“the situated cinema projects”
(2013-2015)
1. ARTSPACE SYDNEY (Australia, 2014)
photographs by Louise M Cooper
An engagement between architecture and experimental film, the situated cinema at ArtSpace in Sydney conceptualizes a form of spectatorship through an intermingling of the experience of the gallery and of the relative intimacy of film. To do this, the project reconfigures the cinema space as temporary, ephemeral and, rather than self-contained, expands within the entire space of the gallery. Nadija and Sackville Music Hall (two 16mm short films) and a short 8mm strip are situated and looped within the gallery, which act as contrary cinema spaces within a space. The silence of the films, in conjunction with the relative silence of the gallery, emphasizes and exposes the mechanics of film-based production and projection—revealing that which is so frequently and increasingly obscured, even fetishized.
documentation excerpt at ArtSpace (video by Louise M Cooper)
16mm loop 1 : “Nadija” (excerpt)
16mm loop 2 : “Sackville Music Hall” (excerpt)
info
exhibition material : two 16mm & one 8mm film loops, 16mm & 8mm projector w/loopers, wooden enclosure, fabric screen
financial assistance : Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec & Conseil des Arts du Canada (travel funding)
Sackville/Sydney, 2013-2014
2. TORONTO (2015)
The situated cinema project; in-camera is a portable micro-cinema commissioned by Pleasure Dome to celebrate their 25th anniversary. Created by Halifax-based filmmaker Solomon Nagler with architects Thomas Evans and Jonathan Mandeville of passage studio and fabricated by Hollis + Morris (Toronto) the structure features pilgrimage (16mm, 4 min. looped, 2015) — an experimental film created by Nagler and artist Alexandre Larose.
The micro-cinema traveled to three Toronto locations, hosted by the Toronto International Film Festival®, 8-11 Gallery and Artscape Youngplace. As it traveled, the architectural structure of the cinema intervened in the city, creating unexpected situations where chance encounters and dislocated spaces forged new relationships between the spectatorial body and the urban landscape. Inseparable from its context, the situated cinema project; in-camera explores intersections of film and architecture through a rejection of conventional cinematic representation, reinventing the cinema space as temporary and mobile.
documentation excerpt
“pilgrimage” (excerpt)
Drawing on issues of memory, decay, palimpsest and the rubbing together of archive, fiction and situations, pilgrimage was constructed from found strips of 8mm amateur footage that we gleaned together during a residency in Sydney, Australia. The original footage—a tourist’s voyeuristic, filmed impressions of a pilgrimage in a crowded urban space, where the faithful painfully stumble before the entrance of a temple—was reworked using an optical printer and other hand-made techniques. It is presented as a 16mm loop in the situated cinema, which is particularly resonant, as the ephemerality of this analogue, mobile cinema reframes the presence of the spectators; watching while watched in an experimental architecture and in urban space.
A compilation of Nadija, Sackville Music Hall and pilgrimage, entitled cinemas : a three part film was screened as a single-channel projection during a retrospective of Solomon Nagler’s work at the Cinémathèque québécoise in the Fall of 2015.