VIDEONALE.scope #5

In Filmclub 813 / Filmpalette / Temporary Gallery, Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst

A film series by Videonale Bonn
Curated by Katrin Mundt

The two artists who are honored in this year's edition of VIDEONALE.scope have more in common than their American origins. In their films, Sharon Lockhart (*1964 in Norwood, MA) and Kevin Jerome Everson (*1965 in Mansfield, OH) create portraits of our present day that bring together documentary, fictional and theatrical traditions in a formally independent way. They show us found places that become scenes in which real people act, who are always more than just "themselves". They work with staging and reenactment, creating stretches and condensations of time and playing with the materiality of image, sound and cinematic process to retell reality.

Sharon Lockhart
In her films, Sharon Lockhart proceeds from observations of found actions or scenes - children at play, farmers working in the fields, athletes training, an opera audience performing - and condenses them into cinematic everyday choreographies. They clearly echo the traditions of avant-garde and ethnographic film as well as postmodern dance. Through precise framing, the use of long, static shots, and subtle technical and dramaturgical interventions, she creates scenes that directly involve us as viewers inside, even if the places and actors are alien to us. Her works are characterized by a special temporality that turns the experience of seeing itself into an event, and a kind of stage-likeness that not only frames the visible, but also always brings the invisible and the excluded into play.

Kevin Jerome Everson
Kevin Jerome Everson's work revolves around the everyday life of the Afro-American working class in an idiosyncratic cinematic language in which documentary and experimental traditions are combined with influences from sculpture and painting. He creates portraits of people and places that, despite their proximity and intimacy, are always recognizable as a play with different forms of staging. His interest is not in the unfolding of a narrative, but in individual scenes - both found and orchestrated. The rhythms of the work, the aesthetics of routinely executed everyday gestures, the spaces and artefacts, ways of speaking and accents of his protagonists inside as well as not least the visible and invisible distortions in the everyday landscapes of America combine in Everson's films to form a visual atlas of communities in motion.