Eastside Projects | Artist's Films

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Artist’s Films
Eastside Projects Second Gallery
21 February to 4 April 2009

Johanna Billing
Magical World 2005
06:12 min/loop, DVD

Magical World presents a group of children from a free after-school music club based at a rundown 1980s cultural centre in Dubrava, a suburb of Zagreb, Croatia. The work introduces us to them rehearsing “Magical World” – a song chosen by Billing and written by the Afro-American singer Sidney Barnes in 1968 for Chicago vocal group The Rotary Connection. The lyrics – a melancholic description of transformation – resonate with the transformation the relatively young country is undergoing in adapting to the European Union demands while also establishing its own fragile national identity. Billing interweaves images of the children’s performance with various views of the suburban surroundings, echoing the rude utopian awakening of the song and the potential future transformation of their lives as they sing “Why do you wake me up / From such a beautiful dream / Can’t you see that I am sleeping / So why / don’t you leave me alone / … / I live in a magical world.”

Johanna Billing (b. 1973, Jönköping, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm.
Recent solo exhibitions include This is how we walk on the Moon, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, 2008; Forever Changes, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Keep On Doing, DCA, Dundee, 2007; Stages, Fundacio La Caiza, Barcelona; Another Album, Hollybush Gardens, London, 2007.

Courtesy of Hollybush Gardens, London.

Beatrice Gibson & Alex Waterman
A Necessary Music 2008
29:09 min/loop, HDVD

A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it. The film is set on Roosevelt Island, a small sliver of land situated between Manhattan and Queens, intersected by the Queensborough Bridge. Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the residents of the Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Accompanied by a fictional narration taken from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1941 science fiction novel ‘The Invention of Morel’, the film deploys fiction as a tool to frame and activate its site. Self-consciously dissolving from attempted realism to imagined narrative, what begins as a process concerned with sociality becomes instead an ethnographic fiction about place and community, and an investigation into representation itself.

Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978, London) lives and works in London.
Recent projects include taxi_onomy (2005-6) an art architecture collaboration with architect Céline Condorelli; ‘if the route:’ The Great Learning of London [A Taxi Opera] (2007), developed in collaboration with musician and composer Jamie McCarthy, partnered by ResonanceFM, Studio Voltaire, London. Gibson was studio artists in residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art ISP 2007/8, is a PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, with Eyal Weizman, and is currently artist in residence at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in Brussels.

Alex Waterman (b. 1975, Portsmouth, Virginia, USA) lives and works in New York.
He is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music, in New York he performs with Either/Or Ensemble. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III. As a curator he has organized events at Les Bains: Connective in Brussels, OT301 in Amsterdam; and The Kitchen, New York.

Johanna Billing: Magical World 2005 (Video Still)

Beatrice Gibson & Alex Waterman: A Necessary Music 2008 (Film Still)