VENOMS & VICTIMS

DOORS 7PM £5 ON THE DOOR

‘VENOMS & VICTIMS’: A Super8 and 16mm performance by HH featuring a live music intervention by ZUZUSHIIMONKEY

Spanish experimental filmmaker HH, aka Oriol Sánchez, part of the programming team at Xcentric at Barcelona’s CCCB (Centre for Contemporary Culture), comes to London for the first time to present his latest video work as well as a Super8 and 16mm performance. Concerned with the aggression and brutality of the film medium itself, his work explores the violence done to bodies, alluding to the inherent destructiveness of the cinematic machine. The screening will end with a noise concert by ZUZUSHIIMONKEY, a project formed by artists Tim Can (London) and Fumiko Azuma (Tokyo), who previously collaborated with HH in Barcelona. Using all kinds of improvised instruments, including conventional and home-built devices, field recordings and Theremins, they will intervene during HH’s multi-projectors snake-themed film performance Venoms and Victims.

-with destructive intent-

2011, dv, color, sound, 1 min.

 With destructive intent is a metaphor for the tension one feels during a film projection, when an original film – with its cuts and splices – runs fast through the projector – in danger.

Private Eye

2013, dv, color and b/w, sound, 15 min.

“Private Eye, a short version of Private Eye aka Apollonia's Secret, is tough. It’s sharp in its aggressive, explosive editing. In its (deliberately) off-putting disorder, it instantiates cinema’s brutality. In this video work, the interests in the cinema’s uncanny character and the cinema’s tendency to push language towards meaningless or, at least, towards uncertainty and indeterminacy are effectively conveyed.” – Bruce E. Elder.

Waking Windows aka Victoria’s Wake

2014, three-channel video, color and b/w, sound, 10 min.

The triptych Waking Windows aka Victoria's Wake reveals the strange feeling that the mechanical repetition of the cinematic apparatus has teamed up with the ‘death drive’, its horrifying relentlessness evidencing that a film strip is a sum of aggressions.

Venoms & Victims

Film performance and live music.

https://vimeo.com/206974055 + https://vimeo.com/193030617

The performance Venoms & Victims interweaves odd films showing snakes’ destructive instinct with footage based on landscapes and textures of the terrestrial world, creating a kind of animism that shapes a kinetic writing in which things express themselves in an impulsive manner. On this occasion, with the live intervention of ZUZUSHII MONKEY.

HH aka Oriol Sánchez (Barcelona) is a Spanish artist who works with film, video, installation and performances. He has curated several experimental film and video shows and has been part of the programming team of ‘Xcèntric, the cinema of the CCCB’ since 2009. His work has been shown at Kino Arsenal (Berlin), CGAI (Galicia), MALBA (Buenos Aires), ACMI (Melburne), Anthology Film Archives (New York), TATE (London), MNCARS (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona), National Gallery (Washington), Image Forum Experimental Film Festival (Tokyo). It has been edited in compilations like Del éxtasis al arrebato, Festival of (In)appropriation and Apología / Antología, and is distributed by HAMACA, media & video art distribution from Spain. “My works, whether on film or video, are positioned on the limits of representation and narrative. Based on experimental animation, documentary and the appropriation of images, they arise from an interest in exploring the relationship between sound and image over time. They show a constant concern for the rhythmic, materialistic and emotional potential of images, always close to a plastic abstraction or highly schematic figurative reality, where the characters, if any, beyond psychology, are treated as figures or icons. Their gestures, looks or expressions are interlaced with the rhythms and textures of the image and populate a kind of interior landscape.”

ZUZUSHIIMONKEY is Fumico Azuma (Tokyo) and Tim Can (London). Formally a trio, Doctor Zuzushii Monkey was established in Barcelona in 2000 with Oriol Sanchez (ES). ZM began life in London in 2005, relocating to Tokyo in 2009, then in 2012 to the Greek Island of Naxos, and to Berlin the following year. ZM are currently based in Hastings, England. They create an audio melting pot of cultures, a combination of old and new technologies, instruments, home-built devices, field recordings, Theremins, and whatever else makes a noise. It’s a mixture, at times rhythmic, at times not at all. Their performances have included sound installations in the forests of Lapland, gigs in Japan, Taiwan, the UK and across continental Europe (including the event ship MS Stubnitz), radio performances (Resonance 104.4 FM), film and documentary soundtracks and dance collaborations. ZM operate under the creative umbrella of the ZUZUSHII ART LABORATORY.