Owen Land: How can you believe anything he says?!
22.11.2009 - 24.01.2010
Opening: 21.11.2009, 5 - 10 pm
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Auguststraße 69
D-10117 Berlin

German Interviewer: What is the New American Cinema? Owen Land: Well, it’s not really new, it’s not entirely American and it’s not exactly Cinema. Thus the final words of one of the episodes in Dialogues (2007-09), the most recent work by American artist Owen Land. The two main characters are both Owen Land himself: the visual and the literary Owen Land skillfully disputing with one another. Cinematically these dialogues are mirrored by the ways in which the images, the music and the language compete, overlap and intertwine. Mythology, theology and philosophy as well as pornography, art and cultural criticism are all made to clash in Owen Land’s simple settings. Rooted in the structural film genre, different episodes conceptually string together in a trash aesthetic that’s beyond the New American Cinema.

The exhibition How can you believe anything he says?! is Owen Land’s first solo exhibition in Germany. The presented works are: Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965-66), No Sir, Orison! (1975), New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976), Undesirables (Excerpts from a Work in Progress) (1999) and Dialogues (2007-09).

The iotaSalon
Thursday, November 19, 7:30pm
UCLA Design | Media Arts Department
Broad Art Center, 1st Floor (EDA)
240 Charles E. Young Drive, on the UCLA campus
Westwood, California
FREE admission!

At the iotaSalon, we get together to screen and discuss new experimental works alongside some classics.  We couldn't have been more pleased about the turnout and discussion at our first revitalized salon in October! iota will hold another salon on November 19th in the Broad Art Center on campus, first floor at the EDA screening space.

The theme for this screening is RHYTHM.  How is rhythm dictated in abstract work? Is it musical? Poetic? Biological? Mechanical? How do visual and aural rhythms intertwine or reject each other?

We will screen a historic segment with works on film, followed by a selection of more contemporary works.

The second volume of the Exquisite Corpse Video Project will have it's first screening in Berlin on November 19th, 8p.m. at Kulturpalast Wedding International.

The project members Stina Pehrsdotter, Niclas Hallberg (Sweden), Wai Kit Lam (China), Kim Dotty Hachmann and Matthias Roth (Germany) will be in attendance.

WHAT?
The ECVP [Exquisite Corpse Video Project] is a video collaboration collaboration project inspired by the Surrealist creation method, the "Exquisite Corpse". The project is coordinated by the Brazilian artist Kika Nicolela and currently has 63 participating artists from 21 different countries.
The ECVP vol. 2 was made during 2009, with the participation of 56 artists. Together, these artists made about 110 minutes of experimental video, divided in 12 chapters.

HOW?
In the Surrealist 'game', a paper is folded such that each contributor sees only a small portion of the previous contributor's work, and begins his own work from that small portion. When the last participant is finished, the sheet is unfolded to reveal a strangely divergent, yet contiguous form or figure.
Using the semi-blind, sequential method of the surrealists' game, ECVP participants create video art in response to the final ten seconds of the previous member's work. Each member is asked to incorporate these seconds into their piece, creating transitions as they please, until
everyone's vision is threaded together into an instigating final "corpse."
While the Surrealists are said to have created the method almost a century ago, only recently could such a fast-paced, pan-global, audiovisual variation of this exercise be produced. The inspiring process of exchange between artists from around the world illuminates the possibilities and potentials of a globalized, collective creativity.

WHERE?
ECVP Screenings and exhibitions have been taking place in various countries since June 2008, such as Sweden, USA, Greece, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa.