SERIES FOR INVISIBLE CINEMA
JAMES BENNING | UNTITLED (TIME)
| Invitation to the visual itinerary with James Benning from March 30 to April 4, 2017 in Zagreb, Rijeka and Vodnjan
If I asked you to describe the way the light moves in the river shot, you probably would say during the seventeen minutes the sunlight moves across the frame. This of course isn’t at all true. The sun focuses the light in one direction, and since the earth is turning on its axis, it’s the river that is moving, not the light. So this shot actually documents how much the earth has turned (or how much the river has moved) over its seventeen-minute duration. (J.B.)
| Loop one March 30 through April 7, 2017
Istitute for Contemporary Art
Zagreb, Trg Kralja Tomislava 20
| Opening: Thursday, March 30, 2017
19:00 |conversation with James Benning
20:00 | screening
| Reader Loop
digital, colour, sound, 51 min
Reader Loop is filmed in my home in Val Verde, California.
From a film in-progress called Readers, in progress. (J.B.)
| Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12:00 – 7:00 p.m.
| During his first cine-journey to Zagreb, Rijeka and Vodnjan from March 30 to April 4 this year, James Benning will put in motion six visual formulas for reckoning time-work in a series of loops named Untitled (Time). Benning’s grand loop is a psychogeographical map of six digital loops for close readings of six systems of weather (or earth) changes, which he will animate day after day in six different galleries with travellers of the time reckoners’ itinerary.
| Landscapes are a function of time, and subjects are functions of the landscapes, says Benning, concerning the politics of his aesthetics of duration and documenting the spirit of place and time. Displaced and indented topography of the Untitled (Time) travelogue enlights six phenomena for six functions of time which the artist opens on the six-day trip for seeing and listening. The lecture itinerary will begin in Zagreb with Reader Loop (conversation and opening on March 30 at 19:00 at The Institute of Contemporary Art), RR Loop (on March 31 at MM Center SC at 19:00), Drawing Loop (on April 1 at 19:00 within the Permanent display “Collection in Motion” of The Museum of Contemporary Art) and Coke Loop (on April 2 at Gallery Greta at 20:00). In Rijeka, James Benning will open the fifth Iron Pig Loop (on April 3 at Mini-Art Cinema at 19:00) and in Vodnjan, the last, sixth Forest Loop (on April 4 at 19:00 at Apoteka – a space for contemporary art).
| With Benning’s newest processual ecosophy of images, we will see his paradigmatical structural 16-mm film Landscape Suicide (1986), the symptomatology of two crimes whose protagonists are functions of thirty years of distant social and mental landscapes. Courtesy of author, the film print will be shown twice, on April 1 at 20:00 at Gorgona Hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and on April 3 at 20:00 at Art-Cinema Croatia in Rijeka. After the film, a conversation with the author will be led by Dragan Rubeša and Tanja Vrvilo.
| This visual itinerary is the first arrival and presentation of one of the most influential members of the American neo-avant-garde, whose map of personal conceptualism connects focal points of visionary cinema and contemporary art, focusing on the construction of perception and the economy of attention. Fixations of surveilled reality, still frames for landscapes after the disappearance of man juxtapose and re-enact abjections from the last century, from utopia to fear. His nearly half-century extended artistic archive includes around forty 16-mm films made up until 2007 and probably twice as more digital works created in serene velocity during the last ten years. James Benning interrupts his two-part structure of radically individualistic history of moving images with his rhizomatic project of displacement Two Cabins, which he started by building replicas of forest cabins by an American philosopher of nature Henry David Thoreau (from July 2007 to January 2008) and an American mathematician and terrorist against technological society Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” (from April 2008 to June 2008). Benning has displaced two cabins from Walden and Montana to his land in the forest of Sierra Nevada and furnished them with copies of the paintings, writings and other works, replicas of objects and a library of the appropriated artistic-revolutionary freedom society. The Two Cabins project was the focus of Benning’s first individual exhibition which was held in Kunsthaus Graz in 2014 and in Kunstwerein in Hamburg in 2015 under the title Decoding Fear. (Tanja Vrvilo)
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Simultaneously, you may visit exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art
Edna Jurcan: Tata i ja 22.3 – 8.4 2017