Video & Film : four proposals

The gallery is very pleased to present Video & Film : four proposals, the first online film program with works from Daniel Blaufuks, José Maçãs de Carvalho, Tatiana Macedo e Susana Gaudêncio

DANIEL BLAUFUKS
The Absence

Inspired by La Disparition by Georges Perec, a novel written without using the letter “E”, this work is made from a re-editing of the classic French film A Bout de Souffle by Jean-Luc Godard, with the main character, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, missing. What is left from this absence is our cinematographic memory which instinctively tries to fill in the void around which everything seems to revolve.

SUSANA GAUDÊNCIO
Fortunate Islands

Fortunate Islands, 2015
Link for English version of vídeo narration

Fortunate Islands explore the walking journey (in this case in the city of Porto) as an ancestral method of critical traveling, that catalyzes knowledge, the artistic act and offers stories. Also the concept of insularity as a desire for imagination, utopia, autonomy or refuge. When we focus our imagery towards the idea of the island, we are often inclined to create only positive values, making it a center for generating illusions and chimeras. What contributes to this trend are the special characteristics of its geographical space - the continent is a norm, an island is an exception.

Video Credits: Music «Nearer My God to Thee” played by Phyllis Taylor Sparks / Potato Photography (Venus of Willendorf): © Ann Gordon / Image of Internet Map: © Chris Harrison / Sound effects: Susana Gaudêncio, Mike Koenig, Mark Di Angelo.

JOSÉ MAÇÃS DE CARVALHO
Archive and Democracy

On Sundays, migrant domestic workers gatherers in the streets of  Hong Kong siting on cardboard or plastic mats in the shadow of five-star hotels, bank buildings, windows of luxury shops, reclaiming the use of public space.

TATIANA MACEDO
Seems so long ago, Nancy

Reversing the gaze

Gallery attendants are paid to watch, but not to watch the art. They spend their time looking at other people looking at art. In fact, through their observation they are making sure that the visitor remains in observational mode. Tatiana Macedo’s 45-minute film Seems so long ago, Nancy reverses this institutional order of gazes. Shot entirely on location at the Tate Britain and Tate Modern galleries, the film points its camera at exactly these second-order observers. Macedo orchestrates, through an intricate choreography of small gestures, asides and looks towards the periphery of the museum structure, an enchanting portrait of the London landmarks by way of their guarding staff. Her subjects are a number of gallery attendants, which we encounter and re-encounter throughout their shifts, rotating through guard and greeting duty.

By way of this simple inversion, Macedo is able to shift our understanding of the museum space, as well as of her own role as the artist and director within the web of interrelations set up by her film. The reversal of the gaze, as a self-referential cinematic gesture, is a gesture of empathy and complicity between the filmmaker and her subjects. Both are determined by their outward gaze, implying an invisibility, which is ultimately unattainable and undesirable. Setting up a camera in any given space will alter that space and the behavior of the people within it. Similarly, knowing there is a guard standing behind me while I am contemplating a painting makes me aware of my own actions. There is no such thing as an image of an empty room – it is always the image of a room with at least a camera in it.

Ulrich Ziemons (Curator Berlinale Forum Expanded/Arsenal, Berlim)