Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain will conclude their month-long residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI), Paris, with a screening and discussion of their moving image work on Monday August 28th at 7.30pm in the CCI. Langan and Le Cain will show three of their short films and talk about the work they have been engaged in while in Paris.
Since 2010, Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain have worked together in an audio-visual partnership that has resulted in thirteen moving image works to date. This is built on the fitting match between Langan’s magnetic, troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms. In 2017, they received an Arts Council of Ireland award to make Inside, their first feature film. They are both affiliated with the Dublin-based Experimental Film Society. Their work has been widely screened at venues throughout the world, including a retrospective screening at Microscope Gallery, New York. Their film Light/Sound (2010) is part of the permanent collection of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris.
Vicky Langan is a Cork-based artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly performance, sound, and film. Langan both embraces and projects vulnerability, offering an intimate territory loaded with personal symbolism and unguarded emotion. With a focus on the sounds of the body and its functions, involving contact-miked skin, amplified breath and live electronic manipulation, Langan’s work sits between sound and performance art. Using simple raw materials , she layers physical gestures and scraps of sound to create intensely personal imaginary landscapes. Mundane domesticity is explored as a temporal space where the material body and sensual inner worlds mesh. In opening herself emotionally, she creates warm yet discomforting rituals that at once embrace the viewer and remain resolutely private, exploring the limits of what can be shared between people and what must remain mysterious. As a curator, Langan is known for Black Sun Cork, a platform for world-class underground music and experimental cinema in Ireland that she founded in 2009.
Maximilian Le Cain makes experimental moving image works that explore a personal relationship with cinema as a site of haunting. Accepted visual and storytelling codes are encouraged to collapse into a more personalized system that approaches moving imagery as an experiential construct open to possession by multiple claims of memory and interpretation. His extensive body of films and videos has been screened in cinemas and art venues worldwide. He is also a writer on film whose texts have appeared in such publications as La Furia Umana and Senses of Cinema. He regularly programmed experimental film for the Cork-based experimental music/film event Black Sun and has presented avant-garde film events in collaboration with, amongst others, Cork Film Centre and Cork Film Festival.
