Bonniers Konsthall

Materials: Cardboard and wooden structure finished with clouts, metal chimney, screen, 13 minute video projection with sound from three channels.

A  collaboration between Bonniers Konsthall and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

Artists: Rosa Barba, Marco Brambilla, Douglas Gordon, Alex Reynolds, Lindsay Seers, Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, Ming Wong

 

Excerpt from Press Release:

"The film Extramission 6 (Black Maria) recounts how artist Lindsay Seers spoke her first words when she was eight years old. Her silence was thought to be connected to her photographic memory. Upon seeing a photograph of herself, she spoke her first sentence: ‘Is that me?’ And with the arrival of language, her photographic memory began to disappear. Through this traumatic loss, Seers longed to ‘be a camera’, which led her to create photographs by placing light-sensitive paper in her mouth, as well as experimenting with other picture-taking methods. The film takes us inside a model of Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Kinetographic Theatre from 1893, the first ever film studio."

"The love affair between art and film started the moment the film camera was invented. This spring, Bonniers Konsthall will investigate the century long relationship.

A century after the first film experiments, moving image is an inevitable part of our visual culture. We interact constantly with moving images on different screens: computers, mobile phones and game consoles. With the development of portable equipment and social networks on the internet, the making, screening and distribution of film have become available to everyone. One could say that we have now reached the stage after film, a shift in technologies, maybe as decisive as the invention of film itself. A sad consequence of the invention of new technologies is that other techniques have to move to the graveyard of the outmoded and the obsolete. Those funerals also mean the burial of a certain vision.

How those shifts, those births and deaths in the history of the moving image, influence and change art is the core in this spring’s major exhibition project A Trip To the Moon.

In the exhibition viewers are presented with contemporary artists who employ moving imagery as their tool to express the theme of the history and future of filmmaking. The fascination of the field of visual arts with film extends right back to the moment the film camera was invented. In order to delve into the debate that has always existed between these two art forms, we will be screening a selection of historical feature films and shorter video installations as footnotes in the exhibition. Video art often serves as a commentary on the role of film in society as a whole, as well as exploring the vast possibilities offered by the medium of film."

Bonniers Konsthall has published an anthology called 'A trip to the Moon' (2012) to accompany the show http://www.bonnierskonsthall.se/en/Exhibitions/Exhibitions/Resan-till-manen/