in Frieze | 21 JAN 20

Frieze Film & Talks On Visibility And Invisibility – And LA As The Perfect Meeting Place For Cultures

Curated by Venus Lau, this year's program at Frieze Los Angeles features a series of films by Cao Fei, Wong Ping, Sophia Al-Maria and Victoria Sin and many more

in Frieze | 21 JAN 20

Entitled Cobalt Hour, the screening program explores the ‘in-between‘ – not a rigid, narrow gap between two opposites, but a fluidity, like the blue hour that exists between day and night. In addition to screenings, artists Yang Fudong and ITEM IDEM (Cyril Duval) will talk about their work.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cemetery of Splendour (still), 2015. Courtesy of Strand Releasing

  • Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk classic Akira (1988) is set in the post-WWIII Neo-Tokyo in 2019 – already the “past” for us, but it shows a possible future, a speculative reality that is not here yet.
  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (2015) presents a dream-state between spectrality, irrationality and romance.
  • Paying homage to zombie films, Cao Fei’s Haze and Fog rethinks the modern “living-death” situation in Capitalist society characterized by over-work and over-production; while Cao’s Asia One (2018) is a love story between humans and machines, questioning our emotional limits.

Wong Ping, Stop Peeping (still), 2014. Courtesy the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong / Shanghai and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles

  • The robotic movements in the film resonate with the virtual fleshiness in Jon Rafman’s works, Disasters under the Sun (2019) and Poor Magic (2017).
  • Wong Ping’s Stop Peeping (2014) and The Other Side (2015) move between physical intimacy, social and ontological issues such as life and death.

Yang Fudong, Yejiang/The Nightman Cometh (still), 2011. Courtesy of Yang Fudong Studio and ShanghART Gallery

  • Drawing on Taoist beliefs, ITEM IDEM's Cold Single (2019) draws on the idea that redemption should be achieved through extreme physical experiences, especially pain.
  • In his black-and-white movies, Yang Fudong finds a way to widen the spectrum of visual textures in shades of grey
  • Sophia Al Maria’s and Victoria Sin’s film BCE (2019) unfurls a contemporary myth, by placing the dark universe in parallel with an infinitude of identities.

Cheng Ran, Always I Trust (still), 2014. Courtesy of the artist

  • Adrián Villar Rojas’ The Most Beautiful Moment of War (2017) frames sculptural moments from everyday life in Yangji-Ri, a village on the Civilian Control Line along the Korean DMZ. 
  • A spam email inspires Always I Trust (2014) by Cheng Ran, a work that oscillates between language and glossolalia.
  • Tao Hui’s The Dusk of Tehran (2014) inserts late diva Anita Mui’s conversation with her fans at her last concert into a totally different geopolitical context.

Explore the full program here

Frieze Los Angeles returns to Paramount Pictures Studios, February 14-16, 2020. 

To stay up to date with the fair's latest news, sign up to our newsletter and follow @friezeartfair on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
TAGS
SHARE THIS