The Present Condition

The landscapes of ‘The Present Condition’ derive from a journey of more than 15,000 km by land by the artist between the two geographical extremes of South America. The video is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, where real and imaginary spaces intersect. Concepts such as human intimacy, desire, work, the savage capitalism that builds cathedrals in the desert, the perverse bureaucracy and the construction of the border wall are just some of the elements that are mixed in a striking and suggestive mosaic of images.

file sp 2019 videoart

Shenzhen Bay Culture Park
“I want to create a surreal atmosphere, so that the people who visit, relax or exercise here have the possibility of engaging in a dialogue with the past and the future. Time and space are dissolved and placed against each other, manifesting a sense of weightlessness, and unrestrained imagination,” Ma Yansong

ВИЛЛИ ВЕРДЖНЕРА
意大利雕塑家
ciuria de foies
These lifelike sculptures are typically carved from solid linden wood then painted with acrylic paint. Their subtle but strange gestures coupled with unexpected objects give the sculptures a quietly surreal atmosphere. Verginer’s peculiar style of painting his work adds to each piece’s enigmatic quality. Rather than realistically paint each individual detail, Verginer applies large swaths of color to his sculptures. The pieces nearly seem to be dipped in pools of pigment. These large fields of color work in contrasting against the realism of each sculpture.

Craco

Tobias Stretch channels the beauty and melancholia of Hauschka’s single “Craco” in his uncanny video filmed in Philadelphia’s answer to Brooklyn’s High Line, Reading Viaduct Park. With music videos for Radiohead, Crystal Fighters and Christopher Bono to his name, the Philly-based animator is known for his distinct aesthetic and method, pairing landscape photography with life-size stop-motion puppets. “I thought right from the beginning when I saw Tobias’s work that it has a mixture of analog and handmade elements and a surreal atmosphere. In my music you have similar elements,” says Hauschka himself, aka the German pianist and composer Volker Bertelmann, who headline’s London’s Union Chapel tonight as part of his European tour. Although best known as a 21st-Century protagonist of the prepared piano practice championed by John Cage, Bertelmann “left all the preparations at home” in order to work with a pure sound on this track. Named after the Italian ghost town, “Craco” is taken from his entropy-laced album Abandoned City and played to Stretch’s own fascination with urban decay. “The music was there beforehand, but I had a bowl of music and a bowl of names and I tried to pair them up. I think the music sounded not only like an abandoned place but also like a nostalgic place and that’s why I thought it was a great match.”

Antistructure
L’artiste visuel canadien s’approprie le réel en lui donnant des aspects grandiose et grotesque. Dans sa récente série «Antistructure», Alex Lysakowski basé à Mississauga, au Canada, nous propose de découvrir des bâtiments industriels, des automobiles, mais aussi des monuments devenus invraisemblables grâce à la magie de la retouche photo. «Je crée des images avec des interactions structurelles surréalistes et étranges au sein de paysages banals. J’évite ainsi un espace de transition entre la réalité et la fiction, tout en conservant le réalisme dans l’atmosphère de l’image», indique-t-il.