DVblog

Fragmented Occurences (2010, 67MB, 4:33 min.)

It’s a little while since we featured anything from the splendid Sam
Renseiw, so here’s a recent piece.
In contrast to many of his films, which have an incredibly strong
sense of a particular place, this was apparently composed
from odds and ends of footage from various locations during the last
few months.
I think it works beautifully; it’s instructive to see Sam intervening,
perhaps a little more than usual, at the editing level.
(His camera work is always very distinctive – there’s often a sense
-true or not- that many pieces are largely composed in the shooting.)

Whatever the case, this is, as always, a wonderful and utterly distinctive voice.

PS This is our 1000th post of the new series. Many thanks to all who have sent words of encouragement & appreciation. It makes the time spent working on DVblog feel doubly worthwhile.

Double Blind (clip) ( 2010, 70MB, 5:38 min)

“Annie Abrahams (from the Living Room in Montpellier, France)
and Curt Cloninger (from Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center
in Asheville, North Carolina, US) repeatedly sang “love, love, love”
(a short excerpt from a pop song) as a kind of duet, in real
time/space and online.

In order to isolate them from their surroundings and make them
more attentive to the other, they were both blindfolded.
While singing they evolved and mutated the original song excerpt,
collaborating and communicating in a space/time of alterity.
The artists have never met each other in the flesh.

There was no set duration.
They sang until the last one of them decided to stop.
In both places a space was reserved for the live performance
and another for the video and audio projection.
A camera was fixed on each of their faces singing to each other.
This live video of both faces was projected both in the
Living Room space and in the Black Mountain College
Museum and Arts Center space.
The performance was also visible on the web at http://selfworld.net.”

Interesting and affecting convergence of the performative work
Curt Cloninger has been doing of late with the
strange, wonderful & categorisation denying oeuvre of Annie Abrahams.

We feature here only a tiny extract from the 4 hour plus performance
of Double Blind – the complete documentation will be on show
as part of Annie Abraham’s first UK solo show at HTTP gallery
in North London, in addition to new works and performances.
The opening is on Friday night & all are welcome – if you’re in
or near London it’ll be well worth getting along to.

Complete Double Blind documentation & links