Javier Barrios, Peter Gregorio, Melanie King, Omar Barquet, Christoffer Birkkjær, Marte Aas, Jon Gorospe and Christine Istad

A video program inspired by astronomy, stars, planets, landscapes and biology.

These short films offer both fabulous, poetic and graphic associations to the themes. The visually strong images in the videos give us different perspectives: Who hasn’t gazed up at the night sky and wondered about the size of it all?

Curated by Javier Barrios and Kulturbyrået Mesén/Rom for kunst.

Video program:
Javier Barrios - Distance of Everything - loop [03:00]
Peter Gregorio - SIN (Singularity is Near) [02:20]
Melanie King - Searching For The Moon [03:08]
Omar Barquet - Drop of Sun [02:47]
Christoffer Birkkjær - Organic noise [04:00]
Marte Aas - Crop Circles [05:13]
Jon Gorospe - Environments: Oceans [05:30]
Christine Istad - Solar [03:36]

Distance of Everything - loop
Javier Barrios

Distance of Everything – Loop is a continuation of the site-specific painting previously shown at Oslo Central Station, Airport Express Terminal.

The video consists of a mash-up of several hundred images of planets, objects and the like – all connected via a centered circle in the middle of the screen. While the images are rapidly flipped through in a strobe-like effect, the circle in the middle remains recurrent and fixed.

By playing on the complex and intricate, where one might feel sucked into the imagery yet also confronted with information too astronomical to comprehend due to the extreme speed, my wish is to shed a light on the relationship between science and wonder.
www.javierbarrios.com

SIN (Singularity is Near)
Peter Gregorio

The Singularity, Super Intelligence Grows Exponentially. As we approach the merger of human cognition and technology, we near the epoch of a great paradigm shift. My work considers positing this merger in the context of visual art, from both personal and universal vantage points. My recent projects refer to the scientific concept of “The Singularity” — the point when technology and human intelligence merge — where technologically designed intelligence surpasses the biological.

Searching For The Moon
Melanie King

Searching for the Moon draws attention to an oft forgotten element of our landscape, the Moon - an illuminated lantern which seems to make a journey through the sky. Caught up in the busy tumult of life, we forget that Earth too is moving, spinning on its axis at 1040 miles per hour.
Searching For The Moon on Vimeo

Drop of Sun
Omar Barquet

Drop of Sun is a video that depicts an action made in 2014 at midnight on the beaches of Chelem, Yucatán, using a chair to be burned together with a circular mirror planted on the shore. This action combines in a simple way the processes of transformation of the materials, the passage of time in landscape and over objects, as well as the relation with the artist as generator of this symbolic gesture of change. The title of this work retakes a fragment of a poem from Octavio Paz, included in his book The Grammar Monkey.
Drop of Sun on Vimeo.

Organic noise
Christoffer Birkkjær

The animation is made of line segments, moving on background of observations from biological degradation processes found in nature.

Crop Circles
Marte Aas

The film Crop Circles is a poetic documentation of the phenomenon of crop circles. Filmed with a Super-8 camera, the colours and tones dissolve into one another, giving an almost impressionistic character to the film. The filming shifts between a bird’s-eye perspective and a ground level perspective. We are witness to an impressive visual array of corn circles in all their many guises – geometric forms, animated bird-like shapes and intricate symbols. The circular forms contrast with the repetitive lines of carefully planted corn. The central motif is the cultivated landscape of fields, with sparse areas of habitation, pointing out the liminal zone between nature and culture. In this film however, it is unsure what is separating the two.

Environments: Oceans
Jon Gorospe

"It is part of the instinct of our species to move away the waste we produce. It is a foundational hygienic gesture: we push away from us what, in all likelihood, could sicken us. We send it to a mysterious and opaque space in the hope that there it will disappear. We move the excrement to a parallel reality that, in the words of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, we perceive as “an underground world, chaotic and primordial”. A world-drain, a world-sewer from which we expect nothing will come back. 

Their return, their potential return can only be imagined as a catastrophe: the nightmare of revulsion. However, one could propose a hypothesis that even if a bit excessive is still possible: that the disaster may not be in front of us but behind us." 

Solar
Christine Istad

“An everyday moment can have something picturesque about it, like a paintbrush gliding over the canvas of life. A moving image consists in effect of visual impressions drawn out in time and is well suited to capturing creation. Painterly elements of film as a medium can be light, space, depth, structure and colours, but also abstraction and simplification. In Christine Istad’s video works we encounter the many nuances of the moment, captured by an artist who can be heartless, voyeuristic, attentive, poetic and probing.” Oda Bhar, art critic