© Stéphane Thidet
Courtesy Aline Vidal
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Ask, Stéphane Thidet, 2002
Video, color, sound
Duration: 2’
Courtesy of Aline Vidal Gallery, Paris, France and the artist.
A skeleton dances in the light of a streetlamp. In the distance we hear a dog barking, cars passing–making the video camera tremble–, and we hear faraway music. The scene seems to be filmed by an amateur videographer.
Ukrainian Institute of America, 2nd floor, Conservatory Room, loop all night.
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The Class III, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, 2005
Video, color, sound
Duration: 26’
Courtesy of the artist.
In this video, the artist delivers a lecture about death to corpses covered to the shoulders in white sheets. Speaking in a soft, sweet, schoolteacher-ish voice, sometimes pausing to encourage the silent bodies to share their thoughts, she holds forth on the subject of death, writing her main ideas on a blackboard.
Ukrainian Institute of America, 3rd Floor, East Room, 11 pm, loop until 1 am
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Méthane, Nicolas Moulin, 1999
Video, color, sound
Duration: 32’
CNAP, Paris, France and courtesy of the artist.
Nicolas Moulin excerpts images that could evoke a planet with similar geology to Mars, or more specifically Iceland, with three dominant geological elements: fields of lava, valleys of basalt, and fields eroded by glaciers: ““What interests me when creating a work is how it will be perceived as an unclassified object, possessing its own reality, independent of its conception and fabrication.”” He invites viewers to navigate a sort of innerworld and to disorient themselves.
Ukrainian Institute of America, 3rd Floor, Library Room, 4:20 am and 5:45 am
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On the Beach, Frank Heath, 2014
Video, color, sound
Duration: 20’
Courtesy of Simone Subal Gallery and the artist.
Questions of permanence of information, immateriality of technology, and extreme projections of the future provide the starting point for this video. The film focuses on an interview with two physicists from CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider. Scenes in which scientists discuss their desire to learn about the origins of matter, as well as possible transmissions to the future, blend together with scenes of the film crew attempting to assemble material for a kind of time capsule or ark that will record our civilzation for a post-human future. Loosely adapted from the post-apocalyptic novel by Nevil Shute.
Ukrainian Institute of America, 3rd Floor, Library Room, 4 am and 5:45 am
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Resounding (Infrared), Susan Hiller, 2013-2014
Video, color, sound
Duration: 30’
Courtesy of the artist.
Many of Susan Hiller’s works question our “rational” understanding of the world. This work integrates “irrational” or “unscientific” modes of thought, and its design bypasses fixed theoretical constructions foreclosing the perspectives of the intelligible. Resounding (Infrared) presents a cosmic soundscape with a panorama of visual patterns retrieved from the expanding radiation of the universe. This cosmic background radiation, which is present in the air around us, appeared as interference on pre-digital television sets and radios. Voices from our time describe experiences of extra-terrestrial phenomena. A sleeping human taps a message in Morse code: “I am dreaming, I am dreaming”.
Ukrainian Institute of America, 3rd Floor, Library Room, 3:30 am, 4:55 am and 6:20 am
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Western, Thierry Costesèque, 2015
Video, color, sound
Duration: 22’
With the support of Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn; CNAP, Paris, France; Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (FNAGP) and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York.
Western borrows from film the archetype of an individual confronted with a hostile universe as a starting point for a performance, which consists of crossing Broadway Avenue on a horse. Broadway is an old Native American trail, the only one that escapes Manhattan’s urban, linear texture. This is why Costesèque intends to travel up Broadway toward West Harlem with his horse. He is the stranger.
Ukrainian Institute, 2nd Floor, Concert Hall, 6:40 am