Though Leung’s works are highly attentive to their physical surroundings, she conceives of them not as site-specific but “context-contingent,” capable of being realized again and again in different places, but each time conditioned by institutional circumstances that would determine their form. Likewise, they accrue new layers of meaning as they circulate through different situations. When Violets 2 was originally exhibited at Netwerk Aalst, for instance, it was installed on the floor of the gallery space one story above the bar from which the pipes had been removed, mirroring their former placement, only this time as a waste product instead of a conduit for its elimination, as if the building were spilling its guts. Subsequent presentations, however, must contend with the challenges of one set of architectural footprints descending on another, with the reconfigured pipes now foregrounding the spatial eccentricities of their new containers. Meanwhile, Shrooms is particularly effe
Aria Dean is an artist who works in multiple media. Her interest in materialist and structural film has always been an intellectual base, and in her new film Abattoir, U.S.A.! she builds upon that base in ways that expand her creative practice. Dean speaks with McKenzie Wark about the connection between her earlier film and her newest piece, the importance of collaboration, and the challenges of being an artist who is also a noted writer.
Straub, who has died at the age of 89, was, together with his wife Danièle Huillet, one of the most radical and incendiary of political filmmakers in post-war Germany, Italy and France.
The director talks about his intellectual, political and hilarious body of work, as the ICA puts on a retrospective with contributions from his former students Carol Morley and Jarvis Cocker
Aesthetics and politics: a new reader from The Visible Press offers a bracing introduction to Afterimage's ever-curious, ever-relevant quest for the contours of a radical cinema