ART CITIES:Berlin-João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva
The work of Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, who have worked collaboratively since 2001 from the “InMemory” exhibition at the Galeria Zé dos Bois, is characterized by the use of silent films and other analog forms of expression to portray poetic-philosophical narratives suspended in an indeterminate zone between reality and artifice. Their work is often developed through research travel to a variety of destinations around the word, allowing the artists to investigate enigmatic scenarios and landscapes and discover anecdotes and stories, which they incorporate into their writing and film practice.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: KW Institute for Contemporary Art Archive
The exhibition “PAPAGAIO” at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, is one of the largest retrospectively conceived solo exhibition in Berlin of the art duo João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, who represented Portugal in the 53rd Venice Biennale. The site-specific film installation brings together over twenty short 16 mm films, taken from three central work series produced in the past ten years. The exhibition architecture that rhythmizes the space visually and acoustically brings the individual works into dialog, and emphasizes the equally sensory and structural qualities of the duo’s oeuvre. Each film follows the same formal guidelines, presented in slow motion, silent, and looped, the camera focuses on its object of observation from a fixed distance and angle. Precisely one single motif, sequence of movement, or activity is recorded at a time.The subject is always positioned at a pressure point between perception and reality, the motifs are drawn from found or staged everyday, biological, physical, or chemical phenomena. Proceeding from a deliberately staged moment of confusion, the individual films challenge our usual perspective on a specific situation, while the installation as a whole acts to shift our view of the world. nThe film that gives the title of the exhibition “PAPAGAIO (DJAMBI”), which translates as parrot, uses a different composition principle. The 43-minute film (an unprecedented length for the artists, who have so far only made shorts) was shot last year on the central African island of São Tomé and Princípe, a former Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea, during a local voodoo ritual invocating the deceased forefathers. The camera is passed along from the artists to the participants, who are in trance and possessed by the spirits of the dead. The approach to time shifts from infinite repetition to a vastly stretched moment. The film thus stages an encounter with the realm of the dead to account for what cannot be experienced by the living. The film gives an indication of the artists’ long research in former Portuguese colonies, which are well suited for approaching and understanding experiences and images that have not yet entered the codes of representation and conduct that are typical of Western culture. The artists’ works contain no explicit moralistic interpretations of colonialism, but the very representation of these contexts clearly points to the symbolic violence of colonialism. Another film “One day without filming in Naha City” is one of the most eloquent and cryptic of the works in the exhibition. The camera is attached to a vehicle that slowly moves into an automated parking garage. The machine transports the car from the daylight to the most absolute darkness, where image, sound and the consequent movements appear only as an abstraction to the observer. The repetitive and automatic movement is intertwined with the desire of the mind to understand its position within this framework, without knowing what is inside what, who interrogates whom, or whether these positions are plural or parts of a single entity.
Info: Curators: Ellen Blumenstein and Vicente Todolí, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststraße 69, Berlin, Duration: 29/11/15-24/1/16, Days 7 Hours: Wed & Fri-Mon 12:00-19:00, Thu 12:00-21:00, www.kw-berlin.de
