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.
‘A Peculiar Apparatus: Spectres of The Penal Colony’ By George Clark, pp125-134 (Dual language in English and Bahasa) In: ARKIPEL Penal Colony – 5th Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival Ed. Manshur Zikri, Forum Lentang, Indonesia 2017
Jatiwangi Sinematek 26 July – 6 August
Jatiwangi Art Factory
The Jatiwangi Sinematek is new project realised with the Jatiwangi Art Factory as part of Film making / film viewing workshop as part of residency UK / ID British Council Residency.
I will be in residence at Jatiwangi Art Factory JaF, a collective founded September 27, 2005 that focuses on discourses of local rural life through arts and cultural activities such as festivals, performances, visual art, music, video, ceramics, exhibitions, artist in residencies, monthly discussion, radio broadcast and education.
This residency is a part of the British Council’s UK/Indonesia 2016-18 season, which aims to build new relationships and collaboration between the UK and Indonesia.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION #5
LUKE FOWLER | GEORGE CLARK | PETER HUTTON | HELGA FANDERL | ROBERT BEAVERS | UTE AURAND
Saturday, August 5, 2017 | 7:30PM
Capitol Theatre | 121 University Ave West, Windsor
Sea of Clouds screenings at Media City Film Festival (2-5 Aug 2017) as part of the International competition.
For Christian (Luke Fowler, Scotland, 7 min, 2016)
Sea of Clouds / 雲海 (George Clark, England / Taiwan, 16 min, 2016)
Łódź Symphony (Peter Hutton,USA, 16mm, 20 min, 1993)
Der Augenblick ist mein (The Moment is Mine) (Helga Fanderl, France/Germany, S8mm, 2017)
Among The Eucalyptuses (Robert Beavers, USA/Germany, 4 min, 2017)
Four Diamonds (Ute Aurand, Germany, 4 min, 2016)
