03: Marxt / Habib Allah / Halsberghe / Gaillard
SELECTION 2016
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
SELECTION 2016
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
This spatial thriller operates on a delicate line between reality and illusion. Lukas Marxt's favourite motifs – barren landscapes, seemingly untouched by humans, but at the same time suggestively apocalyptic, and subtle changes in perception that play tricks on the observer – construct a peculiar narrative. With the use of drone photography he rescales the landscape in ways that make it difficult to distinguish between the macro and the micro.
A mysterious drive across the desolate land of the Sinai Peninsula led by a group of trafficking Bedouins. Habib Allah follows them behind the lines of military checkpoints, off the political, economic, and historical grid, a place where these desert outliers quietly continue their lineage. Stories, itineraries, directions, and allegiances become as blurred as the status of the Bedouins themselves, who remain unrecognized non-citizens of this no man’s land.
In the Citadelpark in Ghent there’s a sculpture honouring the brothers Lieven en Jozef van de Velde, both colonial pioneers. Their relief portrait plaque is mounted on a rock. On top of that rock sits the statue of a boy, Sakala, in 1884 the first Congolese visiting Belgium. Where in reality, he immediately learned French and wore western clothing, he is being depicted nude. With this study of a forgotten sculpture Halsberghe deconstructs the filmic illusion and critically analyzes the western gaze.
Floating through a hallucinatory night the viewer encounters a damaged cast of Rodin’s iconic bronze sculpture The Thinker, Hollywood Juniper trees swaying as if in a trance, fireworks bursting into life above Berlin’s 1936 Olympic stadium and finally a German oak tree planted by four-time Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens. In this historical-associative web Gaillard enhances the sculptural texture of the seductive 3D cinematography by looping a 9 second sample of Alton Ellis’ Blackman’s Word and later on Black Man’s Pride, which he both remixed to create a spatial feel.