7 Yarns – A Weave of Corresponding Video and Film Expressions
Curated by Gustav Hellberg
Professor at College of Arts at Chung-Ang University, Seoul. Hellberg lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.
Carolina Hellsgård, Hunger, Short Fiction, HDV/35mm, 17', Germany, 2009
Minha Lee, Anamnesis, 20 min 25sec, 2017Jannicke
Låker, Sunday Mornings, 9 min sound color HD 1080iElin
Magnusson, Manshat [Man-Hate], Video, 3:47 min, 2013
Rebecca Ann Tess, The Tallest, 14 min, 16:9, color, sound, HD video, 2014
Mariana Vassileva, Kronstadt, 1:20 min, HD-video, 2014,
Mariana Vassileva, The Colour of the Wind, 4:15 min HD-video, 2014
Gina Wong, Road to Day Dream Mine, 10:39, HD Video, 2016
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
It was with great pleasure I accepted the invitation from Marrickville Garage and Airspace Projects to choose artists and filmmakers for a video screening at Airspace Projects. Then it dawned on me that I had to make a choice. How do you do that? My background is not that of a curator. I am foremost a practising artist and secondly a lecturer of new media art at Chung-Ang University, South Korea. This fact I thought could be to my advantage. I don’t need to relate my choices to any current curatorial paradigms or discourses, as it is not my field of practice. It means that I will not make a half-baked attempt doing a curator’s job. Curators are much better at their jobs than me. However, I hopefully share the love for art with art and video curators. I do also believe that a person who is fully engaged in art, whether an artist, curator or whatnot, has the ability to make an interesting selection of artists or artworks. The special field where you work brings the knowledge, acquired by experience, to the task. The work of an artist and a curator overlap in many ways, thus it might be stimulating to see different engaged people presenting their views. The selective process has to be highly subjective to become interesting anyway. So I acted instinctively, when I set out to find a group of artists and filmmakers to present at Airspace Projects.
Most of the selected artists and filmmakers I have come across at professional occasions. I have either exhibited together with them or worked with them in various ways. It has given me the opportunity to get closer to their work as well as seeing what lies behind the work. Some of them I have known for many years. I have followed their development and I have had many interesting discussions about video and filmmaking.
There’s no theme that ties these artists together, just my appreciation of the qualities of their works. The videos and short films make a weave of corresponding expressions of ideas. I have tried to create a selection that could resemble seven people having a discussion about different aspects of life. Filmmaker Carolina Hellsgård has a narrative tone in her film Hunger that touches Gina Wong’s Road to Day Dream Mine - you can sense biographical elements as well as a good sense of camera work. Both artists work with a quiet intimacy. This I also find in artists Mariana Vassileva and Minha Lee, both whose works break standard narrative. Their videos have closer connection to performance art. Rebecca Ann Tess’s video The Tallest is further removed from people as subjects, but there’s a personal presence that made me want to place her in this weave of videos. Her work is more social and political, bridging to Jannicke Låker’s video Sunday Mornings that directly deals with a person’s social situation. Elin Magnusson, who often works with performance, in her video Manshat states a very personal and unavoidable statement. Maybe it is the most directly politically, socially and personally confrontational work in this selection. Nevertheless it belongs in this discussion about life, where all works are firmly founded in the person behind the work.
Gustav Hellberg, Hopetoun, WA, 19 February 2018
