Thursday, September 12th 2024, 7pm-10pm
artist talk and film screening
Karel Doing will be introducing his new book Ruins and Resilience followed by a program featuring films from his body of work spanning 25 years, from his early work with found footage to recent phytochemical experiments. Through these explorations of the nature of analogue film, Doing‘s body of work explores questions of ecology, materiality and resource, questions that to this day are more urgent than ever.
Karel Doing is an independent artist, filmmaker, and researcher whose practice investigates the relationship between culture and nature by means of analogue and organic process, experiment, and co-creation. His work has been shown worldwide at festivals, in cinemas, on stage, and in galleries. He was a founding member of Studio één, a pioneering DIY film laboratory. He has invented “phytography,” a technique that combines plants and photo-chemical emulsion.
Whirlwind
1998, 9 minutes, colour, 16mm, NL
The origins of this film came from documents shot during the preparations and the executions of several collectives performances performed by the British group Loophole and the Dutch artist Karel Doing. Using frame by frame, long exposures and optical effects, these performances were manipulated and intensified. The essence of cinema, writing with light, is portrayed as a hallucination.
Energy Energy
1999, 7 minutes, black& white, 16mm, NL
Progress revisited. Found-footage film, compiled from industrial, instructional and promotional films from the first half of the twentieth century, presenting progressive thought and technological development. But did everything really go so well?
The Mulch Spider’s Dream
2018, 14 minutes, colour, 16mm, UK
Kindling the vision of a spider.
What is it like to be a spider? A creature that lives in the same environment as we do and yet has an experience far removed from ours. The film evokes a non-human world through shape, colour and rhythm. The seemingly abstract images are made by using the internal chemistry of plants interacting with photographic emulsion, a type of image that I have
called a “phytogram”.
A Perfect Storm
2022, 3 minutes, colour, 16mm, UK
A Perfect Storm is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film’s emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve.
Babbler, Fairy and Thrush
2022, 4 minutes, black&white, 16mm, UK
An unfiltered stream of perception: small objects and grand panoramas appear simultaneously. The certainties of near and far, detail and overview, inside and outside are deliberately thrown into confusion.
Aided by in-camera superimposition and travelling mattes, a near abstract experience is created. Sunlight filters through semi-transparent surfaces, while small holes and cracks allow the light to travel unrestrained.
Oxygen
2023, 6 minutes, colour, 16mm, UK
Blades of grass racing across the screen
Agapanthus
2024, 6 minutes, black&white, 16mm, UK
A mosaic of organic forms that tumble on top of each other.
Liquidator
2010, 8 minutes, colour, (35mm) 2K, NL
A project making innovative use of existing archive images of Willy Mullens’ silent film Haarlem (1922). The original film shows the city in straightforward shots and camera movements. Due to deterioration these images changed in a dramatic way. In the adaption Karel Doing zooms in on these effects with the aid of digital techniques like optical flow and morphing. Michal Osowski collaborated on the project with sound that is directely linked to the image, he used the changes in density of the film to control complex filters and distortion effects.
Wilderness Series
2016, 14 minutes, colour, (35mm) 2K cinemascope, UK
By using plants, mud and salt in conjunction with alternative photochemistry, images are ‘grown’ on motion picture film. What in first instance is perceived as abstract turns out to be a concrete precipitation from phenomena that surround us in everyday life. The ‘aliveness’ of the images is underlined by Andrea Szigetvári’s evocative sound-design.
TIME:
artist talk starts at 7pm
film screening starts at 8pm
VENUE:
PA58
Prinzenallee 58
13359 Berlin
event hall, 2nd yard to the right
FEE:
suggested donation for talk & screening: 5 Euros or more