CAM in Motion: 'Manipulated ready-mades'
Film cycle 'You can't see a thing there'
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Date
26 Jun – 05 Aug 2024
Location
Jardim GulbenkianPricing
- Free entry
In the new CAM in Motion film cycle, curated by Katherine Sirois, the title ‘You can’t see a thing there’ is a slight provocation that refers to questions of visibility and perception in images in motion, conditioned by effects such as unfolding, superimposition or multiplication, defocusing, transparency, obstruction or brightness, fragmentation or pixelation.
The title of this programme is a tribute to Daniel Arasse (Alger 1944-Paris 2003) who dedicated a large part of his life as an art historian to questions of representation and the journeys of the gaze in Italian Renaissance painting. Sensitive to the dazzle aroused by painting, he developed the practice of seeking out and detecting the subtle, humorous and often hidden stories behind the wonder of what appears at first glance. In his book On n’y voit rien, published in Paris in 2000, Arasse pointed out the enigmas and games of meaning contained in artists’ compositions.
The cycle exhibits a selection of videos which, in many cases, present an experimental work involving playful alterations of performative or pre-existing visual material through the use of current technologies. It aims to offer a reflection on the paradox of analogue and digital images, between their triumphant role of showing and their simultaneous dynamics of artifice, manipulation or deterioration.
The selection offers the public a mix of pioneering works that use analogue media and manual techniques, landmarks in the recent history of video art, and recent works produced by emerging artists.
The programme is divided into three sessions organised around various technical and conceptual approaches: ‘Obstruction, Blurring and Deterioration’, from 18 May to 24 June; ‘Manipulated ready-mades’, from 26 June to 5 August; ‘Audio and visual collage’, from 7 August to 9 September.
CAM IN MOTION
CAM in Motion is an ‘outdoor’ programme that brings together a series of site-specific interventions by artists and exhibitions with works from the Collection in different spaces in the city of Lisbon and its surroundings. More info
Biographies
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Katherine Sirois
Katherine Sirois (Montreal, 1975) is a Lisbon-based Canadian art historian and curator. In addition to writing essays for exhibition catalogues, she has authored texts on artists and artworks for museums, galleries and private collections. Most recently, she has worked with a number of young artists and curated exhibitions of contemporary art in galleries, private or public institutions and associations.
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António Palolo
António Palolo (Évora, 1946 – Lisbon, 2000), a self-taught artist, carried out his first plastic experiments at a very young age with Joaquim Bravo, Álvaro Lapa and António Charrua. His work developed in a relationship of complicity and attention to his time, which allowed him to establish multidirected and apparently contradictory lines of research. From informalism to the avant-garde, Pop art, geometric abstractionism, hard-edge and conceptual art, Palolo has experienced an imperative need to experiment. Several of his works in painting, drawing and video are represented in the collection of CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, such as ‘Metamorfose’ (1968/1969), ‘Drawings’ (1971) or ‘Hórrido Silêncio do Teu Corpo’ (1966).
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Francisco Novais
Francisco Novais (Lisbon, 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Lisbon. He attended the specialised course in Printmaking and Screen Printing at the António Arroio Art School and graduated in Multimedia Art from the School of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. His works are mostly the result of collecting and manipulating archive materials, extracting hidden meanings, reconfiguring concepts or constructing imaginary landscapes that combine contrasting languages and subcultures, in a game between nostalgia and hypermodernity.
Programme
'Manipulated ready-mades'
In the likes of dada artists whose satirical and rebellious spirit was brought out in collages and photomontages produced from a dynamic process of appropriation, fragmentation and recombination of ready-to-use material, the artists selected for this session use and bring together different pre-existing visual and audio material pertaining to global heritages.
These recycled images come from heteroclite sources ranging from art history to fashion magazines (António Palolo), from old postcards to ethnological documentation on funerary rites or to Japanese advertising (Francisco Novais). They go through different manipulation processes such as cutting, assemblage, juxtaposition, sequencing and animation, superimposition, pixelation or degradation.
António Palolo, 'Metamorphosis', c. 1968/1969
'Metamorphosis' reconfigures male and female bodies with superimposed images of cowboys and pin-ups, cut out from magazines and set in motion in the company of various geometric shapes (circles and semicircles, cylinders and squares).
The relationship between these early black and white experiments and Pop art, the Dada movement and Surrealism is visible in the use of images from popular culture, but also in the geometric shapes that recall Marcel Duchamp's Anaemic Cinema (1926), for example in the case of the recurring circles. The circle will become a vital symbol for Palolo and will reappear throughout his work.
Francisco Novais, 'Drums', 2021
Digital animation over the music piece Drums by the American composer Laurie Spiegel, featuring a collection of Canadian mountain landscape postcards from the early 20th century.
Francisco Novais, 'Untitled (Tombstones)', 2023
A compilation of documentary images of gravestones and graves from different parts of the world superimposed by a vertical, luminous, green-coloured line. This peculiar and contrasting element comes from the extraction of a technical error in an educational film from 1969 about space photography, entitled 'View From Space'.
Based on a Japanese advert from the 80s, the artist explores the deterioration of visual information on VHS with a process of isolating a visual element and close-up, causing a significant loss of quality that transforms the face in focus into a kind of living, disquieting mask.
Credits
Curator
Katherine Sirois
