ITWAN
Jay Sanders’ ITWAN (10 – 20 November) is a film document of an evening performance event at New York’s Sculpture Center collectively titled Inchoative Listening & Centerless Portrayal, featuring artists and musicians including Yuji Agematsu, Mother Earth, Tom Kovachevich, Tom Thayer and Circuit Des Yeux.

Crippled Symmetry
The three videos in this programme share an interest in the often-ambiguous
relationship between form and formlessness; each describe a state before or
after form, when outlines either begin to emerge or blur. The programme’s
title is borrowed from a text by Morton Feldman, in which the composer
compares his musical approach to the dissymmetry that characterises the
patterns of the rugs produced in certain areas of the Middle East. The
rugs’ surfaces, perceived as spaces of nuance, become, in his musical
compositions, temporal expanses. It is these kinds of expanses, both
spatial and temporal, that are to be found in the videos gathered in this
programme: if they focus on specific spaces, the temporalities that they
develop also invite us to linger on the nuances that unfold in them.

Guillaume Leblon’s video Notes (2007) shows the artist’s studio invaded by
a marsh of clay and water, coating the objects strewn over the floor with
a layer of grey. The studio is transformed into a landscape. We see the
artist manipulating different objects, appraising the texture of the clay
with a large ladle or stretching fabric over a wooden frame. Like other
works by the artist, Notes explores surface as a zone of subtlety and
intensity.

In Katinka Bock’s Couler un tas de pierre (2007), a small boat loaded with
stones drifts down a river until it sinks. The film concentrates on the slow
disappearance of the ephemeral shape below the water. It is representative
of the artist’s recurrent use of shapes made from natural materials
– stone, uncooked clay, wood, etc – and characterised by an unsettled
equilibrium between the often simple gestures that generated them and their
possible disappearance.

Filmed on the site of Alberto Burri’s monumental work Il Grande Cretto,
located on an hillside in Gibellina in Sicily on the location of a village
destroyed by an earthquake, Raphaël Zarka’s video Gibellina Vecchia (2010) dwells upon the comings and goings – tourists, architects, flocks of sheep – that punctuate the site’s everyday life. Omnipresent in the landscape, the work, which consists of a large surface of cement crossed by cuttings that repeat the former village’s plan, occasionally merge with it

Exodus
Exodus brings together works by several artists and collectives who ‘investigate the meanings of and relations between (artistic) labour, thought and praxis.’ Taking Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (2005) as a point of departure, a film in which the artist intersperses the Lumière Brothers’ groundbreaking footage of workers leaving the Lumière factory with other scenes of people leaving factories from the history of cinema, Bussel’s programme examines the concept of exodus as ‘a foundational form of movement, and a communally “engaged withdrawal” from the State with the potentiality of a liberatory politics of action.’ Other artists in Bussel’s programme include Chto Delat? (What is to be done?), Bernadette Corporation, Luca Frei, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys and a collective film by Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija.