The Whole World
Curated by Ian White
1st January 2008 – 1st March 2008
The Whole
World is a list of lists: a programme of artists' film and video and an interactive online exhibition.
Both a formal device and a political strategy,
film and video that deploys a list as part of its structure often does
so with political intent: to subvert hierarchies, to undermine
rationalism or to reveal contradiction. In contemporary culture the
pop chart's Top 10 has been replaced by an ever-expanding craze for
"Top 100s" of everything from Hollywood genres to celebrity gaffes. The Whole World attempts to wrestle back
the initiative…
A selection of artists' film and video that
feature lists or different kinds of taxonomies - visual, audio or
textual – are presented as an online exhibition of extracts. Works by
Dalia Neis, Uriel Orlow, Jean-Gabirel Périot, Michael Robinson and
Valerie Tevere take as their subject such wildly diverse lists as
depictions of saints, everything on Ebay, magazine advertising, our
mediated world, protest, violence and war, the pages of National Geographic magazine and the words spoken by people on
the streets of New York. Text scrolls across the
screen, images flash past, immersive landscapes ultimately
disintegrate. Many things are logged and something is undone.
At the same time, viewers are invited to contribute to
the programme by uploading their own video list, be that an extract from an existing work or something made specially for the purpose, to compile a unique, exponential collection: an extraordinary list of lists, of
the world as we know it – the whole
world.
The Whole World is situated somewhere between
the
absurd and obsessive enterprises of Flaubert's eponymous characters
Bouvard and Pecuchet (they hopelessly collect and explore until,
exhausted, they revert to their original jobs as copy clerks) and the Japanese animated game Katamari in which players roll all matter – objects, buildings, landscapes,
the world itself - into snowballing globes of stuff. The Whole
World is ridiculous and irreverent, ambitious and viral.
Programme
Dalia Neis, Saints, 2005 / Jean Gabriel Periot, 21.04.02, 2002 / Uriel Orlow, Everything in Red, Yellow, Blue and Green, 2006 /
Michael Robinson, You Don't Bring Me Flowers, 2005 / Valerie Tevere, When I Say / Valerie Tevere & Angel Navarez, Freque
ncy Allocations / Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
Submitted work will be selected to join
The Whole World as well as
tank.tv's programme on the CASZartscreen in Amsterdam.
From the press release:
1,2,3… Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art is the next stage of an exhibition and research project that explores the “continuous” history of experimentation in film and art and the interaction of both fields. Grounded in the extensive Polish experimental film output of the 1970s, 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes will offer a selection of films mostly produced by Polish artists from that period, whilst including contemporary international artistic proposals that constitute a challenge for the interpretation of the history of experimental cinema. The exhibition follows a schema structured under the following headings: Analytical Strategies. Games and Participation. Political Film and Soc Art (Socialist Art). Image and Sound. Imagination. Consumption. This specific disposition will structure the works with the aim of analysing both formally and conceptually the use of experimental strategies within visual production.
The 17th edition of the 
This year's edition of the 
The 2007 edition of 
End of the year's festival bonanza continues with the second edition of San Francisco -based 
This year's edition of the London Film Festival brings us again its Avant garde Weekend,