Mark Lewis – Downtown, Tilt Zoom Pan
Artist Talk – Discussion – Student conversation
TUE 27.03.2007 | whole day
KDM – Ordinariat für Kunst und digitale Medien
Semperdepot 1.Stock – Medienklasse (I27)
Mark Lewis is a Canadian artist who lives and works in London. His work explores the pictorial possibilities (or impossibilities) of film. Short (usually less than 5 minutes), silent and in most case consisting of (or appearing to be) single uninterrupted shots, Lewis’s films are mediations on everydaylife and the way in which traditional modern forms (including film itself) are experienced both as ‘failures’ and horizons for continued utopic possibility. Lewis is also a founding editor of Afterall Journal, and the series editor of the “One Work” series of books published by Afterall Books. His essay “Ist die Moderne unsere Antike?” is featured in the current Documenta Magazine No1 Modernity?
Philippe-Alain Michaud on Mark Lewis: “The whole of Mark Lewis’s cinema is an exploration of the conventions of the cinematographic medium. Since the early 1990s, when he switched from photography to working with moving images, the filmmaker has developed an analytical process of Kantian inspiration, through which he seeks to throw light on the nature of the cinematic image and describe how it is formed by isolating each of its properties and formal components. This project is an examination of the possibilities of the filmic image in which distinctions between language and metalanguage, between invention of form and critical device, are no longer valid. In reducing the filmic image to scenic devices he challenges traditional cinema’s laws of narrative and syntax. He frees the elements of the cinematographic medium from their narrative function, giving them the independence to take on purely aesthetic values. Mark Lewis ‘s cinema draws up a map of these movements.”
Single person and group exhibitions (selection):
Powerplant Toronto / BFI Southbank, London / PS1 international project, Long Island City, New York / Fact, Liverpool / Monte Clark Gallery / Hamburger Kunstverein, Hamburg / Galerie Cent8, Paris / Rooseum, Malmo / “Le mouvement des images”, Musee national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris / “Designing Truth”, Wilhelm Lembruck Museum / “Art Video Lounge”, Art Basel, Miami Beach, Florida/ “to be continued../jatkuu”, Helsinki Kunsthalle / “The Space of Making”, Neuer Berliner Kuntsverein, Berlin/”3rd Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art”, Martin Gropius Building, Berlin “Fate of Alien Modes”, Vienna Secession, Vienna /”[based upon] TRUE STORIES”, Witte de With, Rotterdam / “The Liverpool Biennial”, International Exhibition, Tate Liverpool / “Gwangju Biennale”, Gwangju, Korea /”Endtroducing”, Villa Arson, Nice France )