Migrating Forms at No Soul for Sale
x-initiative
548 west 22nd, NY, NY
Opening: June 23, 6-9pm
Open Hours June 24-28, 1-9pm
Presented as Migrating Forms’ contribution to X Initiative’s No Soul for Sale: a festival of independents, Half-inch Half-life is a semi-intimate, public viewing room showcasing a 43-hour marathon of selections from the personal VHS archives of artists, critics, curators, scholars and other devotees to the medium, on a large, media-appropriate television set.
Asked to inhabit a physical space over an extended period of time, we came up with Half-inch Half-life in homage to the casual, organic aesthetic of media trading before the advent of file sharing, and in honor of analog video’s gradual passing (felt locally this year with the departure of the Kim’s Video collection from New York). While VHS becomes increasingly obsolete, a wide range of work still exists exclusively or primarily in the medium.
This is an opportunity for contributors to present selections from their collections, in a unique context that does not require the formality or cohesion—of curatorial purpose or in correlation to a participant’s known field of interests—that a conventional screening ordinarily would. Some tapes are found, some are home movies, others are beloved commercial films and several are indeed work, either originating or archived on videotape. Each was chosen for a specific reason, and these choices will be brought to light as the week unfolds.
Participants include Peggy Ahwesh, Animal Charm, Mark Asch, Charles Atlas, Thomas Beard, Rebecca Cleman, Ben Coonley, Critical Art Ensemble, Jon Davies, Barry Doupe, Bradley Eros, Jim Finn, Jim Fotopoulos, Su Friedrich, Cullen Gallagher, Benj Gerdes, Michael Gitlin, RoseLee Goldberg, Ed Halter, Barbara Hammer, Natalie Jeremijenko, Jacob Korczynski, Andy Lampert, Oliver Laric, Nathan Lee, Rachel Lord, Jeanne Liotta, Abina Manning, Carlos Motta, Sina Najafi, Linda Norden, Lynne Sachs, Brother Russell Scholl, Dann Span, Jessie Stead, John Thomson, Josh Thorson, Michael Wang and Matt Wolf.
About Migrating Forms
migratingforms.org
Migrating Forms presents an annual springtime festival of new experimental film and video from around the world, bringing together work by filmmakers, video artists and visual artists using film and video, and situating it in the common context of the cinema, at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The organization grew out of the New York Underground Film Festival in 2008 and is led by Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry, former directors of the festival.
About No Soul For Sale
http://x-initiative.org/blog/
Neither a fair nor an exhibition, NO SOUL FOR SALE is a convention of individuals and groups who have devoted their energies to keeping art alive. The Festival will be an exercise in coexistence: organizations will exhibit alongside each other without partitions or walls. As on the set of the legendary Lars von Trier¹s movie Dogville, participants will be assigned spaces that are only marked on the floor, creating a map of an imaginary city of art, where distances and hierarchies are abolished.
Participants include: Ballroom (Marfa), BizArt/Arthub (Shanghai/Hong Kong), DISPATCH (New York), FLUXspace (Philadelphia), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Filipa Oliveira + Miguel Amado (Lisbon), Forgotten Bar Project (Berlin), Hermes und der Pfau (Stuttgart), Kling&Bang (Reykjavík), L¹Appartment 22 (Rabat), Latitudes (Barcelona), LAXART (Los Angeles), Light Industry (Brooklyn), Migrating Forms (New York), Mousse Magazine (Milan), Next Visit (Berlin), Participant Inc. (New York), Rhizome (New York), STARSHIP (Berlin), Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), Studio Film Club (Trinidad), SUPPORTICO LOPE (Berlin), Swiss Institute (New York), TART (San Francisco), Thisisnotashop (Dublin), Transformer (Washington, D.C.), Via Farini (Milan), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), White Columns (New York) (list in
formation)
About X Initiative
http://www.x-initiative.org/
X is a not-for-profit initiative of the global contemporary art community that will exist for one year and present exhibitions in four phases. Advised by a 50+ advisory board comprised of artists, curators, museum professionals, gallerists, collectors, art historians and critics, X is reaching across traditional boundaries to form a consortium interested in responding quickly to the major philosophical and economic shifts impacting culture. X will feature durational artist interventions, site-specific projects, historical in-depth exhibitions, one-night performances, lectures and weekly events. Questions posed in the form of programming will address relevant and pressing issues pertaining to the changing landscape of contemporary art.
