Swiss Participation at the 9th Edition of Cairo Video Festival
Egypt
September 10, 2019 till September 30, 2019
Alexander Hahn video exhibition
From 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Location
Medrar For Contemporary Art, Gamal Al Din Abou Al Mahasen, EL SAYEDA ZEINAB، Qasr El Nil, Egypt
September 10, 2019 till September 30, 2019
Mécaniques Discursives installation
From 6:00 pm to 11:00 pm
Location
Cairo Festival City Mall, Egypt
In this edition of Cairo Video Festival, 5 Swiss artists participate with their videos, installations, projections and short experimental films. The edition presents 9 programs. Together, they capture the spirit of formal and conceptual playfulness that has accompanied Cairo Video Festival since its inaugural edition 14 years ago. In collaboration with interdisciplinary artists, filmmakers and writers, Cairo Video Festival highlights the most recent global video art and experimental film productions.
Swiss visual artist Yannick Jacquet is participating with his installation “Mécaniques Discursives”, created in 2013, in collaboration with Swiss artist Fred Penelle. This edition also features video works by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn, Aurèle Ferrier – who had participated in the 8th edition of the same festival -, Victoria Maréchal, Anuk Jovović & Pavle Jovović. On September 15, the festival is organizing an artist talk for the artist Alexander Hahn, titled “Singular Acts” on Bestowing Permanence to the Ephemeral.
Featured works:
- “Thought Forms” Video by Alexander Hahn
Analog apparatuses scan and process text & drawings – clairvoyant observations on the chemical elements – from the pages of Occult Chemistry, a book by Annie Besant (1847 – 1933).
- “Mécaniques Discursives” Installation by Yannick Jacquet & Fred Penelle :
While the passage of time seems to accelerate every day, Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet offer a pause, a suspension, a breath. A strange mechanism stretches across the wall, populated with shadowy chimeras. They are mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Is this a laboratory experiment or the plan for a future network? Minutely constructed like a fine clock, it traces connections, routes, genuinely-false, looping itineraries, inviting escape, inviting dreams. The narrative is deconstructed like a thousand-storied film script. Every effort is made to lead astray, to turn around, to forge ahead. Time is shredded, decomposed, lost…and yet everything references it. Mécaniques Discursives is like a parenthesis between two epochs: Gutenberg’s and Big Data’s. By contrasting the oldest form of image reproduction (woodcutting) with the most recent digital technologies, the installation straddles centuries and contracts time. - “Borders II” Video by Victoria Maréchal:
Are there places more imaginable than others?
On Google Earth, Tripoli is depicted as an emptied, abandoned and destroyed city. It is also a city that has not been photographed by the program yet. Across the sea, the small Island of Lampedusa seems so real with its photographs of swimmers, tourists and children riding bicycles. Tripoli and Lampedusa, face-to-face, separated by the sea: synthetic images on one side, and photographs on the other. How do these representations build our imaginary?
From one bank to the other, the sonic landscape tells us what the images have forgotten.
- “Transitions” Video by Aurèle Ferrier
Transitions is a journey from the civilized void of the desert to a maximal urban, capitalistic and hedonistic density (which in the case of Las Vegas assumes some bizarre expression). The film is a contemplation, without any people or moving machines in it, focussing on the built and the designed.
- “Form and Abandon” video by Anuk Jovović & Pavle Jovović Form and Abandon is set within an other-worldly architectural complex, where a group of expressionless characters enact a series of enigmatic rituals.
While the processes and symbols presented are partly rooted in Serbian mythologies and traditions, each of the personas play archetypical roles that chart universal cycles of progression, regression, fusion, and rupture.
At once futuristic and archaic, the video stages fundamental interactions between visual elements to demonstrate essential principles that transcend time and space.
