Mental Landscape

Track One

The time is now! The present can be replaced in real time. Not quite yet by the future, but very easily by the past? eteam's video Track One is a replay of such time disjuncture. As they keep following the memory of a yellow cab that keeps driving through the now deserted streets of Taipei, their pastime augments itself with a mesmerizing sense of reality.

Mike Kuchar

Midnight Carnival

Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.

-- Mike Kuchar

Basma Alsharif

Everywhere was the Same

In an empty room, a slideshow projection of abandoned places plays alongside the narrative of two girls who find themselves on the shores of a pre-apocalyptic paradise. Told through subtitle text that weaves fact and fiction together, the story of a massacre unfolds. When the image and text malfunctions and the story is no longer comprehensible, the video wanders away from the room of the slideshow, allowing us to see what is happening elsewhere.

Basma Alsharif

We Began by Measuring Distance

Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.

Produced by The Sharjah Biennial Production Programme.

Steve Reinke

Not Torn (Asunder from the Very Start)

The archive is not a repository of cultural memory, but of dreams, a bank of dream material. Both memory and archive embrace death, but from contrary positions. The archive is a mausoleum that pretends to be a vast garden. Memory is an irradiated zoo in which the various animals are mutating extravagantly and dying slowly.

-- Steve Reinke

Dani Leventhal

Hearts Are Trump Again

"By way of lush formal and associative shifts, Hearts Are Trump Again evokes the ever-present tension between seemingly polarized states of experience. Desire and repulsion; freedom and constraint; pain and pleasure all find articulation in images of ferocious dogs and mock conversations about childbearing. Tonally complex and viscerally rich, Hearts Are Trump Again is a lyrical exploration of emotional weather."

--Brett Price

Hester Scheurwater

It Hurts

The repeatedly distorted, primate behaviour of an (ani)female carrying her baby, reflecting the pain and suffering provoked by the mother/child relationship.

Ximena Cuevas

Ximena Cuevas: Dormimundo Vol. 1 (Sleepworld Vol 1.)

"If there's something big, big that you want to reach for, you begin by dreaming." —Ivonne and Ivette

"The discomfort in Sleepworld Volume 1 is that of being oneself. The videos included here look at who we are and what we imagine we are. They are experiments in appearances, about the use of artifice to improve life or hide it. It is a reflection on moral displacement, hypocrisy, self-contained dreams, self-loathing, self-destruction in order to repeatedly kill our dreams.

Hester Scheurwater

Mama

"Mama mama mama...," a woman calls out again and again, over and over. Is it her child that she mimics, or is she calling for her own mother? A desperate video performance in the first person.

Barry Doupé

Ponytail

This feature-length video follows several inflicted characters and recounts the ways in which they find resolve. A series of entropic scenarios held together by an attraction to failure and its spectacle describe the characters' malfunction - their inability to fulfill personal desire. Compelled by the consequences and rewards of their attempts they question their own trajectory. Using elements of melodrama, performative monologue and traditional narrative structure Ponytail presents a unique society of characters that destroy the distinction between memory and invention.

Hester Scheurwater

Poster Girl

As if trapped inside a nightmare, the main protagonist of Poster Girl is haunted by disturbing visions, thoughts and fantasies, which the viewer is privy to. She is joined at various points in the video by another woman, whose role in the narrative remains unclear – is she meant to function as a guardian or a demon? The video further complicates the matter by representing both women as simultaneously wounded and wounding, inviting and threatening, vulnerable and menacing.

Hester Scheurwater

Purify

Purify shows a disconnected women washing herself in blood.

Călin Dan

Sample City

With sampled image and sound sequences referring to one another in a precisely calculated rhythmic alternation on four projection surfaces, Călin Dan draws a portrait of the city of Bucharest. Dilapidated tower blocks next to estates of terraced houses, Roma families camping with their horses and carts in the wastelands in the midst of the city, broken streets and new shopping paradises--today the formerly communist Bucharest is a city in upheaval, full of social contradictions and oppositions.

Peggy Ahwesh

Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh

This 3-disc DVD collection features nine works by maverick film and video maker Peggy Ahwesh. The set also includes title descriptions, a biography, film/videography, a selected bibliography, and the following texts:

Pistolary! Films and Videos by Peggy Ahwesh -- Eileen Myles
Film, Baby -- Peggy Ahwesh
Interview with Peggy Ahwesh -- Scott MacDonald

Jennet Thomas

The Man Who Went Outside

A distinguished looking man (performance artist Richard Layzell) is apparently trapped in an ever changing void of colour, locked in a power play with a perversely operated camera. A mute, caged, charismatic TV presenter he is by turns charming, menacing, educational, confused. At times he appears to have great powers. A voice over tells us extraordinary things - how this man is special - the first man to 'have a baby'. Hallucinogenic flash-frames punctuate the colour field to give us a view of his world's disturbing and alien futuristic logic.

Mental Landscape

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