September 16 – October 29, 2005
Curated by Marc Glöde and Christian Rattemeyer
As an extended part of Wild Walls New York: A Series of Films in/on Architecture, which takes place October 6-11, 2005, Artists Space presents a selection of artists’ videos that investigate, document, and disturb urban spaces, both public and private, new and old.
Opening Reception
Friday, September 16, 6 - 8pm
Kamal Aljafari’s Visit Iraq is a humorous investigation of the surroundings of the recently vacated offices of the Iraq airlines office in Brussels, drawing on their advertisement slogan to “visit Iraq.” Carola Dertnig’s video A Room With a View of the Financial District presents vacant office spaces in New York’s Financial District after the bust of the dot com bubble, shot in 2001, before the area became the target of the attacks of 9/11. Eiko Grimberg’s video The Years to Come narrates the facts and fictions of a dynamite explosion on Wall Street and Broad Street on September 18, 1920, the cause of which never was fully uncovered. Interwoven with the inter titles recounting the events and their response, Grimberg presents recent footage shot in the same area. In Proprio Aperto, Judith Hopf, Natascha Sadr-Haghighian, and Florian Zeyfang visited the gardens of the Venice Biennale when they were not used to host the biennial art event. Derelict, unused, and at times severely vandalized, the pavillons and gardens serve temporary housing to the homeless, or just serve as a shelter for parties, grafitti, and debris. And in Timer Warner, Frank Oudeman chronicles the architectural details of an apartment under construction in the newly built Time Warner high rise on Columbus Circle. Close to the walls, Oudeman almost touches the architecture, and give a visceral sense of the sequence of wall enclosures and sudden openings of windows and vistas.
Wild Walls New York is organized by Artists Space and the Center for Architecture, and includes film screenings at Anthology Film Archives, special events at Artists Space, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and screenings in public spaces such as Columbus Circle and the former asphalt plant Asphalt Green.
Artists: Kamal Aljafari, Carola Dertnig, Eiko Grimberg, Frank Oudeman, Judith Hopf, Natascha Sadr-Haghighian, Florian Zeyfang
Wild Walls New York is supported, in part, by ifa - Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, Germany.