highlike

Maxim Zhestkov

Supernova
Supernova is an experimental 4K art film directed and designed by Maxim Zhestkov and made in Zhestkov. Studio Everything around and inside us was conceived in a huge explosion of a star billions of years ago… and, probably, recycled from other matrices myriad times. In this eternal carousel of matter, particles gather, form complicated structures and then burst into all directions fusing atoms together and producing new elements and points of view, new colours and patterns of perception.

SAM TAYLOR WOOD

a little death

Despite the broader reference to the traditional pictorial genre of “still life”, disseminated from the Dutch and Spanish painters of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, ‘Still life’ from 2001 and ‘A little death’ from 2002 refer especially to the painting of transient elements of the French Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779) to discuss the distortion and inexorability of time, the finitude of life or, above all, the interdependence between life and death. The title makes a direct reference to the expression with which the French philosopher Georges Bataille defined the orgasm: ‘une petite mort‘.

Shu Lea Cheang

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Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller