Kraftwerk Berlin, Köpenicker Straße 70 30–31 Mar 2019 Free

Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with MaerzMusik and Berlin Atonal present Serpentine Cinema & General Ecology: On Earth at The Long Now, with films by Sophia Al-Maria, Matthew Burdis, Alexander George and James Capper, Cao Guimarães and Rivane Neuenschwander, Pierre Huyghe, Karrabing Film Collective, Christelle Lhereux and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Neves Marques, Aimée Toledano and Peter Nadin.

The Serpentine’s General Ecology project – the galleries’ long-term and ongoing project researching complexity, posthumanism and climate change, presents a special programme of artist films addressing humans’ impact on the biosphere and the environment. On Earth reflects on machines and infrastructure, toxicity and contagion in the landscape, ghosts, memorials, the performance of absence and questions of care.

Serpentine Cinema & General Ecology: On Earth at The Long Now is curated by Lucia Pietroiusti (Curator, General Ecology, Serpentine) and Kostas Stasinopoulos (Assistant Curator, Live Programmes, Serpentine) with Holly Shuttleworth (Producer, Live Programmes, Serpentine). Advisors: Matthew Burdis and Filipa Ramos (co-curator, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish and advisor on the Serpentine’s General Ecology project).

Programme

Pierre Huyghe, A Journey that Wasn’t, 2005, 21’41”
Alexander George with James Capper, Blue Frame, 2018, 5’11”
Sophia Al-Maria, The Future Was Desert, Part One, 2016, 5’17”
Matthew Burdis, Lindisfarne One One, 2015, 4’25”
Sophia Al-Maria, The Future Was Desert, Part Two, 2016, 4’35”
Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), 2014, 19’
Karrabing Film Collective, Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland, 2018, 26’
Christelle Lhereux and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ghost of Asia, 2005, 9’11”
Cao Guimarães and Rivane Neuenschwander, Blow, 2010, 5’30”
Pedro Neves Marques, Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed, 2017, 15’
Pierre Huyghe, A Way in Untilled, 2012, 14’
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, My Mother’s Garden, 2007, 6’42”
Peter Nadin and Aimée Toledano, Taxonomy Transplanted, 2012, 11’39”

Biographies

Sophia Al-Maria (b. 1983, lives and works in London) studied comparative literature at the American university in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first solo exhibition Virgin with a Memory was presented at HOME, Manchester in 2014. Al-Maria has also shown at the Whitechapel Gallery (2019); Whitney Museum NY, USA (2016); New Museum, NY (2015); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2013); Waqif Art Centre, Doha Qatar (2007) and townhouse Gallery Cairo (2005). Al Maria participated in the 2016 Biennale of moving images (BIM), organized by the centre d’art contemporain in Geneva. In 2015 she guest edited issue 8 of The Happy hypocrite (Fresh Hell). Her memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012), was published by Harper Perennial. Her writing has also appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Triple Canopy and Bidoun.

Matthew Burdis is an artist filmmaker. He has previously received a Channel 4, Random Acts film commission that was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and has screened his work across Europe and the U.S. He founded and convenes Film Forum at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2015 – present).

James Capper studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. His practice combines the materials and techniques of heavy engineering and high technology with his interests in the history of biology and evolution. Solo  presentations  of  his  work  include RIPPER  TEETH  IN  ACTION at  Modern  Art  Oxford (2011), DIVISIONS at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2013), SIX STEP at Rio dell’Orso with ALMA ZEVI for the Venice Biennale (2015), PROTOTYPES at CGP London (2016), ATLAS A SPOLETO! / TELESTEP A SPOLETO!, Anna  Mahler  Association project for the Mahler  &  LeWitt  Studios  &  Festival  dei  Due  Mondi,  Spoleto,  Italy  (2016), SCULPTURE  &  HYDRAULICS at  The  Edge  Institute  of  Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts, University of Bath (2017) and JAMES CAPPER at Bathurst Art Gallery, New South Wales, Australia (2017). In 2009 he received the Jack Goldhill Prize for Sculpture from the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent and upcoming projects include AEROCAB with 3-D Foundation in Verbier, Switzerland, Blue Frame with Forth Arts in Sydney, Australia, and MUDSKIPPER, WALKING WORKBOAT in London. WAYS TO MAKE MOBILE SCULPTURE, a comprehensive  publication  of  drawings, was  published  by  Albion  in  2017,  alongside  an  exhibition  of drawings and sculpture at Albion Barn, Little Milton, Oxfordshire.

Alexander George is an Australian filmmaker. He is known for his collaborations with artists and musicians, often creating surreal worlds charged with raw emotion. His work has received millions of views online but maintains a classical style that is interested in exploring the language of cinema. He is currently based in Los Angeles.

Cao Guimarães’ practice lies in the intersection between cinema and the visual arts. His work is included in international collections including the Tate Modern, London; MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fondation Cartier, Paris and Colección Jumex, Mexico. Guimarães’ work has been shown at the XXV and XXVII São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; Insite Biennial 2005, Mexico; Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, USA; Tropicália: The 60s in Brazil, Austria; the Sharjah Biennial 11 Film Programme, United Arab Emirates and Ver é Uma Fábula, Brazil, a retrospective with in Itaú Cultural, Brazil. Guimarães’ has directed nine feature films that have been shown in international film festivals such as Cannes, Locarno, Sundance, Venice, Rotterdam and Berlin. In 2011, MoMA held a retrospective of his films, followed by BAFICI, Buenos Aires and Cinematheque, Mexico in 2014.

Pierre Huyghe’s exhibitions are complex systems in which interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real and symbolic, are self-organising and co-evolving in a dynamic and unstable mesh. Huyghe is the recipient of the Nasher Prize (2017), Kurt Schwitters Prize (2015), Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2013), Contemporary Artist Award, Smithsonian American Art Museum (2010), Hugo Boss Prize (2002), and Special Jury Prize at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). Selected exhibitions include Skulptur Projekte 2017, Münster, Germany (2017); Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2016); The Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission, New York, USA (2015); LACMA, Los Angeles, USA and Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (both 2014); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2013); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporanea Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2010); Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2008); Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2006) and Wollman Ice Rink, Central Park, New York, USA (2005).

Karrabing Film Collective (est. 2013, Australia) is a grassroots Indigenous media group consisting of over twenty members. They approach filmmaking as a mode of self-organisation and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop a local artistic languages and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Their films represent their lives, create bonds with their land and intervene in global images of Indigeneity. Their films and installations have been exhibited at Contour Biennale, Mechelen, Belgium; Berlinale Forum Expanded; Hallucinations, Athens at documenta 14; Sydney Biennale; vdrome.org; e-flux supercommunity at the Venice Biennale; Doc’s Kingdom, Lisbon; and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, among others.

Christelle Lheureux is an artist and filmmaker living in Paris. Her work focuses on nonlinear stories, where screens, moving images and sounds are split up, playing with narrative and memory structures, whereas her short films mobilise a hybrid language of fiction and documentary. Lheureux’s work has been shown in exhibitions and projects internationally, including the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; Nam June Paik Art Center, South Korea; MACBA, Barcelona and Palais de Tokyo, Paris and is included in international private and public collections. She is currently working on her first narrative feature film, Le vent des ombres, with baptysphere and Kick the Machine, with the support of FIDLab, TorinoFilmLab (Script & Pitch and Frame Work) and the Rotterdam Film Festival (Cinemart). Lheureux has been teaching cinema and contemporary art at HEAD Geneva from 2006, where she organised workshops with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Miguel Gomes, Albert Serra, Raya Martin, among others.

Peter Nadin is an artist, poet, and farmer living in Greene County, New York State. Born in Bromborough England in 1954 he moved to New York in 1976. From 1977-78 Nadin worked as a construction worker, along with the artist Christopher D’Arcangelo, with whom he began collaborating at the time. Together, they established a non-commercial gallery in Nadin’s Tribeca loft at 84 West Broadway, New York. In this space, artists and musicians were invited to respond to the conditions they found in the gallery. Nadin then began a consulting office offering practical aesthetic services in a short-lived artist consulting office collective with Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince, Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, and Robin Winters. During this time, he also worked collaboratively with Jenny Holzer publishing three books. Nadin had solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven, and showed at Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York. He also participated in many group exhibition, including the 1988 Venice Biennale. In 1992, Nadin ceased to exhibit his art and turned to farming and acquired Old Field Farm. In 2006 Nadin published The First Mark: Unlearning How to Make Art, a book that combines cultural criticism with discursive takes on the process of art making and human behaviour. Peter Nadin: First Mark at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York in 2011, which included sculptures made with objects from his life as a farmer was his first exhibition after twenty years. Recent exhibitions of his work have been held in Centro de Desarrollo de las Arts, Havana, Cuba; Galeria Provincial de Artes Plásticas, Guantánamo, Cuba; and Galeria Provincial de Artes Plásticas, Pinar del Rio ,Cuba (2018).

Pedro Neves Marques is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer based in New York. He has exhibited or screened his films at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, and e-flux, New Museum, Anthology Film Archives, and Sculpture Center in New York; Jeu de Paume and Kadist Art Foundation in Paris; Tate Modern in London; V-A-C Foundation and PAV in Italy; Sursock Art Museum in Beirut; the Times Museum in Guangzhou; Fundación Botín in Spain and Museu Coleção Berardo in Portugal.

Rivane Neuenschwander is a conceptual artist whose work lives whose work frequently employs a simple framework and materials (ant-eaten rice paper, coconut powder, ground spices) to convey complex ideas. She tests her hypothesis numerous times, allowing her subject to determine its own evolution. Exploring nature’s hidden and often chaotic logic, Neuenschwander has created a diverse and intimate body of work mapping and charting this evolving terrain. Recent solo exhibitions include Secondary Stories, SPACE, Linda Pace Foundation, Texas, USA (2016); The Name of Fear, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2016); Children’s Commission 2015: Rivane Neuenschwander, Whitechapel Gallery, London, England (2015) and Rivane Neuenschwander: mal-entendidos/misunderstandings, São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil (2014). In 2010, Neuenschwander’s mid-career retrospective, A Day Like Any Other, originated at the New Museum, New York and travelled to Mildred Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis (2010), Miami Art Museum, Miami (2011) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2011). Neuenschwander’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, including the Tate Modern, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Thyssen Bornemisza Collection, Vienna; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Brumadinho; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and La Fundacion Jumex, Mexico City.

A New Orleans native, Aimée Toledano is a artist and filmmaker of documentaries, film essays, and video work.  Her credits include: Passion Play (2018, directed by Deborah Luster); feature-length documentary Bayou Maharajah (2013) which won Oxford American’s Best Southern Film 2013, and film essays Taxonomy Transplanted (2012) and The First Mark (2008).  Her work has shown at the New Museum, NYC.  She is also the program director for The Embassy, a free recording studio for the New Orleans community founded by The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a Thai independent film director, screenwriter and artist, whose works deal with memory, subtly addressed personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai commercial film industry, Apichatpong has been active in promoting experimental and hybrid narrative filmmaking at home and abroad. His art projects and feature films have won him widespread recognition and numerous festival prizes, including two prizes from the Cannes Film Festival. In 1999, Weerasethakul founded Kick the Machine Films, which, at present also produces other filmmakers’ projects and co-supporting local film festivals.

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