Friday April 28th, 2023 – Jeffrey Vallance, The Gospel According to Jeffrey, video of the performance at the chapel of Saint-Léger, Geneva, 82’, sound, English, 2012
The CEC is launching a video production project, initiated as a consequence of the pandemic and the need to develop digital resources. The project will take place in several stages, most often in relation to the CEC’s programming. This series of short films will be posted regularly on our website. The videos will be divided into three chapters under the generic title “Films”: “Recent videos”, “Documents” and “Archives.” The “Documents” section will mainly present interviews with artists, critics or curators; the “Archives” section will make it possible to discover or rediscover some of the videos created in the context of exhibitions, events or editions from the 1990s onwards.
A group of four new videos, produced between 2022 and 2023, with Guillaume Dénervaud, Paul Paillet, Mai-Thu Perret and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, as well as Paul Viaccoz, is now available on our modified and expanded website, thanks to Niels Wehrspann (graphic designer, Lausanne), and will be screened at the CEC, from March 16th to April 28th, 2023, with a private view on Thursday, March 16th, 2023, from 6 pm to 9 pm, as part of la Nuit des Bains.
Videos: new and revisited will open with Paul Paillet’s video, screened from March 16th to 24th, 2023, and Guillaume Dénervaud’s, from March 28th to 31st, 2023. These two artists exhibited at the CEC in 2020 and 2021, during the first two years of Covid-19.
For this invitation, Paul Paillet has directed a hypnotic and psychedelic video-clip, working from a series of collages with zingy colours. Handmade, these collages were then digitised and enhanced with special effects. Reminiscent of vertical smartphone screens, the ultimate symbol of the rapid and uncontrolled circulation of images taken on the fly, Surprise/Innocence is a mixture of low-tech and high-tech. The animation follows a filiform figure with aquatic movements, crossing a landscape of hills against a backdrop of a setting sun and more or less enigmatic architectures. This character moves to the rhythm of an increasingly frenetic live performance by the collectives Tamal Nuisances and Csters, recorded at the Teknival de Chambley in 2004. This Hardtek soundtrack is strangely linked to the album Wings (2016) by the South Korean interplanetary boy band BTS, whose members read extracts from the novel Demian.Die Geschichte einer Jugend by Hermann Hesse (1919). Paul Paillet intentionally takes up this sampling technique which is emblematic of electronic music, especially that of the Free Party movement. This film is a nod to the installation Tin Can BTS Radio (Wings), which was presented during the artist’s solo exhibition fascination for fire which opened at the CEC in September 2020.
AGLOROMONES is Guillaume Dénervaud’s first video. It presents a selection of images shot outdoors, embodying the research and concerns linked to the era of the Anthropocene, which underpin the artist’s entire body of work. Filmed on the route that separates Guillaume Dénervaud’s former residence in the 18th arrondissement of Paris from his studio in Saint-Denis, the images document the artist’s daily observations in this rapidly-transforming part of the city. AGLOROMONES presents a series of filmed scenes between abstraction and reality, a crossing of these interstitial and peripheral spaces, transit areas between the city and the countryside.
The programme will continue with the screening of two documents, directly related to the exhibitions of Paul Viaccoz, Mai-Thu Perret and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, which took place in 2021, 2022 and 2018.
Recorded in January 2022 in Paul Viaccoz’ studio in Courroux, Murs chamaniques. Commentaires is an extension of his ESPRIT ES-TU LÀ ? exhibition. In the voice-over, the artist recounts his spiritual journey to encounter illness and death. The film also presents a visual journey, a tracking shot which encompasses his collection of objects, often linked to personal memories or mystical images, that make up the Murs chamaniques which the artist has been continuously developing in his house and studio for the past few years. Day after day, he assembles objects taken from nature or from everyday life, fetishes and talismans which are then juxtaposed or combined with photographs, drawings, screenshots of his videos, postcards, masks, musical instruments, skulls and crossbones, sabres, dried flowers, feathers, jewellery and pieces of embroidery. This collection of objects, images and texts forms a mural puzzle, rearranged according to the artist’s moods, reflections and lived experience.
The Conversation in English between Mai-Thu Perret and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy opens a series of filmed interviews, which will continue with the one recently recorded at the CEC between Liz Craft and Paul-Aymar Mourgue d’Algue. Conversation is an opportunity for the two artists to revisit the Scrolls in the Wind. A collection of scripts and poems by Harry Burke, Cyrus Grace Dunham, Sharon Hayes, James English Leary, Sophy Naess, Amy Sillman and Emily Sundblad edition (2018) by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, and Mai-Thu Perret’s My Sister’s Hand in Mine (2022), both produced by the CEC. This exchange reveals the complicity between two artists with unique backgrounds, but especially their shared interest in traditional craft practices and their curiosity about various techniques and trades, which they revisit regularly. They share this reflection and this blurring of the boundaries between arts and crafts.
This first round of screenings will conclude with the presentation of four videos from the CEC archives, one per day for four days, from April 25th to 28th, 2023, some of which have been remastered and reformatted for our expanded website: Detroit on Circle by Alexandre Bianchini, Brave new world, March 2020 by Liz Craft, Cosmic Storm, Cern by Gianni Motti, The Gospel According to Jeffrey by Jeffrey Vallance.
In collaboration with Zsuzsanna Szabo, coordinator and production manager
The project Videos: new and revisited is supported by the Federal Office of Culture and the Republic and Canton of Geneva.
