BROOKLinVIDEO is a group exhibition consisting of a selection of 10 video works by 11 artists from around the world, who currently live and work in Brooklyn, New York. The works touch on a range of different issues. What seems to connect them is a latent tension between the overpowering, ever present model of the movie industry and its aesthetics and a "bad boy", rough attitude which revels in the sheer expression of its own vitality. Issues of identity are also of special interest to these young artists, as well as the cultural and ethnic complexity of the city and its inhabitants. Questioning national, religious, social or gender identification has always been, for artists living in the States, a fundamental strategy of survival in the so-called "melting pot" of America, much more so than in Europe.
BROOKLinVIDEO participating artists and exhibited works:
KENSETH ARMSTEAD (born in U.S.A.) shot video footage on location in Ghana that explores the gulf of space between his African and African-American identity, communication and social history. in_authentic_b portrays his impossible journey back to Africa. The classic, almost rhetoric motif of the search for one´s own roots ends up as a football game on dry African soil. Kenseth will also present a site specific series of drawings at FUTURA entitled i_Prague.
FRANCISCA BENITEZ (born in Chile) has been recently mapping, through her video works, the life of different Brooklyn communities. In her video Sukkah, Orthodox Jews from Williamsburgh build fancy tabernacles on their homes´ windows and balconies to celebrate the Sukkah holiday.
GUY BEN-NER, (born in Israel) makes videos using only himself and his children as actors, his house turned into an installation and stage set, and an admirable creativity in telling big adventure stories in a nature-versus-domestic environment. His new video Wild Boy is the story of the taming and education of a child raised in the "wilderness" and his loss of innocence. A place where urban culture is seen as a merry game of repression and disenchantment.
SANFORD BIGGERS and JENNIFER ZACKIN (both born in U.S.A.), in their collaborative video work titled a small world…, based on home footage recorded by Sanford's grandfather and Jennifer's father in the 1970's, compare two different childhoods through the same American rituals. The result is a nostalgic snapshot that underscores the fact that, despite ethnic differences, the American cultural experience often provides a disquieting sameness to family activities within a particular economic stratum.
STEVEN BROWER'S (born in U.S.A.) latest video Trailer for Epic, Conrad Carpenter, The Underemployed Astronaut is a smart and humorous pseudo-documentary of the ever-changing career of Conrad Carpenter, a trained astronaut who never flew because of the government stop to the American space project. It portrays the Apollo moon mission as a mixture of fulfillment and failure of the American Dream.
NIN BRUDERMANN´s (born in Austria) The Swan tells the peculiar yet true fable of a stray swan determined against all odds to conquer the unfriendly waters of the New York East River. An unexpected fairy tale unfolds amidst an industrial scenery, ephemeral as is a real dream.
CHRISTOPH DRAEGER (born in Switzerland) presents his latest video Helenes (Freedom), an amazing 16mm Hungarian film footage found by the artist in a former communist civil protection/disaster prevention camp. The film is a dramatic and apocalyptic rendering of one of the exercises that were performed during the cold war, in anticipation of the nuclear holocaust of World War III. It features a monotonous narrator's voice-over in Hungarian, yet subtitled with President Bush's inaugural address of 2005. In this speech, Bush famously says the word Freedom 41 times. The result is a frightening view of the similarities between cold war ideology and the current "War on Terrorism".
JACOB DYRENFORTH (born in U.S.A.) analyses the model of a typical "white American male" and its role in American popular culture. In his video, Romantic Comedy, the artist is seen running aimlessly through the streets of New York with a bouquet of red flowers in his hand.
MARIAM GHANI, the American daughter of a Lebanese mother and Afghan father, had her childhood and adolescence shadowed by her second-hand experience of their countries´ civil wars, which were intimately intertwined with every detail of her family life. In the four videos that make up The Glass House Home Movies she connects two key moments in this double history (the Israeli siege of Beirut and the US bombing of Afghanistan) with other images of femininity and militarism appropriated from network news, advertising and daytime television.
PATRICK MARTINEZ (born in France), in his animation-style diptych video Untitled (After the Visible Human Project), puts the viewer on a realistic journey right into the mutating and colliding insides of the bodies of a man and a woman convicted and executed in a US prison. The video is based on cryosection magnetic resonance (MR) images produced by the National Library of Medicine.
