Tuesday, 6th May 2025
19:00
LaborBerlin, Prinzenallee 58, 13359 Berlin
Donation-based entry
We warmly invite you to a special evening with Wenhua Shi 史文華, featuring a selection of his short films presented in their original formats. Wenhua will be present for a talk after the screening.
Wenhua Shi’s works combine poetic image-making with conceptual depth, spanning across film, video, interactive installation, and sound sculpture.
Screening Program
Double 16mm:
• Monosabishii (16mm, 2 reels, 4 mins, 2023–2024)
A visual poem was composed, when no one is at home.
Digital:
• Walking Cycle (8 mins, SD to HD, 2016)
WALKING CYCLE is an abstract audiovisual piece that celebrates the line, its quality, and its movements.
• Sense(s) of Time (16mm to HD, 5 mins, 2017–2018)
SENSES OF TIME depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.
• Die Nacht (16mm to HD, 4 mins, 2017–2019)
Prelude to SENSE OF TIME: depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.
• Gutai (16mm to HD, 7 mins, 2019–2020)
Wenhua took on a radical use of single frame image capture and examines his strange and familiar hometown in China, which he has been away from for nearly two decades. The film title comes from postwar Japanese avant-garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji (Chinese) used to write “Gu” means tool, measure, or a way of doing something, while “Tai” means body. The film is the result of intense looking and seeing what might not be there.
• Mother (16mm to digital, 4 mins, 2025)
The latest short by Wenhua Shi.
• The Rose (16mm to HD, 3 mins)
THE ROSE, alters the space, where a newly planted rose is overgrown through iron fence. The film explores the perception of the relationship between foreground and background. The process of editing pays tribute to the optical toy, a bird in a cage, from the pre-cinema period.
16mm:
• Endless (16mm, 12 mins, 2005–2006)
ENDLESS is a meditation on the inevitable deterioration of certain traditional values that have been established (or destroyed) throughout civilization.
• Descending a Staircase (Digital to 16mm, 6 mins, 2012)
This work is a homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Created 100 years after the original piece, it is a meditation on the mechanical nature of cinema / Moving Images, through its dynamic movement and fragmentation. The footage was captured at an apartment building in Beijing, China.
• Because the Sky is Blue (Cyanotype & HD to 16mm, 4 mins, 2020)
Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The duration of today’s social media video clips is similar to Muybridge’s brevity. Wenhua tries to reimagine what subject Muybridge would capture today. All source footage is from Wenhua’s social media feed. He used the cyanotype method to reprint the individual frames to create the final short videos.
About the Artist
Wenhua Shi pursues a poetic approach to moving image making, and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries, and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, Athens Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, West Bund 2013: a Biennale of Architecture and Contemporary art, Shanghai, Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism, and the Arsenale of Venice in Italy. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Juror’s Awards from the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. He is the founder and one of curators of RPM Fest.