Jonathas de Andrade
The Fish
In the film “O Peixe” [The Fish] a fishing village stages a kind of ritual: they cradle the fish in their arms until their timely deaths. A limiting embrace – a rite of passage – where man retakes his condition as species and face to face with his prey, calms it down through an ambiguous sequence of gestures: affection, solidarity and violence. An embrace between predator and prey, between life and death, between the worker and the fruit of his labour.
Ryan Trecartin
Temple Time
Ryan Trecartin is one of the most daring artists working with video in current days. His movies are a mixture of performance arts, sitcoms and hypnotic digital collages, like the result of a collaboration between Bosch and Keith Haring. Shot in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles – a five-story warren of large, cavernous rooms akin to a windowless convention center – “Temple Time” unfolds like a horror-movie group expedition in a campsite wasteland.
Meg Stuart
The Only Possible City
Initially conceived for an ample and neutral room of Manifesta7, in 2008, this video-installation by Meg Stuart is now re-contextualized in the Albertas’ Chapel, inside the National Museum of Antique Art in Lisbon. Meg Stuart is exposed. A human face in a space of human hyper-representation. The real exposed in a place of representation. Is it us who look at Stuart or is Stuart the one looking at us?
