Category: Axel Straschnoy

Kilpisjärvellä is a film for planetariums, and a photo series by Axel Straschnoy. It tells the story of 2 explorers who travel to north Lapland to record the Northern Lights. The film is shot in time lapse, with an extreme wide angle lens, which gives it a peculiar look.
The Northern Lights are an usual subject in planetariums. However, they are mostly treated in a scientific manner and the point of view of the camera recording them is abstract. Kilpisjärvellä presents the Northern Lights in the context in which they can be seen, including the nature, the weather and the time it takes to travel there.

Nordic Film Days Lübeck

The Nordic Film Days Lübeck, first presented by the Lübeck Film Club in 1956 and taken over by the Hanseatic City of Lübeck in 1971, has one of the longest traditions of any film festival worldwide. It is the only festival in Germany, and the only one in Europe, which is entirely devoted to the presentation of films from the North and Northeast of Europe.

Feature films, documentaries and short films from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden are presented at this five-day event every year at the beginning of November. In addition, there is an extensive children’s and youth film programme and a retrospective devoted to important eras, specific genres or famous persons of film history. The section Filmforum presents films from North Germany. Accompanying the film programme are seminars, discussions, roundtable talks, concerts and readings.

This year the Festival runs from November 2 through the 6.

For more information on Kilpisjärvellä screenings program please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

Axel Straschnoy’s new short film will be screened at KUMU Art Film Festival, Tallinn, to be held from September 29 through October 2.

The Kumu Art Film Festival (KuFF) is the first and only cultural event in Estonia to focus on the relationship between film and the visual arts. During the four days of KuFF, documentary, staged and experimental art and artist films will be screened in the Kumu auditorium. The film-makers are all connected to the visual arts in one way or another, and they reveal this relationship in their films. This means focusing on the pictorial language of film and its dislocation, documenting the internal life of the art world, combining film and video art strategies, and much more.

This year, the festival will have familiar formats and thematic blocks (e.g. a focus on one author or archive) but also introduce, more consciously and directly, the relationship between art and film by exchanging the exhibition environment for the screen surface.

KuFF will also continue cooperation with the Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Fundacja ARTon and is glad to present this year two programmes from “Moving Pictures: Artists’ Films from the Film London Jarman Award” curated by the British Council and Film London.

The festival begins on Thursday, 29 September, with the opening and the first screening, and continues from Friday to Sunday.

In addition to films, the festival includes artist talks.

Straschnoy’s work will be screened on Saturday, October 1, at 18:45 in the Museum auditorium.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

For more information on KUMU Art Film Festival please click here.

Axel Straschnoy’s Neomylodon Listai Anneghino will be exhibited at Inter Arts Center, Lund University, Malmö, opening on October 14th, 2016.

Starting in 1895 with the finding in a cave in southern Chilean Patagonia of a peculiar skin, the world was soon to face a sensationalist chase for an animal that was thought long since extinct. It was a very large mammal, weighing around 1.000 kg, which had both external fur and a protective armor embedded into the skin, which was surprisingly well preserved.

Two Argentinian palaentologists played out a drama of scientific rivalry. Dr. Florentino Ameghino was first to write about the beast and named it Neomylodon Listai Ameghino, declaring it still alive and roaming the plains of Patagonia. Dr. F. P. Moreno responded by pronouncing it extinct since thousands of years. A number of European scientists arrived at the spot or had material sent to their museums for closer scrutiny, creating an intense scientific debate about the animal. This way, some of the material found in the cave ended up in Sweden, other parts in London and Berlin. Some findings made their way much later also to Helsinki.

While scientists were soon doubtful about the existence of the living Neomylodon, the popular press was all the more enthusiastic. A price was promised to the one who could hunt down a specimen, and the Daily Express in London sent off a hunting team. Over the years the interest faded, as of course no-one could find and shoot an animal that had been extinct since more than 10.000 years. The Neomylodon proved to be a result more of wishful thinking than of science.

Axel Straschnoy’s exhibition Neomylodon Listai Ameghino approaches this footnote in the history of science critically and from a multitude of angles. The four vitrines are designed to host the complete findings now spread to different museums in Argentina, Chile, England, Germany, Sweden and Finland, plus the originals of the essential texts published on the animal during the years around 1900. But while the texts remain the same each time the work is displayed on its tour across the world, two of the vitrines will be mostly empty and only show what is available in the local collections.

Thus mirrored, the story of the Neomylodon becomes less a story about science than about the construction of myths as well as of truths. It is also a study of colonialism at work. It quite clearly displays the ironic truth that barely any findings ended up in the country where they were excavated.

Not the least, Neomylodon Listai Ameghino addresses the cultures of display, as well as the roles of the spectator in science and art. By moving between different ways of seeing and of showing artifacts, the vitrines themselves become witnesses of how authority and “truth” is transferred through the methodologies of display.

Pontus Kyander

For more information and updates on the project, please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy, please click here.

AXEL STRASCHNOY: Le rappel à l’ordre (2016) opening June 30th at 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
01.07.2016 – 31.07.2016

Single-channel video works have become an important part of the art world offerings among other reasons due to their extreme portability: they can be shipped around the world by way of a dropbox link, they can be streamed online, played on a small TV, projected on a wall, presented as part of a bigger programme, screened in film festivals. In short: their display method is standardised and they travel cheaply. They are the traveling work by definition.

On the other hand, traditional artworks with a strong physical presence need special packing to survive and sophisticated logistics to arrive from place to place. The film addresses the complex web of shipping that lies behind the international art world and traveling exhibitions while being, in itself, one of the most portable kinds of artworks there is.

Le rappel à l’ordre
Directed by Axel Straschnoy
Sound Design: Karri Niinivaara / B-Sound
Colour Grading: Jussi Myllyniemi / Whitepoint
Shot at: Kiasma, Taidehalli, Turun Taidemuseo, EKKM, KUMU, Tallinna Kunstihoone, Nacionaline Dailes
Galerija, Kauno Bienale & Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
Supported by: AVEK / Elena Näsänen & TAIKE
Produced by Kolme Perunaa, 2016

Forum Box
www.forumbox.fi
info(a)forumbox.fi
Ruoholahdenranta 3a,
00180 Helsinki

For more information on Le rappel à l’ordre please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

ECCENTRIC is pleased to announce that Axel Straschnoy has been shortlisted for the COLLIDE International Award, which is part of the COLLIDE CERN FACT Framework Partnership 2016-2018.

For more information on the COLLIDE International Award please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

The exhibition at Del Infinito, which presents three projects by Straschnoy from the period 2003-2006, will close in a few days.

In a time when curators and art historians are beginning to write the history of the early 2000s in Buenos Aires, The Great Morning / Winds of long ago / Blow through the pine-trees places Straschnoy’s work in context. The exhibition highlights the way in which Straschnoy ́s projects proposed new forms of dialogue between the forces in struggle in the arts and in the political arena on those years. Taking a cue from the projects on display, the exhibition merges two ways of dealing with objects from the past, most of which were never meant to be exhibited but which are now the only leftovers from the projects they belong to: it is a retrospective from a curatorial viewpoint, as well as an artistic project on how to present pieces that were never realised. It is old and new work at the same time. It deals with the ideas of revisionism, rewriting, reconstruction and conservation: it is an exhibition about time and its dialogues.

Presented at Del Infinito, curated by Javier Villa

Av. Quintana 325 P.B, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

From 12 May to 12 June 2016
.

For more information about Axel Straschnoy please click here.

Axel Straschnoy‘s film La Figure de la Terre (2012) will be screened at EMAP 2016, which will take place in Seoul from May 24 through the 29.

EMAP 2016
9th Ewha International Media Art Presentation
May 24(Tue)-May 29(Sun)
Ewha Womans University Campus

EMAP, Ewha Media Art Presentation, is since 2001 an open-air sound and moving image festival of high international standard in a central area of Seoul. Occurring each May, at the height of the Korean spring season, EMAP uses the beautiful and varied sceneries of the campus area of Ewha Womans University to stage an event equally directed to the large audience of students as well as a general public of thousands. This year, when Ewha Womans University celebrates its 130 year anniversary, it has been important to create an event of unprecedented scale and quality. The history, scale, and content of EMAP has established it as an international event, carving a seal in the art world next in line to the Gwangju and Pusan Biennials, and to the Seoul Media Art Biennale.

At EMAP some of the finest Korean artists from the field of sound and moving image meet a rich selection of established as well as young international artists. During an intense festival week, the Ewha Womans University Campus is turned into crossroad for artistic exchange where the enthusiasm of audience responses is forged with acclaim from art professionals.

For more information on the program please click here.

For more information on Axel Straschnoy please click here.

CPR FILM FESTIVAL

MAS CERCA DEL BORDE (CLOSER TO THE BORDER) curated by Tainá Azeredo.
The experience of traveling, the moving across the boundaries, the innumerable invisible lines that define what is on that or the other side. Más Cerca del Borde (Closer to the Border) takes the shape of a film cycle that touches marginal issues, and It’s here, at this border where structures, languages, conducts, politics, histories, dreams and traumas are defined. The sequence of videos translates the impossibility of staying in both sides of the line at the same time. The complexity of this action of passing from one side to the other is hard to identify just with the eyes, which cannot escape from the fact that they are looking from the inside out. There is no center; the line is invisible to whom is trying to see it, but extremely real for those who are in one or the other side.

The film by the Argentinian artist Axel Straschnoy, La Figure de la Terre, is based on the homonymous book wrote by the French scientist Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, that describes the scientific expedition conducted by him in 1736 through the River Tornio Valley to prove the real shape of the Earth. On the film, 19th century and contemporary elements are placed in parallel, bringing different aspects that cross themselves geographically and temporally.

SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 4PM. CPR Film Festival
Closer to the Border, Curated by Tainá Azeredo (Brazil)

A selection of six films address the limits by which structures, language, values, policies, stories, desires and traumas are defined. Azeredo, a participant in CPR 2015: Eastern and Northern Europe, was invited to curate this Film Festival for the 25th anniversary edition of arteBA. Artists: Jaan Toomik (Estonia); Axel Straschnoy (Finland / Argentina); Regina Parra (Brazil); Marge Monko (Estonia); Minna Långström (Finland). Moderated by Jorgelina Dacil Infer, Director of Development. Presented by Carmen Ferreyra, CPR Director. With the support of Fundación Iberoamericana de Finlandia.

SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 5PM                 First screening
SUNDAY, MAY 22 – 6.30PM            Second screening

CPR Film Festival is a series of film and video exhibitions around the world, by curators who have participated of the programs. Featuring works by artists living in cities visited during our Core Programs, CPR Film Festival is one of the platforms that CPR provides for the professional development of our curators in residence.

For more information about Axel Straschnoy please click here.

For more information about CPR Festival please click here.

The exhibition at Del Infinito presents three projects by Straschnoy from the period 2003-2006, a period which roughly begins with his invitation to take part in the exhibition Ex-Argentina and ends with his move to Helsinki and the closing down of his studio. What is peculiar to The Builder (2003),  Studio (2005), and The Projects Medley Studio Dra (2006) is that, even if they take the form of projects, their subject matter is the artist’s studio. Furthermore, the first two were never realised and while parts of The Builder appeared in previous exhibitions this is the first comprehensive presentation of both projects.
The three projects were conceived in a peculiar socio-political and cultural context. At the beginning of the 2000s —just after the major crisis of 2001—two ideological ways of approaching art were in confrontation: on the one hand, project artists dealing with socio-political issues mostly in the public space; on the other, the artists of the Centro Cultural Rojas defending the ornamental object produced inside the studio. Straschnoy emerged in the context of a new generation that pushed forward the new premise that the categories of political projects and the production of studio-based objects should be ignored or merged. In either way, the antagonism that marked Argentine art since the early avant-gardes was rendered inoperative.
In a time when curators and art historians are beginning to write the history of the early 2000s in Buenos Aires, The Great Morning / Winds of long ago / Blow through the pine-trees places Straschnoy’s work in context. The exhibition highlights the way in which Straschnoy ́s projects proposed new forms of dialogue between the forces in struggle in the arts and in the political arena on those years. Taking a cue from the projects on display, the exhibition merges two ways of dealing with objects from the past, most of which were never meant to be exhibited but which are now the only leftovers from the projects they belong to: it is a retrospective from a curatorial viewpoint, as well as an artistic project on how to present pieces that were never realised. It is old and new work at the same time. It deals with the ideas of revisionism, rewriting, reconstruction and conservation: it is an exhibition about time and its dialogues.

Straschnoy’s work will also be on view in Buenos Aires between May 18 and 22 at arteBA, the local art fair, in: Oasis, Dixit 2016, curated by Lara Marmor, Sebastián Vidal Mackinson, and Federico Baeza; CPR Film F estival, curated by Tainá Azeredo (Sunday 22 May at 15:00); and Del Infinito’s booth (C4). He is also participating in Bosquejar Esbozar Proyectar {tomo II], at Galería Quimera, curated by Santiago Bengolea and Javier Aparicio.
The exhibition is jointly produced by Kolme Perunaa and Del Infinito.

Presented at Del Infinito, curated by Javier Villa

Av. Quintana 325 P.B, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

From 12 May to 12 June 2016
.

For more information about Axel Straschnoy please click here.