A new (and improved) website, with news, a blog, a media-archive and the first confirmed artists for the upcoming festival! A few days ago we closed the call for entry. The result: 1372 films and videos that our programmers have to browse through ...
The Capital of (the) Ruins
friday 20 nov 2009, 20:00, Sphinx, Sint Michielshelling 3, 9000 Gent in the context of "Time is a Book"
When everything becomes uncertain, chances appear. The filmmakers in this programme do not accept a status quo but cherish a hope. They re-evaluate the past, look at today and develop utopian and/or dystopian ideas about the future. Time and space disappear bit by bit, a non-linear stream with personal and sociological problems as lead actors. The future always doubts itself!
with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Herman Asselberghs, Lav Diaz, Neil Beloufa, Brad Butler & Karen Mirza
With the digital invading every creative enterprise and form of expression, pencils have become pixels, dreams have turned into data. While cinema’s obsession with the “holy grail” of photorealism has generated a blizzard of visual extravaganzas aimed at a suspension of the distinction between representation and simulation, a generation of DIY bricoleurs use ubiquitious “tools of vizuality” (Kevin Kelly) to explore alternative viewings and readings of the familiar. Through processes of transference, translation and combination, they encode, reveal or impose layers of information and deceive expectations about visibility and availability. Poking the surfaces of various images, sounds and symbols, their renderings create poetic, playful and often melancholic environments that are both alien and familiar, questioning our relation to images and our imagination.
with Stephen Gray, Joseph Ernst, Chirstinn Whyte & Jake Messenger, Oliver Laric, Max Hattler, David O’Reilly, Michael Robinson, Dave Griffiths, Jonathon Kirk, Dietmar Offenhuber, Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, Nicolas Provost, Bernard Gigounon, Stewart Smith, Kurt D’Haeseleer & Tuk (Live)
Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz, members of the courtisane collective, compiled two programmes for this Italian festival. A special on the straightforward, elegant and playfull 16mm films of Morgan Fisher, and a glance at the possibilities of cinema to generate associations, intentionally or not. Morgan Fisher will introduce 'his' programme ...
No definite dates yet, but the 9th edition of courtisane festival will take place in 2010's springtime. And this is the call for entry... You can send your film/project to Courtisane. The submission form is here !
Courtisane appears at Beursschouwburg with a short programme in the context of S.H.O.W. "in search of..." tells the story of people looking for purification, but with different motives ...
CASZUIDAS Urban Screen Festival 4&5 September 2009, Zuidas, Amsterdam www.caszuidas.nl
Compiled by Courtisane for the first edition of CASZUIDAS Urban Screen Festival, Imagine is a selection of works and artists previously shown by Courtisane. Digital reveries and riddles, the video works in this programme seek to actively engage the « mental » participation of urban spectators, to throw them back upon themselves, opening up the limits of their sight to the freedom of their imagination. They imagine a new sensory language in which meaning is played with, but never denied. Between abstraction and playful transformation, distilling, reinterpreting popular media culture, these works leave way for the countless images generated by each spectator. Parallel worlds for the imagination of the spectator to wander around.
As always, the Courtisane festival organised a competition for recent short films and videos. A professional jury evaluated all Belgian and international productions made after 2006. On Sunday April 26, at 21:30, the jury announced which special productions win an award (1 Belgian / 1 international).
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION (sponsored by Avid)
BERNADETTE (UK, 2008, 38') – DUNCAN CAMPBELL
“Irish-born artist Duncan Campbell is interested in the seductive power of stories. With a nod to Samuel Beckett's humour, his work juxtaposes the inherent promise of storytelling with the breakdown of narrative and the inevitable disintegration of meaning.” (Monica Nunez)
Bernadette Devlin, one of the key figures in Northern Ireland’s republican and civil rights movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, was known for her temperament. She slapped the Home Secretary when he forbid her to address the parliament after Bloody Sunday…
The jury: “A well researched document of a true firebrand, Bernadette challenges the language and archetypes of documentary film whilst revelling in its own material.”
NATIONAL COMPETITION (sponsored by Eye-Lite)
PARADISE RECOLLECTED (BE, 2008, 33') – JASPER RIGOLE “The International Institute for Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other people’s Memories (IICADOM) is a fictive institute by the artist Jasper Rigole. It all started with the editing of 8mm-footage he found on a flea market. Since then, he has been collecting these films. Despite the fictive nature of the institute, it still has a clear goal: It seeks new destinations for ‘lost’ memories. All material fulfils the same criteria: They once had a personal and emotional value which is now lost (and therefore have become worthless). Within the structure of the institute, these lost images take on a new value. The spectator is confronted in Rigole’s films with research that is so farfetched and detailed that the reality depicted in his work seems plausible. It aims for reflection about memory and its subjectivity.” (Stef Van Bellingen, 2007).
8mm films, found on flea markets and garage sales also constitute the basis of this film, in which recollections are brought together in order to create a parallel world that refers to the ‘the land of Cockaigne’, a fictive medieval land of plenty.
The jury: “A powerful film essay which turns the authorative, official voiceover on its head. It offers a lucid and insightful thesis of a truly modern social phenomena...”
THE JURY MEMBERS WERE:
ROBRECHT VANDERBEEKEN (BE) Dr. Robrecht Vanderbeeken wrote a thesis on a subject in Social Sciences and Philosophy of Science (Ghent University). He is also a former researcher of the Jan van Eyck Academy (Maastricht, Netherlands). He has published What are you doing? Essays on Video Art. Besides, his publications concern a variety of topics (metaphysics, philosophy of tecnology and aesthetics). Since 2007 he teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University College Ghent (KASK) and at the Art Department (Ghent University). His current research concerns video art, theatre, media art and the philosophical implications of technological innovations in art and culture.
LUKE FOWLER (UK) Fowler's work is a testament to film's ability to transcend its own limits as both art form and document. He is a key catalyst and collaborator within Glasgow's vital scene of artists, musicians and film makers and has produced a body of important films profiling vanguard thinkers and counterculture figures such as Cornelius Cardew and RD Laing. Using archival footage, photographs, interviews and music, he constructs impressionistic portraits of his subjects. Fowler's approach offers sparkling, open and compelling moments to rethink their relationship to history and to the radical possibilities offered by film as a non-industrial, artistic practice.
BRYONY MCINTYRE (UK) Bryony McIntyre is co-director of Arika that curates, produces and delivers festivals and events that explore experimental arts. Instal (Glasgow) is a once a year collection of events that looks at different ideas about sound and music. Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee) is all about exploring the many different ways we navigate the borders, disparities and similarities between what we hear and what we see. Previously Bryony distributed and promoted the work of Scottish filmmakers and worked at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She likes films that tickle her fancy.
Courtisane kicked off...
The first pictures, An evening on... Memory with a.o. Circo Togni.
27-29 March, Luke Fowler and Lee Patterson in Ghent
This weekend, Courtisane welcomes both artists to prepare their performance for the forthcoming festival. Draw a Straight Line and Follow it is the only instruction mentioned in the score of Composition 1960 #10 by La Monte Young. Patterson and Fowler follow the instruction by this conceptualist very literally. Registering things they meet on their way, they will make a 'straight' journey through Ghent. The result is brought together in a live performance during the festival (An evening on...Landscapes, 24 april, Vooruit).
23-24-25-26 April Arts Centre Vooruit, Cinema Sphinx, Bank van de Arbeid, Film-Plateau
The full programme online 1 april
The 8th edition of the Courtisane festival presents a unique mix of (short) film, video, audiovisual performances and media art. Courtisane presents the work of today's most adventurous filmmakers in various locations in Ghent. 4 days packed with new cinematic experiences in the most varied forms. This year's dominant theme is the interplay between history and memory.
New work by established filmmakers and by young promises is compiled in thematic film programmes.
Guy Sherwin is Courtisane's central guest. This influential 'film-artist' will discuss film feedback and time lapse in the course of a screening/talk.
The special programme Somewhere in Time rethinks the relationships between past, present and future.
The exhibitionA Simple Truth looks at how small gestures and little words colour personal recollections and collective memory, how they hide or reveal details.
And with An evening on... Courtisane presents two thematic evenings featuring live performances, screenings and installations.
Make a Film!
friday 27 feb 2009, Meirsonstraat, Destelbergen, 20:00
Courtisane, invited by Ciné Privé, compiled a programme on the (in)ability of filmmakers. The mockumentary Puppetboy is a live action film about an obsessed animator (Johannes Nyholm), his clay figure, and a film crew doing a documentary on him. In What you do Gunilla Heilborn, Kim Hiorthoy and Marten Nilsson prove that even the most incompetent can make a movie...
The programme of Without a Trace... here! And you can still read loads of loose notes by one of the curators on his blog.
This is where we’ll do it #5, 2008 YouTube video that was downloaded, partially erased and uploaded to YouTube again 18 sec loop, black and white, no sound
From This is where we’ll do it, series of YouTube videos from which the performing people were erased
Gent, Arts Centre Vooruit, thursday 29 january 2009, tickets
film & video works, installations and an audiovisual performance Pierre Hébert, Martin Arnold, Naomi Uman, Spike Jonze, Matt McCormick, Martijn Hendriks, Tammuz Binschtock, Stephen Gray, Natalie Frigo ...
To erase, remove, rub out or conceal signs and images has never been as easy as it is in today's era of digital hybridization. The immense possibilities in image processing, compositing and trimming have led to the development of a "Photoshop reality", a corrected reality which has penetrated unnoticed the heart of our visual culture. However, the act of erasing is never without trace: there always remains a residue, a print upon the surface, a ghost where once was an image. Whether we are speaking of bare scratching or of calculated digital layering, each erasure leaves a trace behind, each absence suggests a (missed) presence. This ambiguity is even stronger in the context of the moving image, which only exists itself thanks to a sort of progressive "erasure", each image canceling the previous one. Elimination and inscription come together. The act of erasing, "of" and "in" the image, unavoidably leaves the trace of an event underway. It makes the new visible to itself as it redefines what is visible in the old. The film, video and media works in this programme use the idea and the gesture of removing as the basis for an exploration of the tension between presence and absence, appearing and disappearing.
Erase
'Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.' is a quote of Meister Eckhardt somewhere at the end of the 13th century. It's the title and starting point of a performance by Canadian artist Pierre Hébert. Courtisane takes this idea to build an evening (29 january, Kunstencentrum Vooruit) with this performance and work that focusses on erasing and the impossibility of total disappearance. Some loose notes by one of the curators can be found here and here .
Courtisane Festival 2009: dates & call for entry
Edition 8 runs from 22 april till 26 april 2009 at a.o. Cinema Sphinx and Arts Centre Vooruit with an artist in focus, an international film programme and thematic evenings full of performances, film and installations. The deadline of the Call for Entry is 31 december 2008...
Drawn to Life. Reanimating the Animate
Brussels, Maison des Cultures de Saint-Gilles, 25 & 27 nov 2008, free in cooperation with Atelier Graphoui
The artists and filmmakers in this program attempt to revitalize perception, offering an alternative or counterweight to the ways in which technological interfaces determine our relation to the world. . At the crossroads between cinematographic codes and genres, these films and videos seek to dismantle the common a priori assumptions on animation film and its limitations. Fragments of collective and individual memories are redrawn, with pencils and pixels, light, movement and (algo)rhythms, in search of new possible relations between world and representation, image and subject, dream and data, the aesthetical and the political. Animation as re-animation.
WithStephen Andrews, Robert Breer, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Sky David, Dirk de Bruyn, Kota Ezawa, Paul Glabicki, Stuart Hilton, Jonathan Hodgson, Ken Jacobs, Cathy Joritz, Jonathon Kirk, LEV, Frank & Caroline Mouris, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jenny Perlin, Josh Raskin, Bob Sabiston, Carolee Schneemann, Karl Tebbe
With its fourth edition of PAUZE, the annual off—stream festival for new music, KRAAK presents you a fresh bunch of unconventional, eccentric and exciting artists. This year we cross space with synth psych, noise gems, Korean folk and jazz, French outsiders and German avant-garde. With a film program, a lecture and a website full of background information, PAUZE offers you enough for three days of pure amazement.
Courtisane curated the film programme for 'Soul Shredders of Seoul', a part of Pauze that focuses on Korea. In Gajok Chosangwa, spurred on by the loss of hair, the director begins a journey of discovery into more than just his genetic make up. And Wyspa is the story of girl in a strange community run by a priest who is more concerned by the escape of some black goats or the effectiveness of the symbol of the cross.
From September 11th until January 4th MuHKA presents The Order of Things, an exhibition about the uses of image archives and other manifestations of a classificatory or “encyclopaedic” impulse in contemporary art. Within this context, MuHKA_media will host six screening programs dealing with the recuperation and reconfiguration of “found” images in film and video. The makers of these works use bits and scraps from the media reality surrounding us as a basis for the construction of new meanings, in search of a poetry of movement, a syntax of fragmentation, bringing divergent elements together in a system of construction in which they belong: cinema. Based on a series of codes and axioms, cinema can be subject to multiple forms of ideological appropriation, both cinematographic and meta-cinematographic, as well as on a micro-level – each shot is itself a succession of frames. In these film and video works the meaning and the hierarchy of images become subordinated to a new logic, a subversive, narrative or totalizing order taken out of the ‘infinite cinema’, the world in/as images.
With Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, Alan Berliner, Abigail Child, Lenka Clayton, Bruce Conner, William Farley, Morgan Fisher, Hollis Frampton, Christoph Girardet, Arthur Lipsett, Frank & Caroline Mouris, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Simon Pummell, Chick Strand.
