MONTREAL, CANADA.- Space/Time: A New Film and Video Program is on at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal through January 30, 2005. Space and time, two key concepts in the creative endeavour, provide the name for the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal’s brand-new program devoted to film, video and new media.

For its inaugural presentation, from January 12 to 30, 2005, the Musée has brought together five short films by five artists: Khrystell Burlin, Thomas Köner, Gareth Long, Leighton Pierce and Floria Sigismondi. Each offers a personal look at the way we relate to the world, at places that at first sight seem familiar but that soon appear to have a surprising strangeness.

According to Louise Ismert, Multimedia Events Coordinator and organizer of the program, “Each work selected investigates our awareness of being in these familiar yet unreal landscapes, in which we dwell and which dwell in us.”

Theseus, 2004, 5 min, by Khrystell Burlin, draws inspiration from the myth of Theseus to take us on an endless race, a flight through a maze of corridors, symbolizing the boundaries of our inner world. Suburbs of the Void, 2004, 14 min, by Thomas Köner, consists of 2,000 webcam pictures recorded by a surveillance camera in a city in northern Finland. Köner thus reconstructs the passage of time in an urban landscape. A panorama of a suburb under construction, Gareth Long’s Still Life: Urban Sprawl, 2003, 8 min 45 s, is part of the Still Life series. While these works are presented as videotapes, they are in fact photographic stills, collected by hand and reworked with imaging software. Fall (Three Parts), 2002, 13 min, portrays three short walks by the artist Leighton Pierce in a village in the South of France. Pierce captures his surroundings through a small glass ball, in a way miniaturizing the world. In Sigur Rós, Untitled #1, 2003, 6 min 33 s, Floria Sigismondi offers! us an apocalyptic vision of our universe. Here she transforms a playground, a place emblematic of childhood and the carefree life, into an unreal, devastated world. This music video for the Icelandic group Sigur Rós won the prize for Best Video of 2003 at the MTV Europe Music Awards.