SCREENINGS - AHTILA, CURLET, RHODE

The screening of videos directed by artists from the Pinault Collection start again at the Teatrino of Palazzo Grassi. The following videos are screened:

Wednesdays and Saturdays
The Annunciation (30', 2011) by Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Thursdays and Sundays
Jonathan Livingston (8', 2013) by François Curlet

Fridays and Mondays
Piano Chair (3'50'', 2011) by Robin Rhode

Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in 1959 in Hameenlinna, Finland. Her videos eschew verisimilitude or illusion - two traditional mechanisms of the cinematic image - to focus instead on communicating emotion. The artist often describes the living conditions of people suffering from psychiatric problems, so obsessed with fears or phobias that past and present merge. In The Annunciation a group of women prepare a Christmas play on the Annunciation, when an angel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the son of God. The scene is filmed from different points of view and the artist questions the modes of communication in a confusing context and ventures the hypothesis that we live on different planes of perception and comprehension.

François Curlet is a French artist who was born in 1967 in Paris, where he lives and works. His work often establishes relationships between opposite ideas, thereby creating works filled with poetry as well as humor that nonetheless voice a critique to contemporary society. Through these free associations, his work sets the power of imagination in motion and reinvent our natural and material environment. In Jonathan Livingston, inspired by the novel Harold and Maud by Hal Ashby, a driver wanders through the countryside in an expensive car that has been turned into a hearse. The pleasure of speed and the sense of a potential accident alternate, evoking a game of life and death.

Robin Rhode is a South African artist who was born in Cape Town in 1976 and now lives and works in Berlin. Through photography, performance, drawing and sculpture, the artist creates stories that are brought to life through the use of materials such as soap, charcoal, chalk and paint. His artistic practice and his aesthetics find inspiration in the influence of hip-hop, film and sports on youth culture as well as in the importance for a community to tell stories. Piano Chair (2011, 3'50'') is a digital animation in which a composer tries in every way possible to "kill" his piano. The playful atmosphere recalls Buster Keaton's sense of the absurd. Robin Rhode transforms the urban landscape into imaginary worlds.