ARGOSFESTIVAL 2005

Once again this edition of the argosfestival provides a free port for a wide range of audiovisual art forms, offering a broad domain in constant evolution, open to thematic, formal principles and technological variations and developments. The festival programme reflects this variability, going beyond the traditional delineations between disciplines and media, and offering a valuable perspective on numerous in-between spaces – in cinema, television, media art and visual art. Film, video, audio, installation and means of performance nestle together in a wide variety of both Belgian and international work.

Historical and new work, the products of several generations and movements, all complement each other, creating breathing space for a multitude of trajectories. Beyond the origin, language and context in which they were realized, clear connections can be made in regards to form and content. The search for new narrative environments and relations between (the experience of) space and time; a resistance to conventional audiovisual forms and (mass) media and the immaterial stream of images that overrun us on both television and industrial cinema; a craving for adventure in expression and perception, learning how to see and hear (all over again): these are just some of the lines of flight which the programme traverses.

Curated Programs

Four themed programmes form the backbone of the festival. In the exhibition Multipistes Jean-Christophe Royoux focuses on a generation of young French artists who propose post-cinematographic forms, deconstructions or alterations of the familiar notions of projection and identification. The works in the programme Black & White Outs, curated by Paul Willemsen, also question the basic conditions of cinema, by making radical choices for monochrome images and exploring the physiological relationship between hearing and seeing. Challenging and destabilizing the dominant position of the image constitutes a directional guideline in the film and video programme of Tanya Leighton, In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love , as well as in Inner & Outer Worlds curated by Herman Asselberghs, which offers a selection of Belgian audiovisual essays.

Artists in Focus

A contrary and wayward attitude also applies to the work of two ‘artists in focus’. The digital preservation of the work of the Belgian audiovisual artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx indirectly led to an appraisal which, spread out over a myriad of spaces and programmes, will be presented throughout the festival in various forms for your eyes and ears. A number of recent landscape portraits by the American filmmaker James Benning are shown, in which he goes on the lookout for the effects of duration on the perception of space.

Further Events

The adhesion of sound and image, hearing and seeing, is also explored in real-time. Mikko Hynninen will make use of the inherent sound image of the Kaaitheaterstudio’s as a resource for an in-situ performance, in which the environment itself is considered as a virtual instrument. During the closing night of this festival edition the collective of MIMEO and video maker Kjell Bjørgeengen are on the lookout for colorful dialogue, amongst musicians, between image and sound, analogue and digital, control and coincidence.

Symposium: curating and presenting media art

In the context of the festival, a symposium will take place at art centre Nadine, dealing with how curators can respond to new forms of media art, especially to systems of immaterial cultural production. What new models of curatorial practice are needed to take account of interactive, locative, shared, distributed and collaborative objects and processes? Several keynote speakers will give a short presentation. Artists and curators are invited to express and share their views and experiences. This meeting is co-organised by the ‘Digital Platform’ (IAK/IBK, support centres for the Visual and audiovisual arts).

Belgian Focus

This wealth of approaches and use of media is also reflected in the ‘Belgian Focus’ segment, traditionally offering a selective outline of recent domestic audiovisual artistic production. These are the cross-pollinations and connections that are the elementary particles of the argosfestival: stimulating a circulation of experiences and ideas, creating a virtual network of ex- and impressions, physically unfolding as well, over several locations in Brussels.

Festival locations this year are, apart from argos, the Beursschouwburg, Bozar, Cinéma Arenberg, Etablissement d’en Face Projects, Filmmuseum, Kaaitheaterstudio’s, Nadine, Recyclart and Maison d’art actuel des Chartreux.

Subevents

• Tanya Leighton - In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love
• Inner & Outer Worlds, Audiovisual Essays from Belgium
• Black & White Outs, Monochromy and the Mental Image
• Artist in focus
• Symposium - curating & presenting new media art
• Performances
• Belgian Focus (2005)