PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
RÖDA STEN
ROSA BARBA (born 1972 in Italy, lives and works in Germany)
The Empirical Effect (2009)
With interest in non-linear narration and cinematic references, Rosa Barba often works with sculptural 16mm film installations. Merging fiction and facts of reality, she depicts how people react to extreme situations. Her new work stages the evacuation of a district close to the active volcano Vesuvius, which represents the absurd phenomenon that people pretend to be sane and organized when life starts to get most unpredictable and dangerous.
CANDICE BREITZ (born 1972 in South Africa, lives and works in Germany)
Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) (2006)
Candice Breitz works primarily with photography and video installations and is interested in the nature of commercial pop culture, its influences and pervasive effect. In her video work Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) Lennon’s first solo album ’John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’ is re-performed in its entirety by 25 devoted fans. The fans were filmed individually, but are ultimately experienced as a group: they comprise a powerful collective.
LOVE ENQVIST (born 1974, lives and works in Sweden)
Diggers and Dreamers (2005-2009)
A major part of Love Enqvist’s work is concerned with people’s relationships with one another, how these constantly shift, and thereby affect social development. By questioning and contemplating how we live, we are able to view everyday life in a fresh light. The artist book project Diggers and Dreamers is based on a host of utopian visions expressed through architecture, social activities, and personal reflections from around the world.
AMIT GOREN (born 1959, lives and works in Israel)
Kafa (2009)
For many years, Amit Goren has worked as a writer, director and producer of documentaries, feature films and video art. In Goren’s work, Israel’s dramatic history and society are interwoven with his own personal search. In his newly produced video work, Kafa, an instance of brutal reality is depicted with poetic visual imagery, in which Israeli socio-cultural diversity is respresented among the film’s perpetrators.
CATHERINE SULLIVAN (born 1968 in USA, lives and works in Germany/USA)
The Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land (2003)
Catherine Sullivan’s art treats of the injustices of the global economy, illustrating the theme through references to history, the theatre, avant-garde film and contemporary art. Her Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land is based – with touches of Dadaism – on the original to the musical that was being performed in a theatre in Moscow in 2002 when Chechen rebels took actors and audience hostage. In her work, Sullivan explores the borderlines between actors, the roles they play, the audience, and reality.
ALEXANDER VAINDORF (born 1965 in the former Soviet Union, lives and works in Sweden)
Present Unfinished / EUR Chronicle (2009)
Alexander Vaindorf presents the new work Present Unfinished / EUR Chronicle. The utopian project EUR intended to display to the world the greatness of Italian fascism in the form of monumental architecture. The construction has been partially realised, and today EUR is not only a historical site but a suburb in Rome with most of the buildings turned into offices and ministries. The work looks at the unrealised idea from the past, its inherited history and interpretations, transformed and diffused, effected by today’s society. It explores how the visual representation of history, politics and power in the public space are changing, creating a new impact and a new collective memory through time.
GÖTEBORGS KONSTHALL
KUTLUĞ ATAMAN (born 1961 in Turkey, lives and works in Great Britain/Turkey)
Twelve (2003)
Kutluğ Ataman’s films depict unusual life stories and deal with how we create and present our own identities. In Twelve, we meet six inhabitants of a village in southern Turkey who are convinced that they are reincarnations of people who previously lived in the area. They relate tales of their parallel lives from the vantage points of twelve different identities.
TIM ETCHELLS (born 1962, lives and works in Great Britain)
City Changes (2008)
Tim Etchells’ artistic practice begins in his work in performance, but manifests itself in many different forms. He is interested in exploring the creative potentials and limitations of the systems and codes which make and shape our lives, including language itself and the built environment. The text-based work City Changes describes and redescribes a town that endlessly changes its form, shifting from a place of order and routine to one of constant variety and disorder.
SUSAN HILLER (born 1940 in USA, lives and works in Great Britain)
The Last Silent Movie (2007)
Susan Hiller said in an interview: ’Our lives are haunted by ghosts, our own personal ghosts and the collective cultural ghosts of our society.’ These ’ghosts’ are the starting points of works, based on cultural materials, that Hiller has created in a distinguished career of more than 40 years. In The Last Silent Movie she has made a composition of voices from the forgotten archives of lost and endangered languages.
KRISTINA KVALVIK (born 1980 in Norway, lives and works in Denmark)
Notes From a Stranger (2009)
Kristina Kvalvik works with moving images from a narrative point of view. In her video installations Kvalvik examines the limitations of sight and our ability to interpret what we see. Her contribution to the Biennial is Notes From a Stranger, a newly produced work shown here for the first time. In Kvalvik’s suggestive installations, the viewer finds her/himself positioned centre stage and drawn into works that discuss matters relating to surveillance, the inexplicable, and the threatening.
GÖTEBORG CITY MUSEUM
AMAR KANWAR (born 1964, lives and works in India)
The Lightning Testimonies (2007)
Amar Kanwar is one of India’s leading filmmakers. His works consist of a strange mixture of documentary film, poetically charged travelogues and visual or illustrated essays on the themes of human rights and contemporary history. The 8 channel video installation The Lightning Testimonies explores sexual violence in political conflicts in the Indian subcontinent.
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE (born 1955, lives and works in South Africa)
What Will Come (has already come) (2007)
William Kentridge has established himself as a celebrated icon in contemporary art through his characteristic charcoal drawings and animated films. What Will Come (has already come) is based on 17th century anamorphic painting techniques by which a distorted image is restored to its proper proportions when viewed from a certain angle. The work takes as its starting point the ways in which we use our gift of sight and includes a depiction in sound and image of the brutal colonial history of Ethiopia under Italian fascism.
JÖRGEN SVENSSON (born 1958, lives and works in Sweden)
About Documentation (2009) and The World Next Door (2008)
Documentation is an important part of the frequently project based artistic work of Jörgen Svensson, and is the common denominator in these videoworks. The films in About Documentation form a fragmentary summary of the artist’s own work and private life, and are an attempt to visualize something evasive in documentation and not least in time and space. Along with this entirely new work, Svensson also shows the video installation The World Next Door.
FIONA TAN (born 1966 in Indonesia, lives and works in The Netherlands)
Tomorrow (2005)
With a starting point in her multicultural background, Fiona Tan explores how we present the image of ourselves and the mechanisms which affect how we interpret the representation of others. In her filmed portraits she stresses - in humanist manner - the separate individual as the most important feature and in her video installation Tomorrow, the focus is on adults of tomorrow.
GÖTEBORG MUSEUM OF ART
TRACEY MOFFATT (born 1960 in Australia, lives and works in USA)
Doomed (2007)
Tracey Moffatt’s images and films are the product of carefully constructed scenarios, and her narratives are often characterised by a tone of critical irony. In her video works, she includes popular cultural film material. Doomed is a collage of various excerpts from TV and the press, which tell of ruin and destruction, war, violence and terror. Doomed is made in collaboration with Gary Hillberg.
CITY LIBRARY OF GÖTEBORG
PUSHWAGNER (born 1940, lives and works in Norway)
Soft City (1969-1975)
Pushwagner is a recognised name in Norwegian underground culture and a model for young artists and cartoonists. With humour and irony, he depicts the stress, anonymity, and uniformity of the modern urban setting. At the Biennial, he shows original drawings from Soft City, a pictorial story created in London (among other places) in 1969 through 1975. The drawings were the product of a futuristic dystopia, and raise the question of how dystopias are shaped and what they tell us of their time.
GALLERY BOX
LUIS JACOB (born 1970 in Peru, lives and works in Canada)
Album VII (2008) and Without Persons (1999-2008)
Luis Jacob is interested in communication, anarchism, utopias and the history of modernism. His practice embraces a range of techniques, linked by his interest for philosophical and cultural opportunities for social interplay. Album VII presents a vibrant flow of images, collected from books, magazines and other sources. The video installation Without Persons is a reflection on exclusion, social adaptation, and the emptiness of contemporary existence.
BIO CAPITOL
Mats Hjelm Black Nation (2008) 94 min
Artur Żmijewski Repetition (2005) 75 min
Amit Goren Rabbi Firer: A Reason to Question ( 2008) 58 min
Harun Farocki Aufschub/Respite (2007) 30 min
Judi Werthein Secure Paradise/Immer Wieder (2008) 15 min
Victor Nieuwenhuijs & Maartje Seyferth New Babylon de Constant (2005) 13 min
Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler Night Shift (2005-2006) 8 min
