Loops.Expanded 2022 - 2023
Portugal Exhibition
February 1st to April 2, 2023
It is with renewed strength, as part of a partnership that will continue over the next five years, that the National Museum of Contemporary Art MNAC) and DuplaCena celebrate the 2022 - 2023 edition of Loops.Expanded in Portugal - the season’s first exhibition of the international network dedicated to the research, dissemination and reflection on the concept of the loop.
In this edition, Loops.Expanded brings a deliciously extreme heterogeneous selection, whose works present great nuances of formal, generational and geographic diversity in relation to its moving object. Artists from Argentina, Belgium, Belarus and Taiwan, with varied backgrounds and forms of expression, eviscerate the loop from the most different perspectives.
Such as the poetic transformation of Super-8 fragmented family images into a meta-narrative, conceived by a son’s intimate gaze in relation to his mother (Javier Olivera, A Possible Portrait of My Mother); the creation of a truly architectural experience on screen, in a formal, constructivist portrayal of black and white lights in motion (Anouk de Clercq, Building); the splendid visual, existential and philosophical journey into the Myth of Sisyphus (Chia Yun Wu, Five, Four, Three, Two); and the synesthetic effort of an “on the road drawing”, which seeks to encompass and demarcate the world on a larger-than-life scale (Ganadzi Buto, Too Big Drawing).
Alisson Avila, Irit Batsry, Emília Tavares
Such selection reflects the nature of Loops.Expanded as a platform: a curatorial experiment with a decentralized model, carrying out activities in its own name and through partnerships developed by Duplacena (Lisbon), Proyector (Madrid), OndaVideo (Pisa), and WWVF (Amsterdam).
Calendar, Artists and Works:
February 1 - 12, 2023:A possible portrait of my mother, 2021
Super-8 (transferred to video) and Video, color, sound, 06:26
Biography: Javier Olivera (Argentina, 1969) crosses the disciplines of painting, photography, video, installation, objects and cinema to address the relationship between memory and identity as constructors of the individual and social being. Initially trained in painting with the Argentine artists Luis Felipe Noé and Eduardo Stupía, he later studied cinema and video at UCLA (USA) and Ibero-American Literature at Fundación José Ortega y Gasset (Spain). With a career linked to the film industry, Olivera wrote and directed different features between 1999 and 2018, being nominated and awarded by the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Argentina for the documentaries El patrón: radiografía de un crimen (2014 - scriptwriter), La Sombra (2014 - photography) and the fiction El Visitante (1999 - best film), in addition to several productions for organizations such as UNICEF and Telesur. Since 1990, he has been developing a body of work that includes paintings, photographs, videos and video installations, where he applies the knowledge and technology acquired in the field of cinema to create independent and authorial works without ties to industrial standards. This production has been exhibited in individual and group shows in Argentina and abroad and is represented in private collections in France, Argentina and the United States.Synopsis: Working with archival footage from the 60s and home movies on Super 8, A possible portrait of my mother suggests a playful narrative, which points to a piece of the director's mother's life timeline: an uncommitted youth, the appeal of being a socially rebel and the transition to motherhood. The use of the loop enhances the idea of an insistence on the need to address affection through images - and also through the sound design, since a single double note is repeated throughout the work, creating the atmosphere of a mantra and its trance effect. A memory exercise, with a solid formal approach and poetic discourse, where the projection itself also suggests the idea of a cycle.
https://vimeo.com/javieroliverahttps://www.imdb.com/name/nm0647056/?ref_=tt_ov_dr
=======Building, 2003
Video (animation by Joris Cool), color, sound, 12:00
Biography: Anouk De Clercq (Belgium, 1971) explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds, between the visible and the imaginary. His recent work is based on the utopian idea of “radical empathy” and what lies behind “reality”. Author of Where is Cinema, published by Archive Books, Anouk sums up a trajectory with works of art exhibited in the main contemporary (video)art exhibition spaces and events around the world. She is co-founder of Auguste Orts, On & For Production and Distribution, and responsible for starting the nomadic film platform Monokino. She is also affiliated with the School of Arts University College Ghent as a visiting professor.
Five, Four, Three, Two, 2022
4K Video, color, sound, 13:20
Biography: Wu Chia Yun (Taiwan, 1988) is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. She received an MA degree in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art (UK, 2016) and an MFA degree in Motion Pictures from the National Taiwan University of Arts (Taiwan, 2018). Her works are a mixture of image and have expanded from film to installation and conceptual art; to explore the materiality of images, she has applied the technique of film narration, mise-en-scène and cinematic language into the experiments in transmedia. In addition to the expansion of images, Wu also makes fiction films. She uses characters and plots to narrate the indescribable life stories and discuss the sense of belonging, freedom, and human condition. Wu’s first film has been included in The European Independent Film Channel (France, 2015). She has been selected to the Proyector Festival de Videoarte (Spain, 2019, 2022), European Media Art Festival, (Germany, 2020), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (France, 2021), Fine Arts Film Festival (USA, 2022), London Short Film Festival (UK, 2022) and more. Her works have been screened at some international institutions, including ICA London, Louvre Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, BilbaoArte Fundazioa, amongst others.Synopsis: Five, Four, Three, Two responds to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, focusing on accepting fate rather than resisting it. The film generalizes the myth across the unrelated lives of three people eventually connected in their peaceful cycle of passing the boulder, without beginning or ending, joy or sorrow.
https://chiayunwu.com=======
March 14 - April 2, 2023:Genadzi Buto, Belarus
Too Big Drawing, 2021
Digital Video, color, sound, 5:13
Biography: Genadzi Buto (Belarus, 1983) is an artist, director and animator who graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts. He worked in motion design and video effects for advertising, music videos and cinema; later, from Saint Petersburg in Russia, he participated in film production as a classical animator and storyboard artist and was a director of animated feature films for major animation studios. At the same time, Genadzi continues to make independent and animated experimental short films.Synopsis: The drawing extends beyond the paper, outlining the real world.
https://www.youtube.com/c/GenadziButo
