Film as Sculpture at WIELS, Brussels

Film-as-Sculpture_Rosa_Barba_Boundaries-of-Consumption_2012
Rosa Barba, Boundaries of Consumption, 2012. 2 × metal globes, 16 mm projector, 16 mm film loop, film canisters. Courtesy of the artist.

Film as Sculpture
6 June – 18 August 2013
at WIELS, Brussels

Artists: Rosa Barba, Zbyněk Baladrán & Jiří Kovanda, Ulla von Brandenburg, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Rachel Harrison, Žilvinas Kempinas, Elad Lassry, Karthik Pandian and Bojan Šarčević

Curator: Elena Filipovic

Film as Sculpture looks at a new generation of artists and the ‘problem’ that a number of them seem to be insistently grappling with: how to create works that either sit between or somehow address two seemingly contradictory mediums: one of art history’s most classical forms, sculpture, and its apparent opposite, film (or video). For while film is typically thought of as being essentially moving, temporal and immaterial, an infinitely reproducible collection of fleeting images and flickering light (or, in the case of video, pixels and equally immaterial digital code), sculpture, almost by definition, is a solid, obdurate thing, nothing if not the literal attempt to give lasting form to matter. This group show investigates the growing interest among young artists to think through the specificities of sculpture and film by creating hybrid objects that respond to, inhabit, and question both traditions at once. Indebted to the legacy of 1970s expanded cinema, and resurgent at a moment when the 16 mm celluloid that many of them use is itself facing extinction, the fantastic constructions on view at WIELS foreground the slippery relations between the moving image and the sculptural object. [read the full text here]

WIELS
Contemporary Art Centre
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
1190 Brussels
Belgium
wiels.org

Opening hours
Wednesday – Sunday: 11h00 – 18h00

Film-as-Sculpture_Rachel-Harrison_AA_2010
Rachel Harrison, AA, 2010. Wood, bubble wrap, cardboard, acrylic, tennis shirt, A/V cart, DVD player, speakers, projector, extension cord, five hair rollers, pack of gum, ear plugs, and American Apparel video, color, sound, 18 minutes (2009). Courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photography by Brian Forrest.

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