25 Nov 2008

28th SÃ?O PAULO BIENNIAL and CINEMA CAPACETE presents KASPER AKHÃ?J, RAIMOND CHAVES, HARUN FAROCKI, RODNEY GRAHAM and WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH

RAIMOND CHAVES AND KASPER AKHÃ?J AT CASA MODERNISTA/PARQUE MODERNISTA

November 26 - 28, 2008
19:00 PM
325 Rua Santa Cruz
Vila Mariana
São Paulo

Catalan-Colombian artist Raimond Chaves (1963) and Danish artist Kasper Akhøj (1976) will present two performances over the course of an evening held at Gregori Warchavchik's Casa and Parque Modernista. This historical villa in the Vila Mariana neighborhood of São Paulo was the first modern building in Brazil designed by Warchavchik as his residence in 1927-1928. After a period of abandonment it has recently been renovated. Thanks to the Departamento do Patrimonio Historico and Museu da Cidade de São Paulo, Casa Modernista opens its doors to contemporary art for the first time. Please join us at the villa and gardens of Parque Modernista for an evening that brings together Kasper Akhøj's UNTITLED (SCHINDLER/GRAY) and Raimond Chaves' EL TOQUE CRIOLLO.

Raimond Chaves' performance-vinyl lecture El Toque Criollo is one part history lesson and one part traveler's narrative. Taking as a starting point an old vinyl record found in a flea market in Lima, produced by his Colombian uncle Chaves' record label, Raimond Chaves embarks along with the audience on a journey where record covers reveal a complex local concoction of images, the scope of which is often far broader than that of the music within their sleeves. These album covers, collected throughout different Latin American countries reveal as much as they hide, camouflage, or lie about—all you have to do is recall the historical circumstances under which they came about.

Untitled (Schindler/Gray) is a performed slide lecture rethinking the histories of two early modern houses: Eileen Gray's E.1027 in Roquebrune - Cap Martin, France (1926-1929), and Rudolph M. Schindler's Kings Rd. House in Hollywood (1921-1922). The two houses are curiously interrelated in their past and present circumstances. As the first house that both architects had built for themselves, these spaces became the territory of professional and personal conflicts, which materialized in radical transformations on the fabric of the buildings. The talk presents some of the narratives attached to these buildings as they converge and diverge, forming a circular tale of almost tabloid dimension: love, murder and ruin. Schindler's house was built as a radical experiment in gender equality and sexual liberation through floor planning - probably the first house ever designed for swinging. Eileen Gray built E.1027 together with her friend, the publisher Jean Badovici, as a response and critique of the ideas of Le Corbusier, who later, without permission, painted 8 murals in the house, and called them 'Graffiti a Cap Martin'. If we think of a building as a text or a field of discourse, we can think of these houses as palimpsests, whereby one erases a text in order to write another. The work presents these buildings not only as the intersection of multiple desires, and embodiment of ideologies, but also as a space from which one can articulate an alternative, or even oppositional history.

The event can only be attended by 30 spectators each day. Free invitations can be collected from the main information desk at the Biennial building in Parque do Ibirapuera.

HARUN FAROCKI AND RODNEY GRAHAM AT THE BIENNIAL PAVILION 'PRAÇA'

November 28 – 30, 2008
10:00 to 22:00
Parque Ibirapuera
São Paulo

For the 'Praça' space of the Biennial's ground floor Cinema Capacete presents two installations; 'Schnittstelle' (1995 ) by German artist Harun Farocki, and 'Vexation Island' (1997) by Canadian artist Rodney Graham.

Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video 'about his work'. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope for the 1995 exhibition 'The world of Photography'. The film Schnittstelle developed out of that installation. Reflecting on Farocki's own documentary work, it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one's own, new images. The title plays on the double meaning of 'Schnitt', referring both to Farocki's workplace, the editing table, as well as the 'human-machine interface', where a person operates a computer using a keyboard and a mouse.

With Rodney Graham's 'Vexation Island' and subsequent films, all of which are designed to endlessly loop, the preoccupation with time and repetition comes into focus not only formally but also psychologically. In 'Vexation Island,' the shipwrecked pirate, played by Mr. Graham, wakes up on a tropical island only to be knocked unconscious by a falling coconut that he has succeeded in shaking out of a palm tree; after a while he reawakens, returns to the tree and the cycle repeats. It is as though he were caught in a Sisyphean spell or a Freudian repetition compulsion.

WENDELIEN VAN OLDENBORGH AT CENTRO CULTURAL SÃ?O PAULO

November 29 – 30, 2008
11:00 and 14:00 (both days)
Rua Vergueiro, 1000
São Paulo

At the cinema of Centro Cultural São Paulo Cinema Capacete is proud to present two films by Dutch artist Wendelien Van Oldenborgh. 'Maurits Script' 67 min. (2006) and the Brazilian premiere of 'Maurits Film' 45 min. (2008). The latter co-produced by Capacete Entertainments.

The diptych of Maurits Script and Maurits Film focus on the contemporary multicultural society with its inherent conflicts and various interests and desires.

In Maurits Script eight participants read and discuss fragments from, among other things, the letters of Johan Maurits van Nassau, governor of a Dutch colony in the northeast of Brazil between 1637 and 1644. The entire film is recorded live in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. In the discussions that this provokes between participants and with the public, the topicality of this rather neglected period in Dutch colonial history comes to the surface. Maurits Film was filmed in Recife, where this same history plays a different role in the collective memory. Seven individuals or groups from the present-day Recife generated a scene and speak, each one relating to one of the historical figures whose words were the basis of Maurits Script. Maurits Script and Maurits Film are a part of A Certain Brazilianness. In this series of works, the roles of the participants are continually changing (director, actor, personage, audience) as a reference to a revision of fixed social positions and patterns.

The Cinema Capacete project is supported by The Danish Arts Council and the Mondriaan Foundation.