wael shawky
403 posts
Sept 2024 - ArtForum Int'l Vol 63 № 1 "TWO FACES HAVE I" Galeria Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon Jan 29 - May 5, 2024 Review by Sabrina Tarasoff Curated by Ampersand and Justin Jaeckle, “Two Faces Have I” gathered works by Jana Euler, Sylvie Fanchon, Pati Hill, and Chris Langdon to ponder the poetic logic of the “turning point.” The exhibition’s title was taken from a 1973 film by Langdon, and could—but does not have to—refer, as the curators note in the accompanying booklet, “to the gesture through which something might become something else.” Throughout the space, the artworks staged a continual shift in emphasis—from the emotional to the conceptual, the tangible to the invisible, the formal to the expressive, popular culture to aesthetic legacy. Langdon explains that the 1963 Lou Christie love song from which the film and in turn the show took its title “probably” came to her “from that intuitive corner of my painter’s soul. . . . It has all the animistic sadness of whatever we try to do, work hard at, and retire from.” In Langdon’s cinematic fragment The Gypsy Cried, 1973, the camera frames a record of the song after which it is titled—again, by Lou Christie —from beginning to end, following the mechanistic actions of the vinyl player: turning on, the needle moving to scratch the record’s surface, playing the track through raspy speakers to the end of the two-minute song, the needle withdrawing, the film fading to black. Framing motion as its structure and the song as its narrative substance, Langdon’s film displays “concept” as an atmosphere convoluted into the charged lyrics of the pop song, the mechanistic action, the limited scope of the framed perspective. Emailing with the curators, Langdon has said that driving another 1973 film, Venusville, was a question on the “perception difference between a motion picture of a still object and a freeze frame.” Though Venusville was not included in this show, the comment elucidates a principal motive in all of Langdon’s films, namely, a desire to show a self-enclosed world in the fragment, moved by and moving thought. artforum.com/events/sabrina… CHRIS LANGDON aka INGA UWAIS Two Faces Have I, 1973 Filme 16mm transferido para digital, p/b, som, 3’00’’ 16mm, transferred to digital, b&w, sound, 3 mins The Gypsy Cried, 1973 Filme 16mm transferido para digital, p/b, som, 2’30’’ 16mm, transferred to digital, b&w, sound, 2 mins 30 secs The films of Chris Langdon were restored by the Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles. contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/two-fa…
