Sunday October 29, 7:30pm
AEIRIAL
Curated by GHOST (Madison Bycroft, Kari Robertson, Natalia Sorzano)
Madison Bycroft and Natalia Sorzano in person
Image courtesy of GHOST
“A screening program of storytelling, empathy, and friendship.” – MB
Microscope is very pleased to welcome Australian artist Madison Bycroft back to the gallery, this time to present a selection of artist films from those that have been presented by the three-person facilitative platform GHOST (Kari Robertson, Natalia Sorzano, and Bycroft), based out of Rotterdam as well as others from cities where the artists have resided including Adelaide, Australia, Bogata, Colombia, Marseille, France, and New York City.
From the curators:
“For AEIRIAL, a screening program of artists film, we aim to make central the politics of friendship in both form and content: we draw together a constellation of artists that deal with these concerns in their work, but also to act formally on the basis of friendship and seek to make visible the problematics of working within our own community, and keeping paramount our own labour towards empathic communication and shared affinities within these friendships.
GHOST was formed initially based on and through friendship. Bycroft, Robertson and Sorzano all attended the same MFA program in which they became familiar with one anthers’ practice and politics. Together under GHOST the artists are interested in experimental forms of assistance, collaboration and authorship. What does it mean to have affinities? How can these be nurtured across lines of difference? Within the politics of friendship and the operation of Ghost, we privilege hospitality: making space for others, deep listening, a movement of the subject to the side and other generous forms of hosting.”
Program running time: approximately 75 minutes
Admission $8
Members & Students $6
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Madison Bycroft (born 1987) is an artist currently based between her hometown of Adelaide, Australia and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where she received her MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2016. Her work has exhibited internationally including in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Singapore, as well as in the United Kingdom and the United States. She was featured as one of 13 artists under 35 in the exhibit “Primavera” at Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014. Bycroft’s residencies include Triangle France, Marseille, France (2017), International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn, NY (2014) and she was the recipient of the 2014 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships, awarded for one year of study overseas in the visual arts. She is a co-founder of GHOST, platform for experimental collaboration and facilitative projects.
Program Notes
Norman Mejia by Maria Isabel Rueda, 6 minute loop
The Real. Portrait of Norman Mejía, is an ethereal slideshow of 36 images, detailing the decaying former home of (in)famous artist Norman Mejía (1938–2012), in the city of Puerto Colombia. Mejía first came to attention at the age of 27 when he won the National Painting Award for his controversial ‘mujer castigadora’, a soaring work that led to rumours and unfair accusations about the artist being in fact ‘a chopper of women’s bodies’. In the face of ongoing harassment he spent much of his life in self-imposed isolation. Yet, he continued to paint prolifically, producing vast numbers of works and covering every available surface of his cliff-top castle in hallucinatory imagery. Rueda, aware of these stories met Mejía in the year 2004, and developed a friendship that changed the course of her life and influenced her fascination and readings of tropical mysticisms. Over a period of nine years, she frequently visited Mejía’s former home, documenting the building and its surrounds, studying the forces of nature gradually devoured the walls that served as testimonies of Mejia´s desires, demons, fantasy women and symbology.
Avengers Assemble by Wilf Merttens, 7 minutes
Peoples Park by Camille Dumond, 9 minutes
The film takes the history of the People’s Park : in 1969 in Berkeley, California, neighbours and students destroy a parking lot to create a public garden and hippie sit-in. The work transcribes this history, staging it in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland. People’s Park might talk about the slippage of collective wills. In a world where there is nobody, where there is no transport, except for bikes, a proto-futuristic “group mission” by crafty persons, mainly girls, is undertaken. Their means are not elaborate, sometimes naive, slow, unclear. Roles are passive, characters can’t control what happens to them.
United by Ahmet Ögüt, 3 minutes
A new animated film concerned with protesters who have lost their lives in South Korea and Turkey
Children of the Left by Urok Shirhan, 5 minutes
Children of the Left shows historical imges of an international boarding school north of Moscow, followed by pictures of the school’s pupils from all over the world. The students had one thing in common: their parents were freedom fighters.
Winged Helix Forkhead by Kari Robertson, 8 minutes
WINGED HELIX/FORKHEAD is a mono/dia/logue between an ambiguous ‘we’. The protagonist(s) speak both as one and more than one, recounting a time spent dancing under a strobe light and another playing musical statues. Animals pose, static in carefully constructed ‘habitats’ at Rotterdam zoo, human-made stage sets for the exotic creatures to perform themselves in and the camera dances beneath the cellular structure of a geo-dome designed for post-apocalyptic environmental catastrophe.
travels inside sofas (couch nap) by Michael Fitzgerald, 10 minutes
Travels inside sofas (couch nap) uses the character of the enraptured tourist as a means to explore contemporary secular rituals of behaviour, worship and voyeurism. This perennial, post religious character approaches the architecture of the old town in a way in which it has never been approached before. He is addicted to the mirage which fills his field of vision, but having recently lost his sight (or dreamed that he has), he finds himself forced to move through and examine the world around him by touch and and in this act of generosity and intimacy he finds a way to break out of the modality in which he has been stuck, a cycle of visual stimulus and unending desire.
Separations Inc™ by Madison Bycroft, 8 minutes
Calisthenics is a team-based competitive performing art which has emerged from the simple synchronised activity as it is known elsewhere. In Australia, the sport has an emphasis on precision, order, structure: movements are regimented within a system and a syllabus must be passed correctly. In this work, the calisthenics team function as both machinery and framework within which Rayleen, employee of Separations Inc.™, operates. She makes divisive separations, organising things into either this or that, and filing them based on a series of qualifying classifications.
Edible Funghi (Giant Puffball) by Blanche Cybele Derby, 6 minutes
Early fungi were aquatic organisms that branched off from animals, renounced the swimming flagella and evolved to spread their spores in a terrestrial ambient. Mushrooms are neither plants nor animals, but 90% of plant life has a symbiotic root-funghi relationship with them. They offer a third evolutionary pathway, an alternative attitude to hosting, sentience and time.
El Guando by Natalia Sorzano, 1 minute
The Guando myth, is a work that presents as a re-enactment of the unverifiable popular Colombian rural myth El Guando. The myth depicts a burial ceremony that re-appears in the rural roads of Colombia at dusk and during the night.
Artist Bios
María Isabel Rueda (b. 1972) is a Colombian artist and creator of the magazines Tropical Porn, Tropical God and Tropical Goth. She is the founder and artistic director of the artist-run space La Usurpadora, in Puerto Colombia.
Wilf Merttens (b.1984 UK) is a storyteller, poet, nanny and theologian based in London.
Camille Dumond, lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
Ahmet Ögüt (1981, TR) lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. . He often collaborates with individuals whose expertise lies outside the field of art, as well as other artists, to construct situations that bring about shifts in perspective on social and political issues. He is the initiator of the Silent University (2012-ongoing), an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.After graduating from the Fine Art Faculty, Painting Department, from Hacettepe University in Ankara (1999-2003) and Yildiz Teknik University, Art and Design Faculty in Istanbul (2003-2006), Öğüt was enrolled in the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten / Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture & Science in Amsterdam (2007-2008).
Urok Shirhan (b. 1984, NL/IQ) is a visual artist. Her work explores the politics of image and sound in relation to (national) identity. She holds an MA (Hons.) from Goldsmiths University in London and was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and Ashkal Alwan in Beirut. Recent presentations include Live Works/37th Drodesera Festival, Italy; Arnhem Museum of Modern Art; 5th Moscow Biennial for Young Art and Frascati Theatre, Amsterdam.
Kari Roberson b.1988 Lives and works between Glasgow, UK, and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Kari works primarily in film, video and sculpture. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from The Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2016 and has exhibited internationally.
Michael Fitzgerald (born 1990) is an Irish artist living and working in Dublin. He finished his Masters degree at the Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam) in 2016 and his bachelors at NCAD (Dublin) in 2012.
Madison Bycroft (b. 1987) is an artist currently based between her hometown of Adelaide, Australia and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where she received her MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2016. Her work has exhibited internationally including in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Singapore, as well as in the United Kingdom and the United States. She was featured as one of 13 artists under 35 in the exhibit “Primavera” at Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014. Bycroft’s residencies include Triangle France, Marseille, France (2017), International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn, NY (2014) and she was the recipient of the 2014 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships, awarded for one year of study overseas in the visual arts. She is a co-founder of GHOST, platform for experimental collaboration and facilitative projects.
Blanche Cybele Derby is a wild food expert and author, she has published widely on wild food eating, particularly mushrooms, both in her books and on her Youtube channel.
Natalia Sorzano (b. 1984 ) is a Columbian artist currently based in Rotterdam, NL. Sorzano graduated with degrees in Law and Fine Arts from Los Andes University in Bogotá, 2010. She recently finished her master degree in fine art at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, where she is now based. Her most recent exhibitions were at ARTBO (Bogotá, 2016) TENT (Rotterdam, 2016), Wolfart space (Rotterdam, 2016), Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery (Amsterdam, 2015) and BAR Project (Barcelona, 2015). Influenced by Colombian and Latin American cultures, she developed an interest in macabre and phantasmagoric explanations for reality. Her quests and researches about worships and belief made her wander around the spiritual shops in the Netherlands or the houses of witches, healers, spiritual leaders and sorceresses in Colombia. She is currently gathering experiences and relations around the Surinamese social movement and culture known as Winti. Her work comprises mixed media installations, stories, songs, and actions of encounters with magic, people, practices, and ideas to approach human social attachment to cultural imagery and collective faith.
