A Tale of Two Cities: Narrative Archive of Memories II
Yunseul museum, Gimhae Arts and Sports Center, South Korea
8 -29 March 2018
Curated by Sunyoung Oh / Project 7 1/2
“In the frame of the exhibition A Tale of Two Cities: Narrative Archive of Memories, the project 7 1/2 reconstructs the historical fragments hidden behind the modern history of Korea and Indonesia stretching from 1945 to this day. The story begins by discovering and recognising parallel experiences in modern history that is shared coincidentally or inevitably between the two countries. The Seould exhibition (July 21-September 2 2017, Arko Art Centre) leads to Gimhae (March 8-29, 2018, Gimhae Arts and Sports Centre).” – Sunyonng Oh
For A Tale of Two Cities: Narrative Archive of Memories II (curated by Sunyoung Oh) Jatiwangi Art Factory presented Village Video Festival: It’s Performativity and The Living Archive. For the project they divided their archives into two parts. First, they present the Living Archive (memories, things, site, objects) a collaborative project with George Clark. Second, they present the research and video works from the festival, five projects which reflects on artistic findings of the festival.
Living Archive
In addition to the Living Archive the exhibition featured the following video projects:
1. Dito Yuwono, Wakare, 01:55, video, 2016
2. Aridina Krestiawan, Sensus Kebanggaan, 32:36, video, 2016
3. Jatisura Village Government video, 2012-2014 (3 Videos) – Inspeksi Pohon Cabe, 5.38, Video, 2013 – TNI dan Ketahanan Pangan, 9:30, video, 2014 – Green Police, 7.07, Video 2012
4. JaF TV (3 Videos) – Mahardika Yudha & Mohammad Fauzi, Warung Kopi, 15:25, video, 2011 – Serrum, How To Membuat Terompet, 9:35, video, 2011 – Serrum, How To Membuat Segel Genteng, 5:37 Video, 2011
I will be presenting material from my new ongoing project Double Ghosts at the upcoming AV Festival in March 2018. The screening launches a weekend of events 16-18 March exploring the history and legacy of political film, cultural displacement, collective memory and how cinema captures or reflects reality. The following events were co-curated with AV Festival director Rebecca Shatwell to explore these issues in relation to the work of Raúl Ruiz.
“Double Ghosts is a new film work by George Clark that responds to the legacy of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011). In 1995, Ruiz flew to Taiwan to film Comedy of Shadows / La comedie des ombres. The film was shot but never finished. The incompleteness of Ruiz’s film is the starting point for Double Ghosts, an ongoing project seeking to think through divergent cultural, social and geographical contexts. Considering the echoes of unrealised political histories from the legacy of the short lived socialist government in Chile to life under martial law in both countries, Double Ghosts attempts to use the space of cinema as a site of projection between the past and the present.
For this site-specific event, Clark will present a selection of new 35mm footage shot in Taiwan and Chile, in dialogue with rare short films by Raúl Ruiz exploring his homeland through the prism of his exile and work by the artists group CADA (Art Actions Collective) made during the military dictatorship in Chile.”
Double Ghosts programme
Screen Pioneers No.3 Raul Ruiz (Dir. Keith Griffiths, 1985)
Screen Pioneers No.3 Raul Ruiz
Directed by Keith Griffiths, script by Ian Christie, UK, 1985, 10 min
Screen Pioneer’s No. 3 is dedicated to the filmmaker Raul Ruiz. This rare documentary written by film scholar Ian Christie and directed by Keith Griffiths was produced and broadcast by Channel 4 in 1985 as part of the arts programme VISIONS: EXTRAVAGANT IMAGES. The film is brilliant and inventive portrait Ruiz’s work, his biography and preoccupations and including a rare interview with the director
Lettre d’un cinéaste (dir. Raul Ruiz, 1982)
The Return of a Library Lover / Lettre d’un cinéaste ou le retour d’un amateur de bibliotèques
Directed by Raul Ruiz
France/Chile, 1982, 15 min
Ruiz, rediscovering the things of his past in Chile ten years after the Coup, regards them now with the eyes of another world. This other world is cinema, the mechanical gaze of a Super 8 camera. This eye sees very deeply, even beyond reality and brute memory. ‘Lettre d’un cinéaste’ is the documentary version of a Ruizian fiction: a survivor returns to the land of the dead and discovers his doubles and phantom friends – Charles Tesson, International Rotterdam Film Festival catalogue, 2004
¡Ay Sudamérica! (CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), 1981)
¡Ay Sudamérica! CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), Chile 1981, 4.45min
On July, 12th, 1981, six small airplanes, flying in perfect formation over Santiago, dropped 400,000 flyers discussing the relationship between art and society. This action referenced the bombardment of the House of Government (La Moneda), which marked the fall of Salvador Allende’s democratic government and the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. Through this ‘acción sobre arte y política’, CADA reconstructed the political trauma of 1973, while proposing a new critical political perspective. The flyers contained a message that simultaneously upheld each person’s right to a decent standard of living and proposed that the general public was capable of instating an entirely new concept of art – one that could overcome traditional, elite boundaries and become part of public life.
A TV Dante: Cantos 9 (Raul Ruiz, 1991)
A TV Dante: Cantos 9
Directed by Raul Ruiz, Chile/UK, 1994, 10 min
I was commissioned to make, as I liked, this series of Dante’s Cantos, each lasting 10 minutes which would make something like a serial for TV. The commission was ‘do what you want with this amount of money’. So I took the money and I went to Chile. I said I will make a mixture of a parody of political Latin American films of the 1960s and instead of putting in the red flags I’ll put in crosses and people screaming ‘Viva la muerte! / Long life to death!’ That was the starting point and then I said let’s say that Dante comes to Hell, the inferno, and that it is Chile. He comes like on an official visit with a kind of consulate and carrying a book with the civil code. I said to the actors that the premise is ‘if you are a sinner in this world, after you are dead you will become Chilean.’ That was, more or less, in the form of a joke, the idea. So Chile is Hell, so what? In the film, I’d play with that idea. But that idea was considered unacceptable in Europe and it was never shown. Then some American bought the movie and changed the title. Instead of Dante’s Inferno, which was too complicated for the audience, they put Diablo Chile on it and it worked! […] Chileans immediately accepted that Chile is Hell, of course. They are real patriots. At the same time we are supporters of our inferno! – Raul Ruiz, on-stage interview with Ian Christie, International Rotterdam Film Festival, January 2004
Double Ghosts (dir. George Clark, 2018)
Double Ghosts Directed by George Clark, Chile/UK/Taiwan, 2018, 31 min
The artist and curator of contemporary art George Clark will present his research project exploring the unfinished film by Raúl Ruiz “La comedie des ombres”. He will discuss his work together with Fernando Pérez Villalón, director of the Art Department of the Alberto Hurtado University, Santiago.
In 1995 the Chilean filmmaker, Raúl Ruiz, based in Paris, went to Taiwan to film “Comedy of Shadows/La comedie des ombres”. The film, a Taoist adaptation of the work of Luigi Pirandello “Six characters in search of an author”, was filmed, but never finished. The unfinished film “Comedy of Shadows” is the starting point of this new project located at the intersection of Taiwan and Chile. This session will explore how Ruiz’s film can act as an invitation to think through divergent cultural contexts and geographies, from political histories to lives and art under martial law and exile.
In his talk and film projection, George Clark will discuss the relationship between Taiwan and Chile via the Pacific Ocean. This session will include material from the research and in-development work of George Clark along with the screening of his 16-minute short film “Sea of clouds / 雲海” (2016).
George Clark (UK) is an artist, curator and writer. His films have been shown at festivals and museums internationally. His most recent work includes the film “A Distant Echo” (2016), the short film “Sea of Clouds / 雲海” (2016) and the ongoing project “Eyemo Rolls” (2011-2017), a growing body of more than one hundred rolls of 35 mm films.
Many thanks to Laha Mebow from permission to use her photographs from the original film shoot. Thanks to Maria Irene Alcalde, the team at MAVI and Carolina Castro Jorquera. With supported using public funding by Arts Council England and British Council.
“What can the landscape tell us about ancient history and how it is shaped? George Clark’s film essay explores this question through seemingly motionless images of the California desert accompanied by a minimalist chorale. This chosen form emphasizes the at first glance subtle shifts in the nature of the landscape, which becomes a stage for negotiations between an Egyptian archeologist and the members of a native tribe regarding the ancient graves hidden beneath the sand. The result is a multilayered tale that uncovers traces of the past, the ecology of the landscape, and cinematic history in locations that were once used to film Hollywood epics. – Festival Film Dokumenter 2017
“Apa yang dapat diceritakan oleh sebuah pemandangan mengenai sejarah dan pembentukannya kepada kita?” George Clark mengeksplorasi pertanyaan ini melalui gambargambar statis tentang Gurun California, lengkap dengan komposisi suara yang minimalis. Bentuk ini menekankan pada pandangan sekilas mengenai pergeseran bentang alam yang merupakan tahap negosiasi antara arkeolog Mesir dan anggota suku asli tentang kuburan kuno tersembunyi di balik pasir. Hasilnya adalah kisah berlapis yang mengungkap jejak masa lalu, ekologi bentang alam, dan sejarah sinematik di lokasi yang dulunya digunakan untuk memfilmkan epos Hollywood.” – Festival Film Dokumenter 2017
Es oblicuo pero está todo ahí / It’s Oblique But It’s All There Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires, Argentina,
7pm Friday 24 November 2017
Screening and artists talk. Eyemo rolls was presented in special screening at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, the final event of the year for the El Cine Ee Otra Cosa / Cinema is Another thing the cycle curated by Gabriela Golder and Andrés Denegri. The screening will include works by Tanatchai Bandasak, Shannon Te Ao, Chen Chieh-jen, Mok Chui-Yu, Laida Lexthundi, Chick Strand and Tito & Tita.
Untitled (Eyemo roll #86), George Clark, 2016
Untitled (Eyemo roll #01), George Clark
Left to Run To Seed (Tanatchai Bandasak, 2016, silent)
Eyemo roll #26 (George Clark, 2016)
My Tears Are Dry (Laida Lexthundi, 2009)
Eyemo roll #60 (George Clark, 2016)
Letter to Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong (Mok Chui-yu, 1978)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #74), George Clark
Dysfunction #3 (Chen Chieh-jen, 1983)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #90), George Clark
Guacamole (Chick Strand, USA/Mexico, 1976)
Untitled (Epilogue) (Shannon Te Ao, 2015)
Eyemo roll #122 (George Clark, 2016)
Directors Cat (Tito & Tita, 2013)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #81), George Clark
Programme order:
1. Eyemo Rolls #86, #1-3 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
2. Left to run to seed (Tanatchai Bandasak, Thailand, HD video, 2016, silent, 3.12 min) 3. Eyemo Rolls #26-27 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
4. My Tears Are Dry (Laida Lertxundi, USA, 2009, 16mm, 4 mins)
5. Eyemo Rolls #57-60 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
6. Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong (Mok Chiu-yu & Li Ching, Hong Kong, 1978, 35mm [on digital], 15 min)
7. Eyemo Rolls #24-25, #74-76 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
8. Dysfunction No.3 (Chen Chieh-jen, Taiwan, 1983, 8mm [on digital], 8 min)
9. Eyemo Rolls #87-92 (George Clark, 35mm, 6 min)
10. Guacamole (Chick Strand, USA / Mexico, 1976, 16mm, 10 min)
11. Eyemo Rolls #33-34, (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
12. Untitled (Epilogue) (Shannon Te Ao, Aotearoa New Zealand 2015, 5 min)
13. Eyemo Rolls #120-121, #124 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
14. Director’s Cat, (Tito & Tita, Philippines, 2013, 16mm [on digital], 2.30 min)
15. Eyemo Rolls #81-84, (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Sea of Clouds has its German premiere in programme ‘Regarding Resistance’ with works by belit sağ, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lucy Skaer and Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski
Regarding Resistance
Often only what is visible and what is manifested itself in an images is believed. Visibility is never given, but is always produced in conjunction with knowledge and power structures. The five films describe this relationship through different aesthetic and political strategies and deal with the struggles and the knowledge of their black protagonists. The positions of the filmmakers produce a resistant gaze, a counter-narrative to the colonial, western narrative.
Unearthing. In Conversation (Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski, Austria, 2017)
Why Are You Angry (Rosalind Nashashibi &Lucy Skaer, UK/French-Polynesia, 2017)
House of Women (Michelle Williams Gamaker, UK, 2017) Sea of Clouds (George Clark, UK/Taiwan, 2016)
Grain (belit sağ, Netherlands, 2016)
A Distant Echo
Leeds International Film Festival
14 November 2017, 6pm
Hyde Park Picturehouse
Yorkshire premiere of A Distant Echo at Leeds Film Festival in partnership with Pavilion.
“Beautifully shot on 35mm film in locations ranging from the Mojave Desert to Leeds Library, A Distant Echo plays with movement and light in deserts across Southern California, exploring myth, identity, culture and the construction of history. The landscapes are layered with a dialogue between explorers, revealing the negotiations between an archaeologist from Cairo with members of a tribe who guard ancient tombs lost in the desert. A Distant Echo features an original choral soundtrack composed by Tom Challenger and performed by the Colne Valley Male Voice Choir.” – Leeds Film Festival.
A Distant Echo & Sea of Clouds Doclisboa Festival 2017
Wednesday 25 October, 4pm Culturgest
Portuguese premiere of my films A Distant Echo and Sea of Clouds will be held at Doclisboa festival 19-29 October 2017. I will attend and take part in the Jury for the Inatel/José Saramago Award.
“Conjoining film’s materiality with the politics, poetry and mythology residing in landscape, Sea of Clouds reflects rural Taiwanese screenings as a means of covert assembly, whilst A Distant Echo overlays the Californian desert with a literal and figurative choir of voices, conjuring a historical epic out of the echoes between past, present and cinema.” – Doclisboa 2017
2nd Asian Film and Video Art Forum Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art / MMCA
Seoul, South Korea
15 Sept 2017 – 1 Oct 2017
Eyemo Rolls shows at the 2nd Asian Film and Video Art Forum 15 Sept & 1 Oct 2017 in programme curated by Xin Zhou. A selection of the rolls will be shown together with works by Sow Yee Au, Hsu Chia Wei, Hao Jingban and Mok Chiu Yu.
Untitled (Eyemo roll #86), George Clark, 2016
Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria, Tin Mine, Spices and the Harimau (Au Sow-Yee, Malaysia/Taiwan, 2016)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #81), George Clark
Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau (Hsu Chia Wei, Taiwan, 2015)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #88), George Clark
An Afternoon Ball (Hao Jingban, China, 2013)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #01), George Clark
Off Takes (Hao Jingban, China, 2016)
Untitled (Eyemo roll #74), George Clark
Letter to Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong (Mok Chui-yu, 1978)
Eyemo Rolls #86
Taiwan, 35mm, silent, 1.20 mins
Kris Project I: The Never Ending Tale of Maria, Tin Mine, Spices and the Harimau ／克里斯計劃I：瑪利亞、錫礦、香料與虎
Au Sow-Yee, Malaysia/Taiwan, 15 mins, 2016.
Eyemo Rolls #81-84
Philippines, 35mm, silent, 4.20 mins
Ruins of the Intelligence Bureau
Hsu Chia Wei, Taiwan, 14 mins, 2015.
You’ve seen yourself how difficult the writing is to decipher with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.
– Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony, 1919
The apparatus described by Kafka in his piercing short story In The Penal Colony, is an instrument of punishment and control. Only at the point of death does the condemned realize their crimes; in an aesthetic epiphany the sentence and crime are finally comprehended by their body from the words carved into their flesh. The story presents a land governed by a clear yet horrific logic. Leading us to ask what exactly is the “peculiar apparatus” that the story describes? Is it the machine of torture and punishment? Or instead could we understand the apparatus to be the logic which invented and implements it?
This programme will attempt to reflect on this peculiar apparatus; to think about the machine as the logic of power, of nationalism and colonialism. To explore these ideas, I will present a pairing of works drawing connections between two very different places; Taiwan and Chile. These territories, on the opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, are the focus for a new film project I am currently researching, on the one hand I am exploring the machinery of cinema and photography and on the other the mechanisms of power. With this programme I propose to explore the entanglement of these places through work of two artists: Raúl Ruiz (1941-2011) from Chile and Chen Chieh-jen / 陳界仁 (1960- ) from Taiwan.
Running order:
Sea of Clouds / 雲海
(George Clark, UK / Taiwan, 2016, colour, sound, 16 min)
Sea of Clouds is structured around an interview with contemporary artist Chen Chieh-Jen. The film explores the relationship between film, landscape and rural life and the layered histories of these sites as places of self-organization and resistance. Built around the question of translation and the relationship of what we hear to what we see, the film follows Chen’s retelling of the farmer’s tradition of using film screenings as means of covert political assembly during the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan. The title 雲海 / yúnhai is term to describe the view from Taiwan’s highest mountains when everything below is hidden from view by a sea of clouds.
The Penal Colony / La Colonia Penal
(Raul Ruiz, Chile, 1970, black and white, sound, 10 min [extract])
“A foreign journalist arrives on a small Pacific island 200 miles off the coast of South America. Once a leper colony, the island was later transformed into a prison and then, under U.N. mandate, made into an independent republic. Yet despite democratic structures, the inhabitants – who speak a strange dialect composed of Spanish and English – still obey the old prison rules. After sending back detailed accounts of the torture and repression seen everywhere, the journalist realizes that she’s fallen into the trap created for her by the islanders: lacking natural resources, the island’s main export is news. The Penal Colony is a powerful document of the tensions and contradictions in Chile” – Richard Peña
“Taiwan’s Martial Law provisions included laws clearly suppressing assembly, demonstrations, and the forming of organizations. Nonetheless, one afternoon on a holiday in 1983, five youths appeared on Ximending Street dressed in white khaki pants and wearing cotton bags over their heads. They walked, shoulder-to-shoulder, from the Red House to the Wannian Theater, attracting the attention of a growing crowd of onlookers and putting the police headquarters and reserve plainclothes officers on alert. When they arrived at their destination, they immediately began howling and screaming as if they were in great pain, except for one of the men, who quietly lay supine on the ground. That man was Chen Chieh-jen.“ (Fang-Tze Hsu, 2013)
Eyemo rolls #87-92
(George Clark, UK/Taiwan, 2016, colour, silent, 6 min)
Untitled (Eyemo rolls) is an ongoing film project made of discrete 100ft 35mm reels. The project exists in dialogue with other works and is designed to be shown in the gaps between other films. Rolls #87-92were filmed on Green Island, a volcanic off the eastern coast of Taiwan originally inhabited by the indigenous Amis people. During the martial law period in Taiwan 1949-1987 the island served as the administrations penal colony for political prisoners.
Voyage autour d’une main / Journey Around a Hand
(Raul Ruiz, France, 1985, colour, sound, 23 min)
“I did a film, Voyage of a Hand, of which the pretext was the testing of a frontal projection system. I gave texts haphazardly to the actors, shot by shot. And the story began to take shape by itself, like the way one writes, in an instant.” – Raul Ruiz, 1987
Voyages d’une main (1984) is a fantasy of 19th century travel, loosely adapted from writings of Honoré de Balzac and Jan Potocki. The film critiques the adventures of Europeans in exotic colonies, tracing the alienation and descent into insanity of its protagonist.
