BARCELONA.- In its thirteenth edition, from 4 to 6 June, the fair has taken the pulse of the tendencies in video art with a careful selection of 45 artists’ works (12 hours and 10 minutes of video), among which are included 15 worldwide releases (the 60% of the works have been produced during 2015), presented by their local, national and international galleries and invited by an international committee formed by video collectors and activists Isabelle Lemaître, Josée i Marc Gensollen, Haro Cumbusyan and Renee Drake, and chaired by Jean-Conrad Lemaître. For the first time, in tune with these subject lines, the fair includes a selection of galleries that present sound projects curated by Anne-Laure Chamboissier (specialist in sound art). It includes artists such as Iñaki Bonillas (ProjecteSD, Barcelona), Michele Spanghero (Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin) and Susan Philipsz (Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam).
Yesterday, 5th June, a jury of specialists formed by Nimfa Bisbe (Director of the Contemporary Art Collection of Fundación "la Caixa"), Valentijn Byvanck (Director of Marres Museum Maastrich) and Imma Prieto (independent curator) have granted the following prizes:
Prize acquisition CATALONIA RAMBLES, for the best exhibited work. It consists of the acquisition of the piece by Screen Projects, and the loan of this to the MACBA Foundation.
The Story of Milk and Honey, a video project by Basma Alsharif, 2011 · 9’ 45’’.
Single channel SD video. Colour, sound. Edition of 5 + 1AP.
Presented by Galerie Imane Farès. 41 Rue Mazarine, 75006 Paris. +33 1 46 33 13 13.
The Story of Milk and Honey is a short experimental video belonging to a larger project, which includes photographs, drawings and text. An unnamed man narrates the story of his attempt to write a love story in Lebanon. Through voice over narration that weaves together images, letters, and songs, a tale of defeat transpires into a multi-layered journey exploring how we collect information, perceive facts and recreate history. The video represents the material consequence of the failed love story, questioning where the main character is to be found in the midst of his own narrative. This work was produced with the Fundación Botín visual arts grant.
Basma Alsharif’s work considers the transmission of the history of Palestine, between fiction and reality. Sequences which have been filmed or recorded, collected in the media or on the social networks are collated into montages with a highly developed plasticity, where subtitles, and therefore the text, has as much individual presence as the soundtrack (found, borrowed from the repertoire of middle-eastern popular music, or mixed) and yet they remain very separate. Memory appears to be in full mutation, uncertain and subjective. The installation The Story of Milk and Honey (2011) is composed by three series: “Corniche Beirut”, “Les Sauvages”, “Original Family Archives”. Locations, temporalities and personalities are blurred, veering from raw documentary-type images to landscapes of pre-apocalyptic paradise. In 2014-2015, Alsharif has been ‘artist in residence’ at the Pavillon Neuflize, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. She is making her first feature film this year.
Prize LOOP Fair, to the best gallery proposal selected by the jury, which consists of the free participation of the gallery in the following LOOP edition.
China Town, a video project by Chien-Chi Chang, 1992 – 2011 · 19’ 23’’. Single channel video . Edition of 5. Presented by Chi-Wen Gallery. 3F, No.19, Lane 252, Tun-Hua South Road Section 1, Taipei. +886 2 8771 3372. info@chi-wen.com
Immigration is propelled by suffering. To witness the shifting patterns of populations is to see the world in all its exigencies: war, natural disasters, repression, famine, poverty and persecution. But there is a hope at the bottom of that Pandora’s box of troubles: the hope that propels immigrants to settle in strange lands. To contrast the bleak, black-and-white lives of the Chinese men living in the US, Chien-Chi Chang chose to use colour when photographing their families in China.
The last 22 years of developing these relationships are now culminating in a three-generational drama. Some of the first waves of illegal immigrants are now choosing to return to China to enjoy the prosperity they have created there and spend the rest of their lives with family members they have not seen for nearly two decades. Yet their sons still choose to be smuggled to New York, leaving their own families behind. Divided families remain divided.
The compelling quality of this project is its universality. It is about the essential human need to hope for the future and about being willing to sacrifice one’s immediate happiness in order to fulfil the dream of giving one’s children a ‘better’ life. But is economic prosperity worth the social cost? Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found in the lives of the people left behind in China and in those of the second and third generation immigrants growing up in the United States. Look at them, and listen to their voices. You may not understand their language, but you can feel their longing.
Primarily using photography as his artistic medium, Chien-Chi Chang (1961, Taiwan) explores alienation and connection between people in contemporary society by developing long-term, interactive relationships with the subjects. Starting in 1992, Chang became interested in themes related to the dispersion of individuals or families from their homeland, and in the 20 years hence, followed the lives of illegal immigrants in New York City’s Chinatown who left China as a matter of survival. Entitled China Town and still in progress, the series was exhibited in the artist’s mid-career survey Doubleness at the National Museum of Singapore in 2008, and at the Taiwan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2007, Chang travelled with North Korean defectors from Northeast China to Thailand, documenting their lives for his work Escape from North Korea, which won the Canadian AnthropoGraphia Award for Human Rights in 2011. In recent years Chang has expanded his medium to include sound and the moving images, which has enriched his photography-based narratives with additional, multiple elements.
Chang received his bachelor’s degree from Soochow University in 1984, and his master’s from Indiana University in 1990. He began a professional career as a photojournalist in 1991, and has worked for both the Seattle Times and the Baltimore Sun. He joined the world famous photographic cooperative Magnum Photos in 1995 and became a full member in 2001.
