— VIDEO ROOM

ADRIAN GELLER
No lines today, 2020

Super Dakota is proud to present for the tenth edition of its online video screening: “No lines today”, by Swiss artist based in Paris, Adrian Geller. The video is part of “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop”, Adrian’s first solo show at the gallery in Brussels. In the video, the sky is clear and shows no sign of human interference. A written poem appears on the bottom of the screen – almost as a translator, a spokesperson of the skies – accompanied by the sound of singing birds and wind. 

“I created No lines today during the first lockdown in France. I was spending this new and unexpected period in a friend’s house in Normandie. Thinking it would be a short stay of maximum two weeks I was surprised by the duration this would stretch to. I didn’t bring any art supplies, paints or canvases.  

Since September 2019 I have been fascinated with chemtrails as a very recent phenomenon that changes our environment’s appearance radically. Its resemblance to clouds, sometimes weaving a tight net on the blue dome over our heads, as well as its economic and obviously environmental significance. 

During this lockdown, air traffic shut completely down and it felt like the first time in 20 years we could see a blue sky with no trace of ourselves in it. How for millennias humans have seen the sky.” 

Duration: 4 minutes

Ariane Schick
New Me, 2020

In October 2020 Ariane Schick presented a private performance at the Hope Sandoval project space in London. For the performance, she read sentences picked out from Sex and the City episodes; advice, thoughts, flippant remarks merge into a text that reads as an internal monologue. 

The second part of the video starts with Sadé fitting and trying an asymmetrical dark red top. This “binder” as they point out, shows how the body appears and morphs to the outside. They are posing with their hands in the pockets and confident gaze. The artist invites us to enter their studio and see how they rap-dance on Mura Masa & NAO’s “Complicated”. The freedom that the body and the movement represents is for Sadé a journey of exploration and enlightenment.

Sadé Mica
Gotta Do This First, 2019 | Part 1

“Gotta Do This First” is a celebration on the explorations of the body, its problematics and discoveries connected to gender and identity. While documenting themselves was for Sadé originally just about observing their body form and how they move, in the video Sadé insists to be seen and looked at. They pose and introduce their black queer non-binary body to the camera alongside and with Solange dancing at her home.

Karen Vázquez Guadarrama
Flor de Mil Colores / Flower of a Thousand Colours, 2015

FLOWER OF A THOUSAND COLOURS is an intimate portrait of Emiliana, a single mother who tries to survive in a remote Bolivian mining camp at 4897 meters above sea level. Emiliana lives with her children in the middle of the paradise like mountains of Mina Argentina. But appearances are deceptive: the life in the camp is fierce. Those who find tin eat, does who don’t, don’t eat. And because the excessive alcohol consumption in the camp, Emiliana has to be constantly aware of the dangers surrounding her family. 

Gareth Long
Work in Progress, 2010

Gareth Long’s ”Work in Progress” was made as part of a suite of works foregrounding the mechanisms of artistic production. A looped depiction of the cartoon character Daffy Duck, seemingly locked in the throes of ‘writer’s block’, it points with humour to the sincerity and anguish of the creative process.  

An homage to Vilem Flusser’s text, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, the video employs the Klein Bottle as a form with which to inhabit the interstices between organisms and environments. The Klein bottle is a mathematical shape that, like the Möbius strip, merges interior and exterior, beginning and end. Here the form is simultaneously a leaky vessel and a projection surface for an array of found video material. Organisms and environments are mapped onto a single metabolic pathway where inside and outside continuously fold into each other in rhythmic pulsations. 

Margarita Maximova
Just Call Him and See If He Picks Up, 2018

“The video thematizes the distortion of human emotional communication in the digital age in ‘Just call him to see if he picks up’. In this work, we witness a digital chat that actually took place between two sisters, against a background of something that at first seems like a dull road movie, and in which one sister claims that their father is dead.”

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Opera Calling, 2007

Opera Calling was an artistic intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera: audio bugs were hidden in the concert hall. The performances on stage were transmitted to people at home by calling random individuals. By picking up the phone, people could listen to the on-going opera for as long as he/she wanted. As soon as the listener hung up, the telephone machine would call the next random number. In total, over 90 hours of opera performances were transmitted to 4363 households between March 9th to May 26th 2007.

Ariane Schick
Rebecca’s Room, 2019

Images in Rebeccas Room flick to audio : a flow of passing reflections. Sequencing and rhythm softly force image and sound on to shape a growing sense of tacit power play and silky intimidation. 

Rebeccas Room is a collage : a scene from Hitchcocks Rebecca meets background sounds from a Lil Kim video which in turn meets layered close ups from magazines, and all the while the text from the audio is itself displayed as something between subtitling and teleprompting – instruct, narrate, dictate.