ART FAIRS:Videos at LISTE 2019

One of LISTE Art Fairs new initiatives is the Joinery: on the one hand it is a place where galleries can show videos and performances that exceed the limitations of their designated stands, and on the other hand it acts as a meeting point and think tank that considers the latest topics in art discourse.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Frac des Pays de la Loire Archive

Among the videos that are on presentation at LISTE Art Fair are: “Surveillance Chess” (2012) , in which the hacker duo Mediengruppe Bitnik re-evaluates surveillance-scapes as part of public space just before the Summer Olympic Games in London in 2012. By manipulating unencrypted connections between moni toring cameras and control centres, they replace the real-time image on the monitor with a personal invitation to play chess. Crhristopher Aque’s “Idling” (2018), is composed of four hand- held shots of shirtless white  men sunbathing alone in Brooklyn‘s Prospect Park on weekday afternoons. The shaky footage  has been laboriously edited, frame- by-frame, to stabilise the image against a black background – a tender expression of benign desire, albeit a distant, anonymous and voyeuristic one. Nick Bastis presents  “Pedraza vs. Lomachenko  (Camouflage Edit)” (2019) that is a television broadcast of a recent, major boxing match is treated with machinations common to those used to elude automated copyright detectors, layering primary information and abstractions that play out separately but  in parallel: (what is seen) || (what  is understood). A strange pseudo- presence emerges between the perceivable and imperceptible. Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán in “No Shelter From the Storm” (2015) wander through a deforested Eastern European landscape while whistling the popular anti-war song “Where have all the flowers gone” re-adapted by many generations. Forests have historically posed  as a retreat in times of war – the artists visualise the surrendering of nature to today’s all- encompassing condition of  (state) violence. One of Gerrit Frohne-Brinkmann & Paul Spengemann  first collaborative works, “The inaccessibility of ancient Greece and its impact” (2016) uses  the setting of a famed modernist school as a ninth character, staging a rendition of a classical Greek tragedy. By contrasting architecture and language,  the tension between the birth of creative individuals and neoliberal imperatives is confronted. In 2009 Penny Goring bought her first computer and started uploading image macros. The video “Monitor” (2014) is  a compilation of the double helix poetry – partly persona, partly autobiographical – created on her NewHive profile. The video “Reading with a single hand” (2018) takes Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė’s on- going performative project “Young Girl Reading Group (YGRG)” as  its point of departure. The experience of collective reading extended into the domain of live perfor-mance and self-documentation is contextualised in the film, rendering the body and its surroundings as the site of an active and ongoing set of relations. In “History of China Northwest Airlines” (2018) Zheng Yuan retrieved the origin and final destination of every aircraft operated by China Northwest Airlines (1989–2003) and reassembled the enterprise‘s scattered archive into a parallel historical narrative. As a failed experiment in the privatisation of state industries, the artist‘s work shows how the country‘s airspace was opened by the force of government policy. Nona Inescu’s “Vestigial Structures” (2018) was produced with the support of Frac des Pays de la Loire. The video takes its starting point from the concretions that are still considered to be a mystery of nature, a geological curiosity, due to their unusual shapes, textures, sizes and resemblance to man-made objects or fossils. These stones turn the geological and mythological passing of time into solid “portraits”.

Photo: Nona Inescu, Vestigial Structures, 2018, Installation view at the exhibition “Manufacturing nature/ Naturalizing the synthetic”, Frac des Pays de la Loire, 2018, Photo: Fanny Trichet,  Courtesy the artist and Frac des Pays de la Loire

Info: Curator: Boris Magrini, LISTE Art Fair 2019, Burgweg 15, Basel, Days & Hours: Preview: (by invitation only) Mon (10/6/19) 11:00-18:00, Public Opening: Mon (10/6/19) 18:00-21:00, Tue-Sat (11-15/6/19) 13:00-21:00, Sun (16/6/19) 13:00-18:00, Admission: Single entry” CHF 20, Reduced entry: CHF 10 (Students/Seniors/AHV), Free admission for kids up to 16 years, if accompanied by an adult, After 20:00: Single entry CHF 6, Students-Seniors-AHV free admission, www.liste.ch