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Showing posts from October, 2008

Seville Biennial

Just back from Spain where I managed to see the Seville Biennial http://www.fundacionbiacs.com/biacs3/index.php in the Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas. I thought as I entered that it is a brave curator who has “Miraculous Moments” written over the entrance. I have a number of responses to the show: the actual experience of individual works; the fairly clear but fragmented curatorial concept and then the catalogue. Luckily I didn’t read the latter until after I had seen the show. Particular highlights for me were Tamás Waliczky ’s ‘Landscape’ - http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$5790 Rafael lozano-hemmer ’s ‘Tercera persona’ http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/eproyecto.html Austrian Ruth Schnell ’s ‘Retinal Scripts’ were a striking effect installed at various locations around the site. At first glance these appeared to be simple lines of small lights but as the website says “hologram-like words that are generated by transmitting high frequency light impulses to l

Berlin

I went to Berlin ostensibly to attend the Zebra Poetry-Film Festival http://www.literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=494&L=1 but who needs an excuse to visit your favourite city. The Poetry-Film Festival was execrable. The audience (at least starting out) was impressively large, so it is a double crime to have such poor work showing. Pretty much all I saw was either weak narrative poetry voiced over or subtitled to mediocre illustrative film images; or generally coming out of Eastern Europe/the Balkans laugh-out-loudly-bad Kafkaesque nightmare animations. The fare could be summed up as a festival of banal verse illustrated by plodding film-workshop shorts. “Again and Again” was an 11 minute documentary filmed in a glass factory in the Myanmar countryside with a subtitled and spoken Buddhist poem accompanying. The German producer stood up at the end and talked about her documentaries and how this film by The Maw Naing had come out of a film workshop she had set up in that country.

Zebra Poetry Film Festival next

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Just back from the European Museums Forum in Bertinoro Castle, Italy http://www.ceub.it/index_en.cfm There's lots to report but I am now off to Berlin for the Zebra Poetry Film Festival http://www.literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=494&L=1 - so I will have post a double report when I get back next week.