OPERA
Video
Art from China and the Netherlands
One
of the highlights of the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in
Beijing was a duet
performed by a western tenor and a classical
Chinese opera singer.
The
Video Exhibition Opera is a selection of Chinese and Dutch video makers,
who have in common that they all have worked in each others country.
They
sing simular songs with different voices, intonations and
nuances-about longing, based on collective and personel memories. How
to adapt to this crazy
Global World.
How
to keep your identity, values and traditions.
And
... which ones?
Opera
is a special program compiled for the streaming Festival 2008
by SaE
(Sino and Europe Cultural Interaction Foundation).
Participating
Artists:
* Liang Shuo
* Wu Junyong
* Zeng Tu
* Tiong Ang
* Sonja
Wyss
* Paul Donker Duyvis
* Jerome Symons
* Meiya
Lin
* Marnix Goossens
* Zhifei Yang
Program
/ short descriptions
Zeng
Tu (Chong Qin)
1-
Life
is drunk,death is a dream (00:6:00
min)
from
last place to here
from
last second to now
from
last breath to this...
between
last door and next one
there
is my drunk life and my dreamy death
existing
in continuing continuing is the only way
continuing
to the end I exist by continuing...
2-
No
news is Good news (00:5:34
min)
seriously,no
joke,
watch
TV seriously,
cause
people made it
very
seriously.
Meiya
Lin (Amsterdam / Xiamen)
1-
The Times are Summoning 2007 (00:02:40
min / loop)
"The
times are summoning" is personal memory from the artist's
childhood.
By filming a bunch of kids who do the morning exercise
every single morning.
Presenting a matter of fact: strikt rules and
simply obey.
Conceptually it is a heavy issue to deal with.
Moreover
there could only be one action, one thought after all.
But It happens
to the generation nowadays, a completely different, unusually light
reaction.
In the video the background
is taken out – no specific context anymore-
and and a cut loose
from any individual contact between the students.
Like in the video
Lost
Paradise
the space lacks any reference to the
normal world and becomes a kind
of Nowhereland
2-
Lost Paradise 2007 (00:03:00:
min / loop)
"Lost
Paradise", the background sound is mainly the key word for this
video
which is based on a very popular communist song in China.
Singing for the beautiful flower and the nice blowing spring wind.
The tone of the song is bright and communistic cheering up.
The
general meaning is about how joyful to spend the time outside
in the perfect communist society, and how bright our future will be.
Basically the artist chooses most of the elements that are
participating in the song for
the structure of this video. The background was transferred artificially to create a non-existing environment in a nowhere space, a space of lost paradise.
Liang
Shuo
(Hangzhou)
This
Movie contains 3 real life episodes of the life of a Young man: in
his room waiting,drinking, smoking, doing nothing and everything.
Fifteen minutes precise slow motion acting reduced by high speed play
back to one minute normal movement. The second part is a walk over
the local market and the third a close up of a meditative exercise in
making fire.
Total playing time 15 min.
1-
Fifteen minutes behaviour 2007 (00:1:08
min)
2-
Fifteen Colors (00:11:00
min)
3-
Physical Material study (Lighter) 2006 (00:01:00
min)
Wu
Junyong
Opera
(Animation 4 parts)
Wu
Junyong (HangZhou) makes hand drawn animations with simple
contrasting colors. Red is the dominant element. He depicts
complicated social and political behaviour in simple images.
Not
a soft poetic view, but an ironical, raw, sharp and sometimes cynical
analysis
of the people around him. The play with the red flags
and banners is a direct political statement.
Jerome
Symons (Arnhem NL)
The
compact video's of Jerome Symons are often critical, always poetical.
With
sober means he handles subjects like elections in Beirut, Indian
workers in Dubai or,
like
here, women's protest in Tehran and the expansion of China.
Above
all the video's explore the endless space of a short timeline (that's
life!).
1-
Paradise
Regained
2000 Guilin, China (00:01:56 min)
Exploring
new territories outside the workers' paradise.
2-
Silk Road 2007 Kuala Lumpur, Tehran (sound) (00:01:42)
Tribute
to the brave ladies demonstrating on International Women’s Day.
Sonja
Wyss (Amsterdam)
Die
Krähe“ (the crow) 2002, 00:07:00 min
In
„Die Krähe“ (the crow), Sonja Wyss lets a number of elements
interact with each other.
Images of a screaming girl, black crows
against a blue sky, and a snow-covered woodland
landscape are edited
together in slow-motion. With this sequence of images, fragments of
the song
of the same name (Die Krähe), from Schubert‘s
Winterreise, can be heard. This music reinforces
the heavily fraught
tone of doom and desire, the more so because the sound has been
manipulated
and creaks and falters, as if the needle has got stuck on
the record.
The
atmosphere on this video is one of vagueness; suggestions of
innocence, violence, love and death,
intermingle and are played off
against each other. These are the snippets of a possible story,
but
there is no beginning and no end. It is as if we are in the girl‘s
own world,
where the laws of language and logic do not apply, but
where, as in a dream,
images and feelings mix freely with each other.
What she really feels is not defined, and ultimately remains a
secret.
2-
Hoch-Zyte 2002 (00:06:00 min
"Hoch-Zyte"
("weddings", but also: "high times"), shows in a
dreamlike setting three women
and their fantasies and yearnings about
marriage. An 11 year old girl is knitting a weddingsavingsock
(Hochzeitssparstrumpf), and it is getting longer and longer, since a
wedding is not in sight.
She is dreaming and waiting for her prince,
but he is not coming, not yet. A woman, she could
be the girl's
mother, dreams about her wedding long ago. A young maid, she could be
just an illusion,
but could also be the bride, dances with a man in a
wedding dress through some scenes.
Pictures of the conscious are
mixed with symbols from the unconscious, parallel to reality
there is
a dream world, illogical and absurd. The goat, dead crows, eggs,
which are being bred
under a table, a dancing couple and a girl, who
is lying on the ground like sleeping beauty:
these are symbols, which
remind one of fairy tales and legends or ghostly dreams.
Actors:
Janneke Albers, Andreas Scharfenberg, Lona Tulinski, Dieke
de Vries
Tiong
Ang (Amsterdam)
Two
Women Drinking 2008 (00:01:03 min)
On
the morning Pim Fortuyn was murdered in The Netherlands, I was having
a cup of
coffee in my friend Roelandt’s kitchen in his apartment
in Kunming. His wife Weili suffered
from eye problems and she was
drinking some herbal medicine from a bowl.
My
friend Diego took me to a rehearsal of an experimental theatre group
in East London.
I watched all actors having a good time, also during
lunch break, although they didn’t speak much.
Paul
Donker Duyvis (Amsterdam)
The
two video's form a diptych: an old serious woman slowly moving and
young girls full of laughter jumping around
1-
Candles 2001 (Europe) (00:07:30 min)
An
old generous woman, dressed in black, performs a daily ritual in a church.
She
does it with devoted gestures and creates a happy atmosphere
She
is always the only one in the church.
If
she disappears this friendly space will vanish with her...
2-
Guilin
Girls 1996 (china)
A
Story of an Encounter without Words about watching each other with
curiosity.
The beautiful music comes from a cassete given to me
by a traditional Singer living in Inner Mongolia.
I heard the woman
singing and I was moved. She saw it and gave me a cassete with her
songs.
A few days later these Guilin Children jumped upon me with a
generous smile.
I decided o combine these two precious gifts
to memorize these moments of communication without words.
Listning to
them still makes me feel good and than I wonder what happened to the
young girls
and the Mongolian woman singer.
Marnix
Goossens (Amsterdam)
Airpacker
1999 (00:06:00 min)
A
space fully packed with transparant balloons filled with air.
Watching
the room through the window from outside give us a view of hundreds of frozen milky soap
balls.
Spaces within a space.
Then suddenly a hand comes with a sharp pin and lets the air free...
Zhifei
Yang (Shandong)
1-
Untitled 2007 ( 00:04;20 min)
A
repetition of similar shots of a sleeping girl dressed in white.
Zoomed
in the camera shows an innocent young woman sleeping in a long white
dress on a
clean white
cushion and sheet. When the camera zoomes out the cushion is
enormous...
and the background becomes more and more prosaic
2-
Day
dream 2007 (00:07;15 min)
A
white bed in a dark space.
The
sound around tells that we are outside in a garden or parc.
Slowly
a white creature approaches through a long soft yellow tube and
climes in the bed.
Loud
noise of airplanes flying over...fadeout...black
Streaming Video Festival 2008
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