Inside Joke

Following a hiatus in response to pandemic measures, SALT is resuming its screenings in the Walk-in Cinema with the program Inside Joke. Organized in collaboration and as part of Electronic Arts Intermix’s 50-year anniversary, the program is curated by interdisciplinary artist Katie Vida, and can be viewed between March 29 – April 3 2022.

The program Inside Joke, features a humorous selection from Electronic Arts Intermix’s extensive video archive, and includes six videos by Jamie Davidovich, Jayson Scott Musson, Michael Smith, Stuart Sherman, Andrew Lampert and Stanya Kahn. Covering a time span from the 80s to present day, the selection parodically underlines humor’s critical capability, with an ironic and absurd approach to art and mass culture.

Founded in 1971 in the United States of America by the initiative of galerist and collector Howard Wise, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) with its collection aims to cherish video and media art as a creative expression. Over the years, EAI has partnered with numerous national and international institutions and programmers, supporting artists through the distribution, preservation, exhibition and representation of their media artworks.

The screening program Inside Joke can be viewed on loop at SALT Beyoğlu Walk-in Cinema between March 29 - April 3. The program will be streamed at saltoline.org in English with Turkish subtitles, and will only be accessible to online audiences in Turkey.

Click here to watch the program.

Walk-In Cinema, SALT Beyoğlu Screening Program
29 March-3 April, 11.00-19.00

Portrait of the Best Artist
Jaime Davidovich; 5 minutes 38 seconds; English; Turkish subtitles, 1982


Portrait of the Best Artist by artist Jaime Davidovich, features a segment from The Live! Show a weekly entertainment program he made for cable television between 1979-1984. In this show, the artist’s alter ego Dr. Videovich conducts a street interview with the “Best Artist” Rene. Based on the historic quandary between practices of highbrow art and mass culture, the video pays an homage to the Fluxus movement.

Art Thoughtz, Relational Aesthetics
Jayson Scott Musson; 5 minutes 27 seconds; English; Turkish subtitles, 2011


Art Thoughtz: Relational Aesthetics, is from Jayson Scott Musson’s performance series Art Thoughtz which he published on YouTube between 2010-2012. Throughout the series, Musson takes on the identity of his alter ego Henessy Youngman and satirizes art’s class and power relations. Musson utilizes the aesthetics of an educational video and tackles the term Relational Aesthetics coined by Nicolas Bourriaud, which aimed to describe the 1990s tendency in art.

Mike’s World Orientation Video
Michael Smith (in collaboration with Joshua White); 5 minutes 51 seconds; English; Turkish subtitles, 2007


Mike’s World Orientation Video by Michael Smith in collaboration with Joshua White is designed to suggest the kind of orientation video that one might find at an American presidential library. The artist faces the world through his alter ego Mike’s images and taglines. This universe where the absurd is normalized, offers a panoramic view of the postmodern human condition.

Newsbreak
Stuart Sherman; 8 minutes 46 seconds; English; Turkish subtitles, 1994


In Newsbreak, Stuart Sherman, detaches everyday objects from their assigned purposes as a means of absurdifying them and focuses on a newsrack that dispenses snacks. The video tackles the relationship between media and meta culture, and glorifies Sherman’s absurd approach and iconoclastic style, reminiscent of René Magritte and Samuel Beckett, at times disrupting historical categories.

What Portland Thinks About Technology At 3 A.M
Andrew Lampert; 5 minutes 51 seconds; English; Turkish subtitles, 2014


Andrew Lampert, known for his investigative work into the relationships between art, artist and audience uses the language of cinema to explore the coincidental and unexpected. The artist conducts a series of interviews at night in Portland and strolls into the city’s periphery; taşking to people on the street inquiring about what is gained and lost from new technologies.

Arms are Overrated
Stanya Kahn; 11 minutes 35 seconds; English; Turkish subtitles, 2012


Stanya Kahn meshes documentary with the experimental, and in this video she presents an ongoing conversation between two pieces of discarded paper amidst bizarre objects and debris. The existential chatter on the human experience, between the armless and legless cronies, becomes an absurd puppet show.

In collaboration


Program Duration: 43 minutes
The Walk-in Cinema seating capacity is 25; no reservations.