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)
Sea of Clouds presented as part of programme Performance/แสดง/หนัง curated by May Adadol Ingawanij.
“A programme exploring the mobility of the cinematic apparatus. Film projection and montage become audio-visual performances with political and ritual potency. A screen lives in the open. A camera in a street collapses the distinction between film and theatre. These dazzling works signal the long history of the interplay between the moving image and secular and spiritual traditions of media.” -May Adadol Ingawanij
SEA OF CLOUDS George Clark, 2016
SEA OF CLOUDS
George Clark, 2016, 16mm transferred to HD, sound, colour, 16mins, UK and Taiwan
RECORDING OF A SCREENING FOR A SPIRIT (CHAO PHOR MOR DIN DAENG)
Tanatchai Bandasak, 2015, digital video, sound, colour, 3:10mins, Thailand
LA HABITACION INFINITA Christian Delgado & Nicolas Testoni, 2010
LA HABITACIÓN INFINITA
Christian Delgado and Nicolás Testoni, 2010, digital video, sound, colour, 4:25mins, Argentina
THE AGE OF ANXIETY Taiki Sakpisit
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Taiki Sakpisit, 2013, digital video, sound, colour, 13:50mins, Thailand
THE DAY BEFORE THE END Lav Diaz, 2015
THE DAY BEFORE THE END
Lav Diaz, 2015, digital video, sound, black and white, 16mins, Philippines
Presented as part of the Curatorial Practice in Asia Symposium.
Sea of Clouds screens with new Korean subtitles as part of the EXiS 2017 festival progarmme together with Janie Geiser, Xiao Yao , Colectivo los ingrávidos , Naeem Mohaiemen & Sebastian Wiedemann.
Also I will give talk ‘Modes of Display: Curating practice with the moving image’ Art Sonje Center on
EX-NOW 3
Friday, July 14, 2017 at 4:30 pm
Korean Film Archive
하늘의 꽃 Flowers of the Sky_재니 가이저 Janie Geiser, USA | 2016 | B&W, Color | Stereo | 9min 12sec | HD
25_샤오 야오 Xiao Yao , China | 2016 | Color | Stereo | 7min | HD
빛-소리 장치에 대한 인상 IMPRESSIONS FOR A LIGHT AND SOUND MACHINE_ 컬렉티보 로스 인그라비도스 Colectivo los ingrávidos , Mexico | 2016 | B&W | Stereo | 6min 43sec | HD
아부 아마르가 온다 Abu Ammar is Coming_나임 모하이에멘 Naeem Mohaiemen Bangladesh & Lebanon | 2016 | B&W, Color | Stereo | 6min | HD
운해(雲海) Sea of Clouds_조지 클락 George Clark , UK & Taiwan | 2016 | Color | Stereo | 16min | HD
로스 (데)펜디엔테스 Los (De)pendientes_세바스티안 비드만 Sebastian Wiedemann, Argentina & Colombia | 2016 | B&W | Stereo | 24min | HD
On The Planters Art: An illustrated talk on films, maps and gardening Friday 30 June, 3pm,
LUX Scotland The Mitchell Library, Glasgow
Free, ticketed via Eventbrite
‘I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with!’ – Robert Louis Stevenson
‘The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious’ – Gilles Deleuze
Artist and curator George Clark will present this illustrated lecture looking at ideas of perspective, categorisation and interpretation in cinema and art. Drawing from research for his ongoing film projects in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, he will present and discuss a diverse range of subjects from the 16mm Kodachome films of Californian gardener Albert Wilson, the history of bird watching and illustration in colonial Hong Kong and the visionary 1980 Centre Pompidou exhibition on cartography Maps and Figures of the Earth/Cartes et figures de la Terre.Central to the talk is exploration of maps as ‘instruments of travel and discovery, as well as sophisticated tools to dream.’ The presentation will draw on the writings of Jorge Luis-Borges and Gilles Deleuze, film work by South American emigres in Paris such as Hugo Santiago and David Lamelas and Raul Ruiz’s rare film on maps and labyrinths made to accompany the Pompidou exhibition.
Image: Cartes Et Figures De La Terre, catalogue cover, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980.
