Pep Agut
Eric Baudelaire
Matthew Buckingham
Marianna Christofides
Simon Fujiwara
Vittorio Santoro
Shira Wachsmann

Eric Baudelaire
The Makes, 2010
HD video, 26 min.
film still
© Eric Baudelaire, Courtesy Greta Meert, Brussels

Multiple constructions are dealt with in Eric Baudelaire’s video work The Makes (2010). By means of the factographic praxis, he accomplishes a balancing act between fiction and reality. The video adopts the format of bonus features on a DVD. In it, we can see a staged interview with Philippe Azoury, a specialist of Italian Cinema and the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. The conversation revolves around a purported remake of an Antonioni film he had planned to make in Japan in the Sixties. Although the film was never made it was discussed in his 1983 book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, a compilation of notes and intentions for films that were never made. Baudelaire constructs a fictional film, in which he deals with the relationship between images and events, documents and narratives in their historical as well as hypothetical potential.

Marianna Christofides’ triptych Sequence (2011) also deals with a film that was never made. Historical postcards made between 1890-1923 from the Yoshiwara prostitute district in Tokyo are shown. These are assembled into a film sequence, despite the fact that such a film was never actually made. Various technical terms from the language of film editing appear underneath the images, thus connecting multiple shots with one another and creating the illusion of a concentrated narrative through cinematographic montage, which was not yet invented at the time that some of these postcards appeared.

Matthew Buckingham
"1720", 2009
continuous color 16mm film projection with sound
© Matthew Buckingham; Courtesy Konrad Fischer Galerie and Murray Guy, New York

In Matthew Buckingham’s film and sound installation 1720 (2009), the title’s date is projected onto a small suspended screen in black Caslon typeface whilst Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata in G major is playing. The artist refers to historical events in 1720, the year in which Englishman William Caslon invented the eponymous font which revolutionised book design in Great-Britain. It is presumed that Bach wrote his Sonata for Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Köthen in the same year. The third movement of this work has a duration of two minutes and thirty seconds – the same length as the running-time of a one-hundred foot roll of sixteen millimeter film. The film becomes an intersection between aural and visual artifacts that share a common date of origin but are otherwise contingent.

Simon Fujiwara, "Studio Pietà (King Kong Komplex)", 2013, c-prints, triptych, each part framed: 114x79,5 cm, © Simon Fujiwara, Courtesy Galerie Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt; photograph taken by Lance Brewer, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery

In his three-piece photographic work Studio Pietà (2013), Simon Fujiwara develops a cathartic strategy to redefine his complex feelings in relation to the memory of a family portrait. In his effort to reconstruct a remembered photo of his young mother in the arms of her Lebanese lover, Fujiwara becomes the director of this scene, which he reconstructs with actors. Tying it to the religious iconography of the Pietà, he thus edits and overwrites conventional societal constructions and their limits.

Pep Agut
Personal Memory, 2013
HD video, 13:08 min
© Pep Agut, Courtesy Àngels Barcelona

In his video work Personal Memory (2013) Pep Agut is seen naked, slowly wiping the floor of his studio, the carrier of the traces of his painterly past. Simultaneously, words related to the human body appear. Agut connects his own history, the traces of which he is trying to erase, with the physical quality of a body, over which he is sliding. In a sense, he deconstructs the medium of painting and his own biography, thus questioning the status of the artist.

In her video, young Israeli artist Shira Wachsmann shows how she tries to wipe out the traces of her work zerstört (2013): a site-specific work, which she has carved into the floor of an exhibition space. We see how she fruitlessly rubs cement into the floor’s gaps again and again. The tragical political dimension of this work becomes apparent once one finds out that it relates to maps from the British Mandate (1922-1948). On these maps, the word "zerstört" (destroyed) was written underneath the names of eliminated Palestinian villages.

Vittorio Santoro
Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I-IV, 2013, four-part installation:

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I, 2013
vintage Marshall Plan European Recovery flour sack on carton sheet on floor (93x58 cm)

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père II, 2013
colorless synthetic resin and crushed Alcacyl tablets on found window framework with window glass (100x75x5 cm), black paint on wall, white chalk

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père III, 2013
white paint on found window (84x111x8 cm), mounted transversally on wall, light bulb with base

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père IV, 2013
split-flap display, white wood rack (14x85x21 cm), 40 Italian texts, programmed cycle: ca. 7 min., loop


Found biographical materials form the basis for Swiss-Italian artist Vittorio Santoro’s four-part installation Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I-IV (2013). Two windows, a split-flap display and a vintage Marshall Plan European Recovery flour sack refer to his family’s Sicilian past prior to his parents’ emigration to Switzerland in the Sixties. Drawing upon these relics from his family’s history, Santoro creates a fictional, historical space through a shift in their contextualisation, in which he transforms his personal connection to these objects into general societal and political inquiries into isolation and integration, protection and vulnerability.

Vittorio Santoro
Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I-IV, 2013, four-part installation:

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I, 2013
vintage Marshall Plan European Recovery flour sack on carton sheet on floor (93x58 cm)

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père II, 2013
colorless synthetic resin and crushed Alcacyl tablets on found window framework with window glass (100x75x5 cm), black paint on wall, white chalk

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père III, 2013
white paint on found window (84x111x8 cm), mounted transversally on wall, light bulb with base

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père IV, 2013
split-flap display, white wood rack (14x85x21 cm), 40 Italian texts, programmed cycle: ca. 7 min., loop

Vittorio Santoro
Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I-IV, 2013, four-part installation:

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I, 2013
vintage Marshall Plan European Recovery flour sack on carton sheet on floor (93x58 cm)

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père II, 2013
colorless synthetic resin and crushed Alcacyl tablets on found window framework with window glass (100x75x5 cm), black paint on wall, white chalk

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père III, 2013
white paint on found window (84x111x8 cm), mounted transversally on wall, light bulb with base

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père IV, 2013
split-flap display, white wood rack (14x85x21 cm), 40 Italian texts, programmed cycle: ca. 7 min., loop

Vittorio Santoro
Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I-IV, 2013, four-part installation:

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père I, 2013
vintage Marshall Plan European Recovery flour sack on carton sheet on floor (93x58 cm)

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père II, 2013
colorless synthetic resin and crushed Alcacyl tablets on found window framework with window glass (100x75x5 cm), black paint on wall, white chalk

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père III, 2013
white paint on found window (84x111x8 cm), mounted transversally on wall, light bulb with base

Une certaine idée de l'histoire de mon père IV, 2013
split-flap display, white wood rack (14x85x21 cm), 40 Italian texts, programmed cycle: ca. 7 min., loop