Refraction of Light

Salt Beyoğlu

December 21 – December 22, 2018

Reeves Landfill 16 2011 Jennifer Reeves’in <i>Landfill 16</i> [Çöp Sahası 16] (2011) video işinden bir kare
Sanatçının izniyle
Still from Jennifer Reeves’ video work Landfill 16 (2011)
Courtesy the artist
The screening program Refraction of Light, organized in parallel to The Universe Flickers at SALT Beyoğlu, consists of video works by artists Miranda July, Johanna Billing, Jennifer Reeves and Anna Zett. Accompanying the exhibition that delves into the ways of destabilizing our zones of comprehension, and the way in which one interprets the self within, these works question the notions of subjectivity, representation, affinity, and alienation with distinctive visual narratives.

A video on surveillance, identity, and the reciprocative act of watching and being watched, Miranda July’s The Amateurist (1998) satirically portrays three familiar personifications of an unsettling woman who is on the edge of a technologically driven madness: the sick and examined, the starlet and the stripper, and the genius and the talentless.

Where She is At (2001) is set at a neglected functionalist architecture site that was built in 1934 near Oslo, Norway. Johanna Billing films a young woman’s hesitation to jump from a high diving board along with sunbathing visitors at this neglected open-air leisure center. In a loop, the camera intervenes to the protagonist’s inner struggle as well as to the onlookers’ use of the place.

The anti-landfill work Landfill 16 (2011) by Jennifer Reeves is a meditation on nature’s losing battle to decompose the discarded relics of our abandoned technologies and productions. The artist used a recycled 16mm film, which was buried for enzyme activation in her own landfill in Indiana, and eventually hand-painted once it was exhumed to create a colorful, pulsating, and abstract “moving painting.”

In This Unwieldy Object (2014), Anna Zett follows a group of scientists, fossil traders, sculptors, and filmmakers who try to opportunize on extinct animals and animate a petrified history. Shot on a road trip into the deserts of the North America, the film is a rhythmic interplay of documentation, film and narration, facing the aftermath of the colonial capitalism through a journey.

The public screenings will take place in the Walk-in Cinema at SALT Beyoğlu.

PROGRAM
December 21-22


18.00 Miranda July, The Amateurist, 1998
English; Turkish subtitles
14 minutes

18.15 Johanna Billing, Where She is At, 2001
Without dialogue
8 minutes

18.30 Jennifer Reeves, Landfill 16, 2011
Without dialogue
9 minutes

18.45 Anna Zett, This Unwieldy Object, 2014
English; Turkish subtitles
47 minutes
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