SCREEN #2: ERIK BÜNGER

Location: Cinema Rio, Monicastraat 11, 8420 De Haan. Info & Revervation: www.bildnis.be

FREE GIFT AT THE DOORS FOR EVERYBODY!!!

Argos, Bildnis and Cinema Rio team up for Screen, a selection of artist’s films from the Argos collection. Four  Tuesday nights, at 8 pm, Cinema Rio in De Haan presents a medium-length film by a renowned artist. The series ends with an anthology from the Argos collection.

Focus on Erik Bünger, a Swedish artist, composer, musician and writer that works with re-contextualising existing media in performances, installations and web projects.

A Lecture on Schizophonia, 2009, 37'18"

Recordings of sound and image are all-pervasive in the modern world, and sometimes seem to have a life of their own. Erik Bünger’s ’lecture’ – a narrative voiced over a series of images, clips and quotations – explores what happens when the recording and the original source become separated or confused. The artist uses comedy of Woody Allen, the songs of Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, and speeches of Barack Obama to draw attention to disjunctions between image and sound, and the effect a change to one can have to the other. Found footage from the 1973 film ’The Exorcist’ is combined with Biblical quotations to explore the conflation of the voice with the soul. When a deceased person can be ’played back’, has technology overcome death? From the very first recording of a human voice to the message on your answering machine, the piece explores ownership and possession, reality and illusion, and the presence of the ‘body’ of a voice. Bünger’s project exists not only as a video piece but also as a performance piece, manipulating the very effects he analyses as he explores the nervous split that is created when sound is separated from its source.

The Third Man, 2010, 49'24"

As a child my father told me about the movie: In a city somewhere, a man searches for another man. Everyone he meets tells him that his search is in vain, for the other man is already dead, but he refuses to give up and suddenly he believes he catches a glimpse of the other man’s face in a doorway. Then dad sat down in front of the piano and in his own tiptoeing kind of way he played ‘The Theme from the Third Man’. It made me dream of footsteps echoing in back alleys and a great, green shadow flickering by in the corner of my eye. Every time I heard that melody I had the peculiar feeling of someone observing me from a hidden viewpoint." The Third Man is a project in the form of a performance lecture and a film. It tries to trace the footprints of an elusive entity called ‘The Third Man’. We hear him move between the pins of the music box; a staggering, predestined forward motion in a crude imitation of life. He takes up residence in the ecstatic body of Julie Andrews, turning seven innocent children into musical puppets, each one reduced to a note in the diatonic scale. He is the song of an angel, who with his quill inscribes sound waves directly into human brain tissue. He is in the voice of every pregnant mother, bathing her defenceless foetus in song. (from Erik Bünger)




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