Banner Repeater members screening:
Wednesday 17th August, 7pm – film starts 7.15pm – 10pm.
Invisible Adversaries by VALIE EXPORT
with Rose-Anne Gush, at Deptford Cinema.
We are very excited to invite you to a screening of VALIE EXPORT's experimental science fiction film:
Invisible Adversaries with a talk and discussion with Rose-Anne Gush.
Invisible Adversaries.
My body actions since 1968 and my drawings illustrate the loss of communication and withdrawal from language that results when the body rejects the norm of its expression, the body is drained to become a mere particle of space which conceals its wounds, is merely an element of lifeless sculpture [photographed bodily figuration in nature and architecture], the body’s experience of space and consciousness deformed by imposed structures [my short films]. The idea and the wish grew increasingly stronger within me to shape life’s social structures [high voltage] and norms [mutilations], these invisible adversaries, the compulsion of meaning, into a metanoia of cinematic images… (VALIE EXPORT, excerpt from the Stadtkino’s progam notes no 203, “Landvermesssung – Der osterreichische Film 1970-90”)
“By the mid 70’s VALIE EXPORT was one of Europe’s foremost feminist performance and installation artists. Her work in avant-garde film had already earned her the recognition of and invitation to participate in major European avant-garde film festivals. EXPORT then posed herself the task of integrating film and all of her different experimental projects in video, performance, and installation art. The result of this effort was EXPORT’s first feature film, Unsichtbare Gegner [Invisible Adversaries, 1976], a 100-minute 16mm, color film [Script: Peter Weibel in collaboration with VALIE EXPORT, Collaboration Peter Weibel]. The script became the vehicle for accommodating in vignette fashion a great number of already finished pieces.”
The film focuses on the young photographer Anna, who finding herself increasingly dejected over the period of a year, sees this as evidence of an invasion of the Hyksos, a quickly appearing, then disappearing, ancient Egyptian tribe, and a fascination for EXPORT since her youth. Anna perceives peoples increasingly aggressive behavior around her as a doubling effect of the Hyksos invasion. ‘Her daily encounters and her meticulous photographic record-keeping of her impressions lack development. Instead there is a repetition of crises or a crescendo of anxiety in nearly every episode of Anna’s quotidian experience.” The insertion of EXPORT’s works permeate the film, which primarily works stylistically in terms of realism, bringing about what Roswitha Muller describes as a “lack of restraining boundaries between different levels of representation”. Whilst EXPORT scripted the lines for Anna, Peter Weibel contributed often improvised dialogue, but, writes Muller “the final conception, organization, and composition of Invisible Adversaries, happened at the cutting table” taking EXPORT eight weeks to edit and recompose many of the passages, included those provided by the script.
Speaker: Rose-Anne Gush is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds and her research explores feminist figures VALIE EXPORT and Elfriede Jelinek in conjunction with, and against, critical theories of art and feminism. Through these figures her project examines the relation of artistic labour to the body in what has come to be called “body art”. She explores new technologies in art that break with Modernism and philosophical conceptions of artistic labour, highlighted by these works. She has spoken at various conferences in the UK and internationally and writes for Mute Magazine (among others) and lives in London.
Members: Please note: the screening is free for Banner Repeater members - please email members@bannerrepeater.org for tickets.
Become a Banner Repeater member here: http://bannerrepeatershop.goodsie.com/banner-repeater-membership.
Banner Repeater members meet around 5 times a year and include group visits to exhibitions (with reduced prices when poss), talks and screenings, as well as other events, (inc Domino Nights upon request) that seek to open up important questions in art today. The membership is run entirely voluntarily so please bear with us when emailing.
You can purchase tickets for members friends for £5 from the Deptford Cinema website. (The ticket price goes directly towards covering running costs for the event at Deptford Cinema, which is a collectively run not-for-profit organisation).