The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul

Published in conjunction with the exhibition For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness. Lina Selander in collaboration with Oscar Mangione held at Argos, Centre for Art & Media, Brussels, 24.09.2017 - 17.12.2017.

About the exhibition:
For a Time Light Must Be Called Darkness features six video installations, most of them made in collaboration with Oscar Mangione. These works take us to Bredäng (a suburb in south-west Stockholm), Berlin, the West Bank, Pripyat and Chernobyl. All of these places are the occasion and the starting point for broader reflections about our present in relation to historical facts. Selander visits these sites and like an archaeologist digs in their past, their monuments, museums and archives. She looks for visual documents, focuses on details and analytically sketches new hypothesis. In this way, she tries to retrace hidden links between distant imageries, correspondences and analogies, in order to create new narratives. In her essayistic approach, Selander combines her own texts and footage along with still images, quotes and archive material. In this way a constant tension springs within these multiple-layered audiovisual works and reminds us that seeing is never an innocent act.

How to live together in cramped quarters? How to create a microcosm against hostile surroundings? In Barge Life, Florian Deroo tackles these questions by looking at a mythical classic of French cinema: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante. A work brimming with the energies of surrealism and anarchism, L’Atalante follows a young couple, two shipmates, and a clowder of cats who dwell in the belly of a river barge. Deroo offers a wide-ranging essay on the film, revealing how it lovingly delineates a small group that withdraws from the rhythms of modern life to establish a different kind of existence elsewhere. In L’Atalante’s most riveting moments, the river barge becomes a vehicle for a powerful fantasy: a supple and mobile collective life, lived in sensuous interdependence.

Combining film criticism, philosophy, and biography, Deroo’s Barge Life reconsiders an important forerunner to the French New Wave and the early death of its director. Drawing readers into the intimately cramped living spaces of L’Atalante, Deroo explores the allure of retreating into a self-sufficient shelter, along with its intractable problems.

On the rich history of video art and its enduring relevance to today's artistic and critical practices. 

The New Television delves into the rich history of video art, reexamining the pivotal Open Circuits conference held at MoMA in 1974 and exploring its enduring relevance to today's artistic and critical practices. Open Circuits was an important event in establishing video art in American museums and articulated a range of conflicting teloses for the medium, some which materialized (like local cable television) and others that remain unrealized. The conference proceedings were published in 1977 as The New Television: A Public/Private Art, and the radical design of the book reflected the conference's utopian aims. 

This two-part publication includes a facsimile of the long-out-of-print conference proceedings and new essays and discussions by over a dozen scholars and artists. The new scholarly texts and previously unpublished archival documents in The New Television illuminate the network of institutional histories of video art, consider global televisual contexts and alternative critical approaches, and examine contemporary video art and its continued relevance from new perspectives.

Rachel Churner is the director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. She is also an art critic and editor, whose writings have appeared in Artforum and October magazine, among other publications. She was a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and is the editor of multiple books, including Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:) (2022); Yvonne Rainer: Revisions (no place press, 2020), Hans Haacke (MIT Press, 2015), and two volumes of writings by film historian Annette Michelson (MIT Press, 2017 and 2020). Churner is a faculty member at Eugene Lang College at The New School, New York.

Rebecca Cleman is Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and a writer. She has programmed screenings and special projects for such venues as the International House Philadelphia; the Museum of Art and Design, Anthology Film Archives, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City; and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Germany; and organized or co-organized many events for EAI, including a panel discussion on the films of David Wojnarowicz and a conversation between Hilton Als and The Wooster Group's director and co-founder Elizabeth LeCompte.

Tyler Maxin is curator at Blank Forms. He was previously the Communications and Special Projects Associate at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). His writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, BOMB, and Film Comment.

“In Facing Blackness, Ashley Clark traces the contours of Bamboozled, guiding readers through Lee’s intricate representation of race, politics, and popular culture. Clark moves beyond straightforward film criticism to situate the film within a complex history of blackness and American entertainment, making a powerful argument for its ongoing relevance and vitality. Thoughtful, rigorous, and witty, Facing Blackness is a thoroughly engaging analysis of this monumental film that is imperative reading for fans of Spike Lee and cinephiles more broadly.” — Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture

Ashley Clark is a writer, critic and film programmer. He was born in London, lives in Jersey City, and works in Manhattan. Facing Blackness, initially published in 2015, is his first book. This revised second edition contains a new foreword.

The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history. Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.