TUESDAY | SEPT 23 | 9PM AT OPEN SPACE
Everything is going to be alright
Karaoke Show, Alegrias, Matchstick, Inflate / Deflate, Conditions,
Nummer Acht, Tape Film, The Eternal Object

Tuesday | Sept 23 | 9pm at Open Space
Everything is going to be alright
Conceptual and durational art actions mired in pathos, angst and instability give way to
emerging markets, manageable failures, punchdrunk courage and ineffable gestures.

1. Karaoke Show
Karl Tebbe | 35mm | 2007 | Germany | 4:30 | W Can Premiere
At the age of 14, Tebbe badly wanted to be able to dance
like Michael Jackson. But you either have the rhythm in your
blood—or you don’t. Now, 22 years later, stop-motion animation
has allowed the filmmaker to finally fulfil his lifelong dream.
Naked. With an audience. No, not you.

2. Alegrias
Arielle Falk | video | 2007 | USA | 9:20 | World Premiere
In the performance/video piece Alegrias, I put ski masks on
my face, one on top of another, until I am unable to breathe,
at which point I pause for a moment and then proceed to take
them off, one by one. AF

3. Matchstick
Micheline Durocher | video | 2006 | Can | 3:30 | W Can Premiere
Constructed around a soundtrack of burning matches,
Matchstick is a poetic meditation on memory, desire and Hans
Christian Anderson’s Little Matchstick Girl. The video finds visual
pleasure in the play of light and darkness, blurring and fragment-
ing images while it develops its central theme, the impossibility
of truly remembering and the construction of desire through
video editing techniques.

4. Inflate / Deflate
John G. Boehme | video | 2008 | Can/Serbia | 5:30 | World Premiere
Market, 8:00am to 12:00pm. OdÏaci, West Baãka District of
Serbia. Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. Inflate 60 Leisure
implements. Deflate 60 Leisure implements.
Through durational performance, Boehme reconfigures the
language of labour, leisure and sport.

5. Conditions
Laurel Woodcock | video | 2006 | Can | 2:17 | W Can Premiere
A single shot framing a lawn chair beside a helium tank in a
barren landscape. The chair is tethered with 100 helium filled
balloons, and is eventually blown over by a gust of wind. A dia-
lectical tension between the literal and the mundane is coupled
with a Beckettian awareness of the absurd, as the hope of being
uplifted fails not just once, but twice. LW

6. Nummer Acht (Everything is going to be alright)
Guido van der Werve
video | 2007 | Netherlands | 9:00 | Can Premiere
A frozen sea with nothing on the horizon, except for a large
ship that is forcing its way through the ice. A tiny figure is walk-
ing a few metres ahead of this icebreaker, as if it has to lead the
way. A more monumental image could hardly be imagined. The
filmmaker has ventured onto thin ice.

7. Tape Film
Chris Kennedy
16mm | 2007 | USA/Can | 5:00 | W Can Premiere
Made as an experiment in hand processing, the film cycles
through five different film stocks and a variety of processing
methods. The result creates dimensional havoc in the image.
The concept of inside and outside is troubled and the act of en-
closure creates a screen on which to project the filmmaker’s own
image.

8. The Eternal Object
Sarah Lightbody | 16mm | 2008 | Can | 32:00 | World Premiere
This film addresses the shift in Cuban art practices during the
1990s toward issues concerning a crisis in national identity in
view of Perestroika and the unrelenting American embargo. The
film documents the construction of an art project built at the
Banff Centre for the Arts in 1997 by the Cuban artists-duo, Ordo
Amoris Cabinet (Francis Acea & Diengo Hernandez) involving
the production of 400 “original cuban cups” and the simula-
tion of a Cuban display counter and market environment. The
voiceover interview with the artists, recorded in 1999 on L Street,
in downtown Havana, positions the film within Cuba’s pre-mil-
lennial economic devastation—the officially designated “Special
Period”; this period was a direct result of the collapse of Cuba’s
trade partnership with the Soviet Union. The film addresses the
emergence in the Cuban market place of products constructed
out of the disassembled parts of Cuba’s fractured twentieth-
century national identity. The jury-rigged mechanisms of the
continually reused and renovated 1950s pre-blockade industrial
American product has been re-imagined once again through
the fluid assimilation of its millennial Soviet other. Constructed
and understood as the means to serve ends, these strange
hybrid handcrafted products are representative of las crises
mas abberrante.

SL