Moving Image was conceived to offer a viewing experience with the excitement and vitality of a fair, while allowing moving image-based artworks to be understood and appreciated on their own terms. Participation is by invitation only. Moving Image Istanbul 2015 took place September 4-6.The newly formed Moving Image Curatorial Advisory Committee for Istanbul 2015 has invited a selection of international commercial galleries and non-profit institutions to present single-channel videos, single-channel projections, video sculptures, and other larger video installations. As media partners, BRIC Plus News attended the three-day art fair.
We congratulate New York gallerists Edward Winkelmann and Murat Ozorobekov in their achievement of having 6,500 visitors attend over the three days – exceeding their best-ever attendance for the New York editions.
This year they featured 22 artists represented by galleries and non-profit spaces from Europe, North America, South America, and Asia.
Some of the eager visitors during this years’ exhibitions
Kalliopi Lemos , a sculptor, painter and installation artist based in London, was selected to receive the The Borusan Contemporary Art Collection Prize. Kalliopi Lemos is represented by Gazelli Art House, of London, which describes the award-winning artwork as follows
“Lemos’s new piece expands her ongoing exploration of bodies in unnatural positions, diverse scales and the quest for balance and she asks from the visitor to find ‘the centre’, their own compass for this universe. At the Centre of the World opens a space for visitors to reconsider the tension between inside and outside, body and spirit, material and immaterial; ultimately, the work raises questions about the limits and pain of the human body while hinting at all that cannot be fathomed or expressed in the quest for a place ‘at the centre of the world’.”
Kalliopi Lemos, At The Center Of The World, 2015. 16mm B&W with sound, 08:29 minutes. Courtesy of Gazelli Art House, London. The sculpture ‘Iron Sphere’, featured in the film, was made by Kalliopi Lemos in 2015.
Among the historical works presented at this second edition of the fair in Istanbul is a rarely seen work by Ana Mendieta (presented by Galerie Lelong, New York). Recently remastered, this 1978 silent film is one of the artist’s characteristic “Earth Body” works. Also presented this year are several shorter black and white works from Martha Wilson’s seminal “Complete Halifax Collection” (presented by PPOW Gallery, New York). Among the installations is a room-sized multi-channel work by Michael Nyman (presented by Myriam Blundell Projects, London). Featuring ten independent, yet interrelated, edits of Nyman’s 2009 film NYman with a Movie Camera, this complex installation engages in a visual discourse with Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, presented in its entirety on an eleventh screen. The five-channel work by Kon Trubkovich(presented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York) weaves YouTube videos of Russian speakers singing American songs with multi-channel compositions culled from hours of found and family footage, ultimately creating a visual poem that addresses personal and collective history, the Cold War, migration, assimilation, loss, and memory.
The wide range of single-channel works in Moving Image Istanbul 2015 features the work Top View by Nevin Aladağ (presented by Rampa Gallery, Istanbul), who approached various people of different ages in the center of Munich and asked them to perform a few dance steps for the camera. Although the people in the film remain anonymous, and one sees little more than their shoes and the movements of their feet, even these tell a lot about people’s identities and characters. Taus Makhacheva’s 2009 work, A Space of Celebration (presented by .artSümer, Istanbul), involves wedding halls from her native Dagestan in which anthropomorphic figures move, freeze, play, and dance, trying to establish a way of interacting with the outer as with the inner. Humour and irony, as instruments in this work, make visible the attempt to form a subject in the new public space. And in Xavier Veilhan’s new work Vent Moderne (presented by AndréhnSchiptjenko, Stockholm), he creates a film that plays with perspectives, scale and the links between set and architecture. The sequences are built around the figure of a designer, a creator, and an architect, to whom French actor Micha Lescot lends his traits. The film brings to life a succession of fantasized moments in the protagonist’s life: the design process, meetings, travels, and moments of celebration.
All photos curtesy of Moving Image
ArtInternational Celebrates its Fifth Year
Istanbul’s ArtInternational modern and contemporary art fair wrapped up a record-breaking year last Sunday with artwork sales totalling $30.2 million. Eighty-seven art galleries from 27 countries displayed work by over 400 artists at the three-day fair which was attended by 32,383 visitors. Organizers said the number included over 2,000 collectors from around the world. Last year’s fair, its second edition, was attended by approximately 20,000 visitors.
