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