3D Makeup

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival

Ines Alpha, a digital artist specializing in 3D makeup, constantly seeks artistic collaborations that transcend her own face. Working only on her personal characteristics became restrictive and monotonous for Ines. Starting from faces as blank canvases, she incorporates digital elements that ‘amplify‘ unique personalities, styles and essences.

Bio

Ines Alpha is a digital artist internationally recognized for her unique 3D makeup style, developed while working in the beauty industry as an art director. Her innovative approach combines makeup with technology, creating ethereal and futuristic narratives, and redefining the future of aesthetics in the world of beauty.

Photo
Diane Sagnier

Speculative Evolution, Prototype 1

FILE 2024 | Installations
International Electronic Language Festival
Speculative experiment on a future ecosystem under strict control. The narrative takes place in a simulation, 30 years in the future, where artificial intelligence and synthetic biology collaborate to optimize an environment for cultivated species. An AI-powered simulator helps visitors generate new species to balance the ecosystem. Inspiration comes from the book Under the White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert and artists’ stories about life on a damaged planet.

Bio

Marc Lee is a Swiss artist focused on real-time rendered audiovisual installations, AR, VR and mobile applications, critically exploring creative, cultural, social, ecological, political and speculative themes. His work has been exhibited in important museums and new media art spaces. Shervin Saremi is an Iranian musician and audio engineer specializing in sonic computing, procedural sound design and production. Currently researching immersive audio at UdK Berlin.

Floating

FILE 2024 | Aesthetic Synthetics
International Electronic Language Festival
Leilanni Todd – Floating – United States

Floating explores the concept of surrendering and freeing oneself by allowing oneself to float, symbolizing overcoming adversity and mastering self-confidence. Inspired by her grandmother’s journey to overcome her fear of water through swimming, the work uses water and sea creatures as symbols of resilience and transformation. The personal narrative behind the work adds depth to its exploration of overcoming fears and discovering inner strength.

Bio

Leilanni Todd is an award-winning creative director with extensive experience in advertising, fashion and new media. Originally from Toronto and now based in New York, she harmoniously integrates art, technology and culture into her work. Through her FLOAM WORLD platform, Leilanni creates surreal narratives, reimagines traditional norms in fashion and advertising, and addresses complex human issues with humor and creativity.

Coro pêndulo
Pendulum Choir é uma peça coral original para 9 vozes A Cappella e 18 macacos hidráulicos. O coro é constituindo por um corpo vivo e sonoro. Esse corpo se expressa por meio de vários estados físicos. Sua plasticidade varia de acordo com sua sonoridade. Varia entre sons abstratos, sons repetitivos e sons líricos ou narrativos. Os corpos dos cantores e suas vozes brincam com e contra a gravidade. Eles se tocam e se evitam, criando polifonias vocais sutis. Ou, apoiados por sons eletrônicos, rompem sua coesão e explodem em um voo lírico ou se dobram em um ritual obsessivo e sombrio. O órgão viaja da vida à morte em uma alegoria robótica onde a complexidade tecnológica e o lirismo dos corpos em movimento se combinam em uma obra com acentos prometéicos.
.
Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir is constituted by a living and sonorous body. This body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies according to its sound. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds and lyrical or narrative sounds. The singers’ bodies and their voices play with and against gravity. They touch and avoid each other, creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and explode in a lyrical flight or bend in an obsessive and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where technological complexity and the lyricism of moving bodies combine in a work with Promethean accents.

Lucy Mcrae
HEAVY DUTY LOVE
A cautionary narrative in an uncomfortable, complex debate on the scientific acceleration directing our evolutionary path —from gene-edited babies to CRISPR to AI — Heavy Duty Love is a mental health prop existent as a tactile mechanical structure, asking, “As we head toward a life designed from scratch, will we seek new types of intimacy?”. Realised as a speculative domestic device compensating for a lack of human touch in early life, Heavy Duty Love sandwiches the body between layers of soft, dampening materials normally used in contemporary camping or construction.

The Body is The House, The House is But Haunted
.
Eli Cortiñas’ artistic practice traverses contemporary and historical visual cultures, which she dissects using montage and collage, displacing limiting attributions and creating space for feminist and decolonial narratives. These methods gradually reveal specific patterns which are often inherent in the images themselves. Juxtaposing what seems disparate, drawing parallels and uncovering commonalities, Cortiñas lays bare traditional conventions of representation and identifies surprisingly rigid narrative patterns.

Vicky
Vicky is an interactive film that tells the non-linear story of a future hurricane on the southern border of the United States in 2028. The narrative, which is augmented by sound design from Theo Karon, is spread across multiple screens, each of which houses a different character reflecting on the situation in different ways.

فيليب الزجاج
菲利普·格拉斯
פיליפ גלאס
フィリップ·グラス
필립 글래스
Филип Гласс
Einstein On The Beach
ROBERT WILSON
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi

.
Einstein on the Beach is an opera in four acts (framed and connected by five “knee plays” or intermezzos), scored by Philip Glass and directed by theatrical producer Robert Wilson. The opera eschews traditional narrative in favor of a formalist approach based on structured spaces laid out by Wilson in a series of storyboards. The music was written “in the spring, summer and fall of 1975.”Glass recounts the collaborative process: “I put [Wilson’s notebook of sketches] on the piano and composed each section like a portrait of the drawing before me. The score was begun in the spring of 1975 and completed by the following November, and those drawings were before me all the time.”
full opera

In Search of Petra Genetrix

Petra Genetrix, the protagonist of the series Porosity Valley, is a migrant, mineral, and data cluster. In this lecture performance, the artist traces the origin of Petra Genetrix who constantly crosses borders, gender boundaries, and the concept of existence and nonexistence and creates her own hyperbolic mythology. While utilizing audio and video excerpts from her existing works, Ayoung Kim uses her own voice to create a verbal narrative exploring those agents who cross boundaries. By doing so, she continues to trace multifaceted crystal faces of Petra Genetrix, who is fundamentally porous and ambiguous.

Cutting Corners Creates More Sides
A spoken text …rummages through piles of surplus; boxed accouterments and that unaccounted for miscellanea… and the uneasiness of language itself as it grapples with the whereabouts of the necessary words. The narrative debris morphs through manifolds of optical glass with each utterance marking points along the way. On a long, black tableaux two cameras with little or no depth of field, sentence by sentence cut through a mysterious world of a seemingly inconsequential lineup of objects, tools, parts, bits and the unidentifiable forgotten –whatever might have been close at hand becomes enfolded in a richly colored crystalline doppelgänger image. For each sentence and “drilling” through the objects, the cameras’ parallaxes have been adjusted for a different cross section—the point where momentarily a continuous horizontal view is possible only to then quickly deconstruct as quickly as it formed. The object/installation itself is a self-contained self-reflexive mobile surface complete with positional projectors and screens and a narrow black “runway” of sorts reflecting the initial process of recording.

Der Eidolon spaltet sich
Der Eidolon spaltet sich untersucht die Konstruktion menschlicher Form und Identität in einem narrativen Bereich. Es reflektiert und verkörpert den Bildschirm als Portal und Kontaktfläche sowohl als physisches als auch als virtuelles Gerät.

In the robot skies
In the Robot Skies is the world’s first narrative shot entirely through autonomous drones. In collaboration with the Embedded and Artificially intelligent Vision Lab in Belgium the film has evolved in the context of their experiments with specially developed camera drones each programmed with their own cinematic rules and behaviours. The film explores the drone as a cultural object, not just as a new instrument of visual story telling but also as the catalyst for a new collection of urban sub cultures. In the way the New York subway car of the 80’s gave birth to a youth culture of wild style graffiti and hip hop the age of ubiquitous drones as smart city infrastructure will create a new network of surveillance activists and drone hackers. From the eyes of the drones we see two teenagers each held by police order within the digital confines of their own council estate tower block in London. A network of drones survey the council estates, as a roving flock off cctv cameras and our two characters are kept apart by this autonomous aerial infrastructure.

Arrival

“Arrival’s narrative plays out in four languages: English, Mandarin, Russian and Heptapod. Though they are not spoken in the film, we learn that Louise is also fluent in Farsi, Sanskrit and Portuguese (and possibly others). The language learning process and the growing translingual bond between Louise and the heptapods forms the film’s narrative arc and the majority of its plot. Thus language, and specifically the mechanics of ←215 | 216→multilingualism, is Arrival’s central theme. Within this context, the ability to communicate across language barriers is an asset, and the flexibility to navigate new linguistic challenges is invaluable. The heptapods are pure science fiction, but serve a powerful metaphorical function. As Emily Alder (2016) writes in The Conversation, “ultimately, Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually […] The film’s message is that difference is not about body shape or colour but language, culture and ways of thinking. It’s not about erasing that difference but communicating through it”. Gemma King

.

语言学习过程以及路易丝与七足动物之间越来越多的跨语言联系形成了电影的叙事弧线和大部分情节。 因此，语言，尤其是←215的机制| 216→使用多种语言是到达中心的主题

.

Процесс изучения языка и растущая межъязыковая связь между Луизой и гептаподами составляют повествовательную дугу фильма и большую часть его сюжета. Таким образом, язык и, в частности, механика ← 215 | 216 → многоязычие – центральная тема Арривала.

Spektrum
SPEKTRUM is an interplay of light, music and the performers. The use of projections in a theatrical context was a very pleasant experience for us, for when projections are used indoors, they can be controlled so precisely that amazing changes of perspective are possible. Once the stage is perceived as a platform, once as a white cube, once the spatial perception itself is completely challenged. As the three different elements of the performance merge into one unified language, SPEKTRUM is able to be many things at once: playful and yet fierce, touching and yet disturbing. Less a narrative than an emotional and sensory experience SPEKTRUM challenges the mind of the spectator in a quite a poetic way.

Liminal Scope
Liminal Scope is an immersive light and sound installation, in which three rings frame the transit of light through space. The audiovisual score enmeshes harmonic frequencies, rhythmic motion,
and gradients of color, orchestrating a narrative which navigates tension and release. Our form of reality is mutually constructed by our perceptions along with their limitations. The installation’s rings form an aperture that focuses and reveals a spatial quality of light, which usually remains unseen. Liminal Scope is a meditation on these perceptual limitations as they
relate to our shared and individual perspectives on reality.

The Eidolon Splits
The Eidolon Splits explores the construction of human form and identity within a narrative realm. It reflects and embodies the screen as a portal and contact surface both as a physical and a virtual device.

Mirror Matter
In the neutrino observatory rendered in Mirror Matter, slow panning movement gives a sense of the immensity of the nearly 13,000 photo-multipliers that inhabit this strange vessel – their ‘eyes’ engineered to watch light. Another frame depicts the Hadron Collider at CERN; its architecture envisioned through lidar scans, producing a dynamic, transparent imprint in three dimensions. Described as a vision that flows through the body, it is imagined by Škarnulytė as ‘alien archaeological vision’ with the ability to see through, and as the experience of sight farthest from the human realm. Through simultaneous perspectives, the constant surveying motion that weaves a continues thread through each video narrative, and the immersion generated by the reflective black ceiling, the viewer is imparted with this panoptical mode of perception.

Synchrometrics

Can we design future memories for the body?
Is the body itself the apparatus for remembering cultural processes?Prospectus For a Future Body proposes new perspectives on how the body remembers and invents technological narratives. Central to the project is the study of body movement in dance: How it can evolve, adapt or re-condition to possible futures?Eternal Summer Storm explores the concept of muscle memory transfer as an alternative form of interactive cultural continuities. This concept prototype speculates on a future digital library of body movements or dance techniques that can be experienced beyond the audio-visual conventions. Eternal Summer Storm attempts to recreate legendary Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh dance choreography and experience in ‘A Summer Storm’ (1973) from archival footages.Bionic Movement Research is a collection of experiments on the process of designing digital muscle memory for the body. Inspired by Luigi Galvani discovery (1780) of animal electricity in the human body, these experiments appropriate the techniques of electrical nerve stimulation to choreograph artificial muscle contraction and body movement.

Where the City Can’t See
Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by fiction author Tim Maughan, ‘Where the City Can’t See’ is the world’s first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners, designed in collaboration with Alexey Marfin. The computer vision systems of driverless cars google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are now fundamentally reshaping urban experience and the cultures of our city. Set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ) and shot using the same scanning technologies used in autonomous vehicles, we see this near future city through the eyes of the robots that manage it. Exploring the subcultures that emerge from these new technologies the film follows a group of young car factory workers across a single night, as they drift through the smart city point clouds in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists but that the map doesn’t show.

Untitled: (A Search for Ghosts in the Meat Machine)
What does it mean to be human? At first glance a simple question, the idea of being human is an unstable construct, continuously recrafted. Recent technological innovations allow us to redesign ourselves profoundly— from networked prosthetics and artificial intelligence, to the genetic code of life itself. Can our behaviors be reduced to algorithms? Can our bodies be upgraded with nonorganic integrations? Can sentience itself by manufactured in a lab? This set of nine sculptures examines personhood from anatomical, psychological, genetic, biochemical, behavioral, algorithmic, personal narrative and memory. In many ways, this installation is an emotional confrontation with being quantifiable.

Nine Bats

The abstract and colorful patterns of Kølbæk Iversen suck our bodies and envelop us in total installations that deal with the body, corporeality and phenomena such as phantom pain. The works store poetic and existential narratives of what it means to be human.

Triph
“When left alone with no audience, the object glows dimly as if it were asleep. Yet when visitors approach, the installation slowly comes back to life. Colour gradients pour into each shape, whilst mirrored surfaces start reflecting light – all to the orchestra of an encompassing soundscape. This project invites visitors to become part of something. An immersive light experience in which the audience directs the intensity, audio and colour palettes simply by approaching, moving around in and between the large geometric shapes of the installation. Truly, a merging of art, interaction design, sound, tech and vision. As visual architects, our aim with ‘TRIPH” is to demonstrate that a number of different techniques can be combined into a mix of unexpected shapes and materials, that in turn help to create a new truly unique way of experiencing a story. Both in daylight condition and at night. With our self-initiated work, we aim to find undiscovered methods of narrative, questioning the ways people discover and open themselves up to new conceptual work.” Circus Family

World of Glory
World of Glory is a 1991 Swedish short film written and directed by Roy Andersson. Its original Swedish title is Härlig är jorden, which means “Lovely is the Earth”, and is the Swedish title of the hymn “Fairest Lord Jesus”. The narrative portrays a man in white make-up who guides the viewer through his life in a bleakly stylised world. The film was Andersson’s critical comeback to cinema, after many years in advertising

Abyss of Light

Abyss of Light is divided into three screens and into three acts, the traditional structure of classic narrative film. In the first act, all the images synchronize to form a single panorama of Bryce Canyon in Utah. In the second, the screens break away from one another into three parallel sequences wherein each projection shows the same one hundred images at different speeds. In the third, all three images synchronize once again to form a single wrapping panorama of Death Valley, California. The work is an ode to the American western, one of my favorite film genres. Despite my admiration, however, my desire is not to imitate westerns. Instead, I set up an abstraction in opposition to the idea of narrative, something that can be seen in all of my work. In Abyss of Light, continuous disruptions of the American landscape document my refusal to see the land as backdrop for man’s heroic conquering of the wild; instead I see it as a foreground, a subject to be contemplated for itself and for which wildness is a state of grace.

Beyond Cassini
“BEYOND CASSINI” uses this narrative to celebrate the accomplishments of one of the most successful and beloved Satellites in space exploration history. As Cassini begins its final flight into Saturn’s upper atmosphere with a mission of disintegration, visuals flash back through time giving viewers highlights of this dying satellite’s life.

Machine Hallucination
Refik Anadol’s most recent synesthetic reality experiments deeply engage with these centuries-old questions and attempt at revealing new connections between visual narrative, archival instinct and collective consciousness. The project focuses on latent cinematic experiences derived from representations of urban memories as they are re-imagined by machine intelligence. For Artechouse’s New York location, Anadol presents a data universe of New York City in 1025 latent dimensions that he creates by deploying machine learning algorithms on over 100 million photographic memories of New York City found publicly in social networks. Machine Hallucination thus generates a novel form of synesthetic storytelling through its multilayered manipulation of a vast visual archive beyond the conventional limits of the camera and the existing cinematographic techniques. The resulting artwork is a 30-minute experimental cinema, presented in 16K resolution, that visualizes the story of New York through the city’s collective memories that constitute its deeply-hidden consciousness.

Dutch-Croatian photographer Sanja Marušić uses an experimental approach to colour, composition, materials, and manipulations in her work to create dreamlike scenes that are at once cinematic and alienating.She travels the world in her production of these otherworldly images, finding settings and forms that play with our relation to the subconscious, simplifying the bodies of her subjects with geometric shapes, and abstracting the human form even further by incorporating stylised dance movements.Putting places above people, many of Sanja’s photographs are set in wide open futuristic spaces in an attempt to create surreal and alienating visual emotions. She often uses cool and bright colours as well as singular objects and accessories in order to create unique and enigmatic narratives.

Bernie Krause

Bernie Krause is one of the world’s experts in natural sound, and here we listen through Krause’s ears as he collects the sounds of purring jaguars, snapping shrimp, cracking glaciers–and the roar of the wild. It is an intensely personal narrative of life as it hits the ears, and of the planet‘s deeply connected natural sounds and music.

أندريه تاركوفسكي
塔可夫斯基
アンドレイ·タルコフスキー
Андрей Тарковский
Solaris
In Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky presents a vision of contemporary society as one that has become cut off from nature, and provides a narrative that illustrates the possibility of remaining human in the inhuman world that is the result. The film contrasts a life-affirming natural landscape to an urban, constructed landscape where the natural world is submerged and invisible. The Solaris space station is both a projection of this second, inhuman, landscape and an allegory for Tarkovsky’s view of urban life. The narrative of the film concerns the journey by the central character, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), from emotional deadness to a rediscovery of his humanity as he charts a course between these two worlds, and the role that art, whether painting, music or film, plays in this.
cinema full

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology

Vespers

“Vespers is a collection of 15 3-D-printed masks that explore the idea of designing with live biological materials. The collection consists of three distinct series, each reinterpreting the concept of the death mask—traditionally a wax or plaster impression of a corpse’s face. Taken as a whole, the three series form a narrative arc from death to rebirth. In the first series, Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group looked at the death mask as a cultural artifact. Fabricated using an algorithm that deconstructed polyhedral meshes into subdivided surfaces, the masks were 3-D printed with photopolymers, as well as with bismuth, silver, and gold, and rendered in color combinations that recur in religious practices around the world.” Rachel Morón

Symphonie Cinétique

The exhibition project focuses mainly on the cor­relation and inter­action of three elements: reflection, sound and movement. Symphonie Cinétique narratively inter­relates the three elements, and brings out their inherent, almost mystic harmony. The result of this process is an artistic synthesis, a unique spatial experience. At the premiere, Arnalds performed the Symphonie Cinétique live on piano and tablet. This fascinating interplay between music, light and movement served as a prelude to the exhibition.

요르단 울프슨
ジョーダンウォルフソン
Colored sculpture
“Colored Sculpture” is a work in animatronic that becomes a mechanical theatre, with its spectacular performance brings us reflections on a dark past that we want to reject.“With a highly polished appearance, the work is suspended with heavy chains from a large mechanized gantry, programmed to choreograph his movements. The sheer physicality of the installation, which fills the entire space of the gallery and includes the work being hoisted and thrown hard on the floor, viscerally obscures the distinction between figuration and abstraction, in addition to promoting the formal and narrative possibilities of sculpture. “

振り子の合唱団
Pendulum Choir

Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play with and against gravity. They brush and avoid each other creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and burst into lyrical flight or fold up into an obsessional and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where the technological complexity and the lyricism of the moving bodies combine into a work with Promethean accents.

Zee
File Festival 

Immersive Audiovisual Environment Artificial Fog, Stroboscopes, Pulse Lights and Surround Sound, 2008

ZEE proposes a state of tabula rasa and unfolds without a narrative or reproducible imagery.The audience wanders freely in a space filled with extremely dense fog that fully obscures all of its boundaries. Stroboscopic- and pulse lights illuminate the fog, in a softened and evenly dispersed manner, creating kaleidoscopic three-dimensional structures in constant animation. An ambient and minimal sound-scape connects to the imagery, without directly synchronizing to it.The core visual impression of ZEE is of a psychedelic architecture of pure light, an abstract luminescent landscape enveloping the visitor. Time appears to stand still.

High Tide
For her show High Tide, which was most recently exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Humeau sculptured a collection of futuristic marine mammals and set about imagining what they might sound like if they could recount complex narratives. With mechanical clicks and whistles, similar to those made by whales and dolphins, Humeau’s creations tell of a great flood – an apocalyptic deluge that sparked the birth of their culture. “These floods”, she explains, “might be the consequence of climate change and rising oceans and the air becoming toxic. Maybe the great flood is actually us. As humans, we are the flood.”

Lucky Storm
This is one part of a three-part installation that alters the spaces of the gallery with elements derived from American romantic landscape painting, especially the pre-photographic interpretation of landscape found in Thomas Cole’s paintings and those of the Hudson River School painters. Nature is frequently presented as a fantastic amalgam of real detail and impossible phenomena, not observed but reinvented for the purpose of allegorical narrative.

For Colored Girls
Photographer Ed Maximus is well known for his ventures in the fashion world, but his latest project For Colored Girls has sparked a tidal wave of interest and support, especially after it’s feature in Vogue Italia. Maximus has stated that the project centers on the narrative of black women being controlled by themselves despite oftentimes having their bodies politicized and policed by outside forces.more…

Anonymous Women
In the latest narratives, “Demise,” the woman becomes the victim of domestic disasters. Her activities, obsessions and objects are overwhelming her. Her home has become a site of tragedy. The scenes of her heartbreaking end are loosely inspired by several sources including the game of clue, where murder occurs in one of five rooms of the house: Dining Room, Kitchen, Hall, Conservatory, and Library.

マイケル·クラーク·カンパニー
Tate Project Part I ]
The choreography rehearsed and performed in 2010 paired the rigour of classical steps with contemporary movement, a juxtaposition that paralleled Clark’s training as a ballet dancer at the Royal Ballet, and his later anti-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian choreographic experiments. Balletic poses, jumps and steps were isolated from traditional narrative sequences and made strange through repetition. The graceful leaps and turns of the trained dancers seemed awkward and uneven, just as they were often out of sync and oriented in different directions. This choreography paralleled the performance space, which was demarcated by geometric and striped floor mats designed by Charles Atlas, which resembled the large windows at the back of the hall and the black beams that extend vertically from floor to ceiling.

Echoes
Marguerite Humeau’s design is used to explore the means by which knowledge is generated in the absence of evidence, or in the impossibility of either reaching or analysing the object of investigation. Humeau weaves factual events into speculative narratives, therefore enabling the unknown to erupt in grandiose splendour. The work is presented as a series of live science fictions: semi-real, synthetic, supernatural events.

Me as Eva Hesse
Throughout the past two decades, Gillian Wearing’s films, photographs and sculptures have investigated public personas and private lives. Since the beginning of her career, the artist has drawn from techniques of theater, reality television and fly-on-the-wall documentary-making to construct narratives that explore personal fantasies and confessions, individual traumas, cultural histories, and the role of the media. Anonymity through elaborate masks, costumes and role-play has remained a critical part of Wearing’s practice and influential investigation of the ways in which individuals present themselves to others when the self is temporarily concealed.

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون
The large-scale nine-panel installation, Microcosm, is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Microcosm is an imaginative reinvention of the sumptuous landscape of sin, salvation, and tawdry visions of those who never made it to paradise. The structure and narrative pattern of Bosch’s triptych, such as the architecture of heaven, earth and hell, as well as the basic forms of Bosch’s pictures, have been preserved in Miao Xiaochun’s work. But new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to explore a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favoring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view in a single landscape.

the Valley of the Gods
Valley of the Gods weaves together three narrative threads, mixing with the world of myths inspired by the Indian tribe legends about the ancient hero Ullikummin. “I am fascinated by the beauty and poetry of this mythology. It illustrates the contrast of primitive America with the current, equally surreal culture of America’s myth. With the culture of mass media and dreamed-up film illusions. It is summarised, among others, by the phrase ’sky is the limit’, demonstrating that everyone can become enormously rich”, director Lech Majewski said in a statement.

Мэнди Грир
曼迪·格里尔
Imagined Exotic
“In her works, haunting vignettes of half-told stories are littered with crocheted entrails and vines of thick, cloying mud that evoke a sense of elegant foreboding. They deal with a sense of vague narrative that, through abstraction, finds archetype; her installations whisper of timelessness, of a buried, invisible power that runs below the surface of the world that we cavalierly inhabit. ”

Nude No 5
Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Maar
Mary Ellen Strom’s works unearth submerged narratives in the environment, history, and in cultural discourse. Working primarily in video, Strom uses the language(s) of drawing, painting, sculpture, and dance. These media are used to generate an embodied understanding of place by utilizing movement, signs, and metaphors.

6&7
Tao Ye rejects any attempts to harness his work to narrative, which is why he numbers his choreographies rather than naming them. Numbers 6 and 7 were choreographed one after the other, but are presented here as a single work. 6 takes us into a dark world: six black-clad dancers emerge out of a foggy landscape resembling smog-choked Beijing. They start moving with one ‘voice’, treading the ground firmly and dancing—chiefly with the upper part of their bodies—a ritualistic dance which stretches the human body to the very limits of its flexibility. An equally minimalist soundtrack and the exceptional lighting design of Sweden’s Ellen Ruge, a close collaborator of Mats Ek, who has done a lot of high-profile work here in Greece, complete the raw materials of this performance-experience.

منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

Mortifications
Hart’s work is symbolist and poetic, not really narrative, but vaguely so, and is mesmerizing, hypnotic and formalist. Bodies or natural forms like flowers always appear in it. Hart calls her work, “post photography,” and has created a body of theoretic writings and exhibitions based on this concept. The things in her worlds are generated from computer models instead of captured with a camera.

coagulate
Mihai Grecu’s video work Coagulate is a visually immersive journey into a world of water which behaves against the laws of nature. This choreography of fluids explores absence, presence and aquatic distortions. In this world, man breathes water and fish breath air. Water seems impervious to gravity. Rather than narrative, Coagulate is based on sensation and atmosphere.

Drawers
Nikki Pressley’s work is concerned with examining and disrupting the narratives associated with personal and collective history, language, belief and memory. She is interested in interpretations of time and space that are malleable and destabilising in relation to humanity and self. The work consists of drawings, sculpture, projection, design and organic materials that function as contemplations on these various ideas, often creating broad relationships from project to project.