilgi University. After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became involved with contemporary art, specifically video and performance. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including Platform Garanti (Istanbul), KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Arts (Helsinki), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Museum of Contemporary Arts Taipei, Art in General (New York), Digital ArtLab (Tel Aviv), and Stedelijk Meseum Bureau (Amsterdam). His video works have also screened extensively, including the Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Sydney and Zagreb Film Festivals.

Text: VDB online catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Martin Brand: Station
2004/2005, Germany, 14:52 Minutes

"A study of a youth clique in Bochum. Its members meet at the railway station, drive to one of their houses, hang out, listen to music, drink and smoke pot. The communication between the young people is hard for outsiders to understand. Friendly emotions and tensions, musical taste and ideologies all seem to change rapidly; the film does not use commentary or editing to impose any structure. What remains is a sense of a great lack of orientation."
-- Marcel Schwierin, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2007

Biography:
Martin Brand was born in 1975 in Bochum/Germany and studied Art and German in Bochum and Dortmund until 2002. Since then, he has worked as a freelance artist and filmmaker in the Ruhr area and other places. In the past years, he brought a series of video projects into being, based on observations and thoughts regarding social/societal, as well as political activities and conditions. In doing so, his works often range between documentation and fiction, coincidental observation and staging. Themes like youth culture, search of identity, orientation through role models, influence through media and advertisement, creation of cliques and scenes, violence, and group hierarchies and mechanisms are central to the content of his work. His videos and installations, which have been shown at numerous exhibitions and festivals, have also been awarded repeatedly. He has received scholarships and artist residencies and was given the Funding Award of North Rhine-Westphalia for Young Artists in 2006.

Casper Stracke: No Damage
2002, Germany/USA
12:30 Minutes

No Damage is a composition made out of fragments from over 80 different feature and documentary films that show the architecture of New York City--its architectural presence as captured on film over eight decades. Lifted out of their original context and juxtaposed in groups, these scenes reveal their emotional implications: grandeur, glamour, the wake of modernism, post-modernism and, most recently, post 9/11 sentimentalism. A number of particular clips that resonate such emotions enter into a non-verbal discourse on age, status, functionality and aesthetics. The feeling of eternity that these giant structures seemed to possess has now changed into the consciousness of finitude.

Buildings disappear for different reasons. They collapse or pulverize; constant damage causes constant transformation. In an elapsed time view these enormous transformations appear like insignificant friction--within Manhattan's architectural mass, moving like a giant glacier.

Biography: Caspar Stracke is a German video artist based in New York. He works with film, video, and digital media. His single channel work and installations have been shown at MoMA New York, the Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, New York, the Flaherty Seminar, Film Forum LA, Yerba Buena Center SF, Center for Media and Technology (ZKM) Karlsruhe, Germany, Renia Sofia, Madrid, Image Forum and ICC Tokyo, among others. He has participated in festivals and gallery exhibitions throughout the US, Latin America, Canada, Europe and Japan. He is the founder of Lossless Video, an on-line forum for video art criticism.

Stracke has also worked as a curator for institutions such as The Knitting Factory, NY, Eighth Floor Gallery, VideoEx, Zurich, Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Ocularis/Galapagos Art Space, New York, and CityZooms, Bremen.

Text: VDB online catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Semiconductor: Acousticity
2006, UK, 3:00 Minutes

During many excursions around the Czech capital, Prague, Semiconductor photographed and recorded the sights and sounds of the city; reaching from the suburbs and its factories to the city's famous medieval centre. Each section of the film is controlled and animated by the sound that was recorded in situ at time of photographing, creating a physical connection between the images and the audio. The animated photos bring to life the fabric of the city using resonance to open a window onto the physicality of the structures themselves. The buildings appear to be exploding with energetic particles leaving it unclear whether we are looking at time speeded up, or an unseen moment in time.

Biography:
Semiconductor make Sound Films which reveal our physical world in flux; cities in motion, shifting landscapes and systems in chaos. Since 1999 UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt have been exploring many processes of digital animation to produce experimental films and live animation. Central to these works is the role of sound, which becomes synonymous with the image, as it creates, controls and deciphers it; exploring resonance, through the natural order of things. Finely crafted digital work is combined with analogue processes that tailor the randomness and errors within computer systems as co-conspirator.

Semiconductor have recently returned to Brighton, U.K. since completing a series of fellowships at; The NASA Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, California US, Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship, Berwick-Upon-Tweed UK and Couvent des Recollets, Paris, France. Past and future exhibitions include; Venice Biennale, Prague Contemporary Art Festival, ICA London, San Francisco International Film Festival, Careof Gallery Milan, EMAF Osnabruck, and Beaconsfield Gallery London. They are currently developing a U.K. touring exhibition of work made during their Space Sciences fellowship and will release a new DVD, Worlds in Flux with Fat Cat records early 2007.

Text: Lux online catalogue: http://www.lux.org.uk.
Reprinted with permission by Lux.

Blake Carrington: Sky and Wires: At Home and Homeless
2007, USA, 10:00 Minutes

Sky and Wires: At Home and Homeless is a response to a contemporary life of engaging with places not as a space to be, but as a space to chart a trajectory through. In two movements, still imagery from locations in New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Arizona, Indiana, Louisville, Austin, and Las Vegas is introduced and then destroyed in a hyper-rhythm of image and always-progressing serial sound. The aggressive pattern and flow of image and sound become predominant, as the importance of individual scenes and notes is blurred.

Biography:
Blake Carrington is a media artist working with video, sound, site-specific installation and performance. Spending two years in Japan, he screened work several times in Tokyo at events such as Design Festa and Flo Union. Returning to the U.S., he completed a residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University. He recently received grants from the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation and the Chancellor's Office of Engagement Initiatives at Syracuse University for co-founding Urban Video Project, a public arts initiative that uses the post-industrial landscape of Syracuse as context for multimedia projections. He is also one-third of the artist group Avalanche Collective, with whom he has exhibited most recently at University of Georgia's Broad Street Gallery in Athens.

Jeroen Kooijmans: Cargo
2005, The Netherlands, 1:30 Minutes

"Cargo" is a fragment of Jeroen Kooijmans' documentary "New York is Eating Me & The Cactus Dance." In little more than a minute, he tells the story of what happened to New York on September 11, 2001. In the blink of an eye, nothing is like it was before...

Biography:
Jeroen Kooijmans' (1967) work is characterised by small, but highly significant interventions. Evident in the choice of the framework or a subtle adaptation of the recorded material in the montage at a later stage. In a lively, carefree manner, Kooijmans succeeds in presenting extremely realistic images. His work seems to be closely related to that of pure observation, as if it is a direct translation of that which Kooijmans saw or imagined. He lays his cards on the table so that the observer can happily look, think and dream along with him. Coolly and serenely, he shows us rare moments in which people dream and fantasise, leaving reality and "the madding crowd" far behind them for a while.

Text: Monte Video catalogue: http://www.montevideo.nl.
Reprinted with permission by Monte Video.

Image: Mike Stubbs, "Cultural Quarter," 2003.
Courtesy Monte Video, Amsterdam.
http://www.montevideo.nl

Mike Stubbs: Cultural Quarter
2003, UK, 10:00 Minutes

Not so very long ago, the thought took root in the minds of authorities and city builders that the "cultural assets" of a city are important factors in the quality of life in that city. Artists, students and culture lovers organize their own lively living environment, and in so doing attract other people from outside the city, who spend part of their income there and, by so doing, make the climate even more lively. Project developers, municipal services and cultural organizations have found each other in a new shared interest, a win-win-win situation, and the first plans for this kind of cultural city renovation are now being realized. In "Cultural Quarter," Mike Stubbs provides this dream vision of a city with a negative equation. In a run-down district full of the crumbling remains of the urban-developmental idealism of an earlier period - council flats from the 1970s - we observe, as if through a surveillance camera, a group of inhabitants who pass their days on the street. Children having a ball with a broken-down car, while adults are standing around with glasses of beer in their hands and blank expressions on their faces. It is precisely the image that the visionaries of cultural renovation are aiming to wipe out. Stubbs shows us that it is not so much the scene itself as the intercession of our glance that determines our perception of it. These people are being observed; the faces of some of the inhabitants are "scrambled," and now and then the images are accompanied by dramatic sounds. In this way, Stubbs enters into social mechanisms that will not come up for debate in the meeting rooms of the planners, but are certainly part of these developments. - Vinken & van Kampen

Biography:
1958 - Born in Welwyn Garden City, England; lives and works in Liverpool. Mike Stubbs' work encompasses film, video, mixed media installations, performance and curation. He has won more than a dozen major international awards including first prizes at the Oberhausen and Locarno Film Festivals, and in 1999 he was invited to present a video retrospective of his own work at the Tate Gallery, London.

Text: Monte Video catalogue: http://www.montevideo.nl.
Reprinted with permission by Monte Video.

John Smith: Dirty Pictures
2007, UK, 14:00 Minutes

Palestine, April 15th / 16th 2007 - Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Hotel Diaries is an ongoing series of video recordings made in hotel rooms, all of which relate personal experiences to contemporary world events. Other works in the series include Frozen War (Ireland, 2001), Museum Piece (Germany, 2004), Throwing Stones (Switzerland, 2004), and Pyramids/Skunk (The Netherlands 2006/7).

Biography: John Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. Since 1972 he has made over 40 film, video and installations works. His films have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world and awarded major prizes at film festivals in Leipzig, Oberhausen, Hamburg, Cork, Geneva, Palermo, Graz, Uppsala, Bangkok, Ann Arbor and Chicago. One-person presentations of his work include exhibitions at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), Pearl Gallery (London), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany) and retrospectives at the Venice Biennale and Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Regensburg and Winterthur international film festivals. John Smith is Professor of Fine Art at the University of East London.

Text: VDB catalogue: http://www.vdb.org.
Reprinted with permission by VDB.

Jennifer Schmidt: Tulipomania/Everquest
2006-2007, USA, 8:00 Minutes (Loop)

"Tulipomania / EverQuest" explores how we impart value to ephemeral things by juxtaposing the sensations of 17th century Tulipomania and the spirit of the contemporary videogame EverQuest, within a graphically animated video.

3 videos compose the project, "Turk Tulipo", "PA-Dutch Tulipo", and "Neth Tulipo", which portray independent scavenger hunts - tracing the presence and symbolism of the tulip motif within three distinct locations and cultures. Synched in timing and playback: when all three videos display the same animated tulip sequence, a 3-of-a-kind / jackpot "game response" is activated, presenting tulip flowers blowing in the breeze to bombastic music.

Biography:
Jennifer Schmidt (b. 1975, Bedford, Indiana) is a multi-media artist living in Brooklyn, NY and Boston, MA, who often works with printed media and graphic design to create sculptural installations, video, and screenprinted ephemera.

She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Delaware in 1997; and is faculty within the Print and Paper Area and Graduate Program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Recent exhibitions and screenings include: International Print Center New York, NY, Pulsar Festival for New Media, Caracas, Venezuela, Cinema-Scope, London, UK and Miami, FL, Candela Gallery, Puerto Rico, Test Patterns: Public Art Project, Baltimore, MD, Volume Gallery, New York, NY, Goliath Visual Space, Brooklyn, NY, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany, Video Pool, Winnipeg, Canada, AIM V:SYZYGY, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, Transport Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Jen Bekman Gallery, New York, NY, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE, Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, Gallery 312, Chicago, IL, and Experimental Sound, Video and Film Programmation, Institute Jean Vigo, Perpignan, France.