Directors Lounge: Jari Haanperän - Spectres of Light
Friday, August 13th, 2010, 21h
Galerie Meinblau
Pfefferberg, Christinenstr. 18/19
D-10119 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg

Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Jari Haanperän lives in Berlin and together with Mirka Flander, his producer, he is running the gallery Suomesta. With his installations, Jari Haanperän takes up and further develops the idea of the Light Space Modulator by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Although Jari's film works on the other hand appear very different to the abstract spirituality of Moholy-Nagy's light machine, the two constituting elements seem to be the constant source of inspiration for artist and filmmaker Haanperän: light and the spirited machine. However with Jari, these elements seem to evoke their opponents: darkness, which is needed for the effects of light, or lumen, and the darker forces.

Maybe, in order to deal with darkness and those darker forces, we also need storytelling, dark humour and irony. At least, this is what Jari Haaperän is doing in his film works: he tells short stories. In several of Jari's films, the story goes back to the mechanical age: "The Turkish Chess Machine" refers to the famous "Schachtürke", a mechanical Robot made in Austria in 1769. In "Kalavalo", on the other hand, the artist gives a surrealist vision of the first deep-sea exploration undertaken in a spherical steel box by biologist Charles William Beebe in 1930. This saying, don't we see the mechanical age as the succeeding period of enlightenment?

In his most recent film work, the documentary "World of Light", however, there may be the hint for a turning point: Although the images all show images of dark spaces lit by multitudes of lights, in the narration a different idea emanates: what, if there will be too to many lights, too much light? Could it then be, that the future spectres will no more live in darkness but lie in light overflow, in over-lightenment? Like Jari, we still love the dark caves of cinema.

Programme:
- Indoor Light
- Kalavalo
- The Dark Side of the Car
- The Turkish Chess Machine/Die Turkische Schachmaschine
- Bang
- World of Light

Artist Link:
http://www.jarihaanpera.com/

More info (curator's page)
http://www.richfilm.de/filmUpload/1-framesJHaanperan.html

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Gallery Meinblau
http://www.meinblau.de