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.

In its inaugural year, Migrating Forms convened a jury to consider the program and devise awards as they saw fit. The jury consisted of Redmond Entwistle (artist, Patterson/Lodz), Jacob Korczynski (programmer, Images Festival, Toronto) and Astria Suparak (director, Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery). The jury was free to determine the structure their awards along any criteria they felt most relevant to the program as a whole, indicative of unique achievement, and/or beneficial to the artists.

Jury Selection Awards
The Last Silent Movie by Susan Hiller
Library of Congress Award

Susan Hiller’s imageless paean to dead and dying languages was recognized for its contribution to our understanding of culture and communication.

Versions by Oliver Laric
Investigative Purporting Award

Awarded for Oliver Laric’s investigation of the possibilities, ambiguities, and politics of indexical images in the internet age.

Unnamed Film by Naomi Uman
Véritable amour patriotique (True Patriot Love) Award

The jury named this awards for after an exhibition by artist-filmmaker Joyce Weiland. They praised the film for its meditation on “ideas of nationality, production, and place, in this era of globalization.”

Ponytail by Barry Doupe
Future Past Award

For his depiction of slowly decaying bodies, moving through mediated spaces and trying to grasp their place in an alien world, the jury awarded Barry Doupe the Future Past Award in recognition of his poetic rendering of our time.

Best of the Festival
Short: Zasto ne Govorim Srpski (na srpskom) by Phil Collins
Feature: DDR/DDR by Amie Siegel

For their overall achievement and their handling of themes that reoccurred through out much of the work at the festival, the jury awarded Best of the Festival awards to Collins and Siegel, noting the “conceptual and aesthetic rigor” of their work.

Darrin Martin and Torsten Zenas Burns’ WHAT-IF? will have its New York premiere as part of the shorts program Conjurer Visit, Saturday, 4/18 at 8:30pm

“Playing It By Ear” - April 7, 2009 - Ara H. Merjian - Artforum

AS PART OF A SCREENING TOUR of his solo and collaborative work from the late 1990s through 2005, Darrin Martin recently presented a sample of his single-channel videos at the MassArt Film Society. Martin’s joint ventures with Torsten Zenas Burns, such as Recall (1998) and Volcanica (various dates), intermix archival footage—’70s pedagogical videos for aspiring psychologists, horror films, and hippie happenings—with staged performances involving the artists themselves. At the core of Martin’s solo work, by contrast, is a sustained evocation—visual, aural, and phenomenological—of his struggles with hearing loss over the past decade. After a series of medical interventions, Martin’s skull was outfitted with a device that sends vibrations to a hearing aid in his unaffected ear… (read more)