This activity will be streamed live

WEDNESDAY 20 SEPTEMBER
4.30 pm Wendelien von Oldenbourgh. Artist who develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation.
Resisting a Recurring Image. Cinema Olanda
Cinema Olanda is the title of the presentation of three film works by Wendelien van Oldenborgh in the Dutch Pavilion in this year’s Venice Biennale. Taking its conceptual starting point from Gerrit Rietveld’s pavilion as a modernist projection of the Netherlands, the exhibition reconsiders what lies beyond its aesthetic and ideological frame, both at the time of its design in 1953 and in the present. Designed during the Postwar Reconstruction, when architecture was key to forging a new national image, the pavilion projects a progressive image of openness and transparency. On entering the pavilion, the viewer is confronted by Van Oldenborgh’s site-specific architectural installation, which both houses and aesthetically resounds with her three new ‘films’. These works reveal an alternative narrative to the Netherlands’ self-image as a tolerant nation, namely its reality as a complex and rapidly transforming social, cultural and political space.
In the presentation Wendelien van Oldenborgh will talk about how bringing alternative projections into the national pavilion not only tries to recover unconsidered histories that reside as ghosts in the present, an act that tries to resist the dominant image that keeps being projected. She will also address how this very act of meddling with the imaginary has been met with resistance and commentary from the national press.

5.30 am Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson. Artists and filmmakers.
Dark Matter Cinema Tarot. A Nocturnal Committee in Barcelona
(Collective reading with Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson)
The Dark Matter Cinema Tarot is a vernacular technology, a tool for collectively exploring ways in which cinema images can open up new channels of infra-perception connecting different realms of personal, aesthetic, social and political experience and enquiry, reaching towards the dark matter that haunts the ‘still moving’ image.
In conceiving the DMC Tarot, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson have replaced the Major and Minor Arcana with a selection of still images drawn from cinematic memory. No longer tied to the symbolism of the classical tarot, the DMC cards, suspended between contingency and fatality, refract questions posed to them through a process of speculative description and collective fabulation, with each reading forming a singular montage of gestures, situations and relations. Each consultation of the Tarot summons a Nocturnal Committee to pursue the alternative narratives and schizoanalytic possibilities that may be harboured in the different constellations of figures, forms and forces, and their partial repetitions, resulting from each fall of the cards.

BIOGRAPHIES
Wendelien van Oldenborgh
Develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation. She often uses the format of a public film shoot, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce a script and orientate the work towards its final outcome. With these works, which look at the structures that form and hinder us, she participated in various biennials, and in smaller dedicated shows. Recent presentations include As for the future (2017), DAAD, Berlin (solo); Prologue: Squat/Anti-Squat (2016), The Jerusalem Show, Palestine Biennial East Jerusalem; Form Left to Night (2015), The Showroom, London (solo). Van Oldenborgh’s work has been exhibited widely, including: RAW Material Company Dakar (SN); Tate Liverpool (UK); Muhka Antwerp (B); Generali Foundation Vienna; 2nd Biennial of Kochi-Muziris 2014; Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2011; 4th Moscow Biennial 2011; 29th Bienal de São Paulo 2010; and 11th Istanbul Biennial 2009. This year she is representing the Netherlands with a solo presentation in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh is a member of the (Dutch) Society for Arts and a recipient of the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (2014).

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson
Filmmakers and artists whose work interrogates potential forms and fictions emerging from the ruins of the moving image, and whose practice includes the creation of short and feature films, exhibitions, sound and video installations, film-performances, event works, radio shows and books. Their artistic production uses cinema in expanded form to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories and to create new modes of collective engagement with contemporary thought. Maglioni and Thomson's films include Wolkengestalt, Blind Data, Facs of Life, Through the Letterbox, In Search of UIQ and Disappear One. Their work has been presented in international film festivals, museums and art spaces including FID-Marseille, Bafici, Jihlava, FIFVC-Beirut, Centre Pompidou, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Britain, Serralves, Redcat, Museu de Arte Moderna de Bahia, The Showroom, KHOJ, Castello di Rivoli, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, Casco, CA2M, Van Abbe Museum. As artists in residence at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, they have been developing common infra/ctions, a project that forges connections between infra-forms and the development of ‘vernacular technologies’, including the creation of a Dark Matter Cinema Tarot and a Centre for Language Unlearning. They are currently preparing a new film, Common Birds.

Sponsored by:
Estrella Damm
Wendelien van Oldenborgh "Cinema Olanda" 2017, production still, photography Daria Scagliola
Programes públics
macba [at] macba [dot] cat
Tel: 93 481 33 68