Film and Video

Somewhere between documentary and film essay, Double Take (2009) presents Alfred Hitchcock - and his doppelganger Ron Burrage - as a paranoid history professor unwillingly trapped between archive images of the Cold War and the broadcast of a live television programme.

The works of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, l975) focus on socio-political aspects and investigate the problematics of identity and memory using classical mythology, opera, Baroque dance, palace protocol and social behaviours.

In the words of Gilles Deleuze, everyone has his south - it doesn't matter where it is. In the imaginary cartography of the global order, the idea of south presents itself as a powerful metaphor that acts on two fronts.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is an artist based in New York whose work emphasises socio-political reality and delves into the nature of memory. He uses language and historical narrative, availing himself of theatrical and literary resources that he then transposes into conceptual language.

Visionaries - Audiovisual Works in Latin America is an eclectic exhibition that is full of vitality and deeply committed to audiovisual creation in Latin America. The series looks at Latin American experimental video and film from Mexico to the countries of the Southern Cone in a combination of screenings and conferences that put everything from pioneers in experimental film to more recent productions under the historical lens. Organised by Brazil’s Instituto Itaú Cultural, the series consists of 73 works grouped into nine programmes.

Fragments of the East. Performance Art and Feminist Discourse (1968-1989) is a video and conference series on the origin of feminist discourse in the artistic practice in three historical contexts with no public sphere. As artists beginning within the framework of the communist dictatorships of Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Poland, Geta Brătescu (Ploiesti, 1926), Sanja Iveković (Zagreb, 1929) and Ewa Partum (Grodzisk, 1945) created works that question artistic specificity and autonomy at the same time that they allude to repressive contexts and the subject’s capacity for transformation and representation in works of art.

The films of the multifaceted Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach (Winterthur, 1965) start from a direct encounter with a place or person and take the depiction to the limits of the metaphor. His latest works, Verso (2008) - starring his father - and L’Atelier (2007), are being screened along with Spin (2001), an earlier film with the artist’s mother.

Film has made its way into museums and galleries at the same time that art has opened up avenues in the world of film. Exhibition spaces often host multimedia installations, experimental film sessions and even narrative films. In their quest to integrate image, sound and movement, more and more artists are turning to cinema as a means of expression, exploring experimental abstraction, documentary and narrative fiction.

Lillian Ball, an artist and environmental activist who has received numerous awards from institutions like the Guggenheim Foundation and the United States National Endowment for the Arts, has dedicated a large part of her work to protecting the wetlands.

Cuando la tierra tiembla (2006) is a visual document of the human drama of exile, migration and displacement. The video draws on the circumstances of the Mexican community residing in New York to look at the situation of emigrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their testimonies, along with those of members of associations who work with ‘illegals,’ form the central thread that runs through the story.

India is a place of abundant contrasts: part of the population lives in full post-modernity, modernity can still be found in another, while another segment - perhaps the majority of the population - lives anchored in feudalism. From a western standpoint, Indian film is a complex thing that breaks with the aesthetic codes and parameters established in the West in its themes and forms. Understanding it means delving into the culture and idiosyncrasy of its peoples.

In Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, a group of HIV-infected women created a network called Tapologo. Working with nurses from their community, they transformed misery and degradation into resistance and hope. Catholic bishop Kevin Dowling helped them, raising doubts about the sexual and moral doctrine of the Church in this context.

The camera never stops moving while it follows the operation of emptying the Huerta de San Vicente of all of its contents - paintings, furniture, rugs, flowerpots, knickknacks, a piano - leaving it clean and bare, and accompanying the objects wrapped in semi-transparent plastic to a storage site where they are placed in a pile.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents a selection of works from the Colección Pi Fernandino in Madrid, one of the few private collections that concentrates on works done in audiovisual format from recent decades.

The concept and evolution of television ads produced by political organisations and parties during electoral campaigns have changed noticeably since they first appeared in the United States in the 1960s. Today, campaign ads have become a hybrid genre, the product of the convergence of different television formats ranging from advertisements, to fiction, documentaries, news reporting, music videos, political propaganda, parodies and sports and music events.