Like pebbles in water

curated by Elena Volpato

Opens 6.30 p.m., 14 October, Room 1

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1966/2003, 16mm

As part of the Torino Foto Festival organised by the FIAF - Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografia (Italian Federation of Photography Associations), GAM di Torino is pleased to present a selection of artists' films and videos in which the photographic time of the still image and the flow of filmic time are compared.

Looking at a photograph in a video or film is like looking at a pebble on the bed of a river or at the bottom of the sea. Its solid sense of completed reality appears to us as though veiled by the flow of the film, almost disembodied by the ephemeral dimension of a fleeting duration that is not part of it.

 

Photographs and film are superimposed, layered bearers of different feelings of time. In the works on show, which come from the collection of the VideotecaGAM (GAM video library), the photograph is sometimes shown as a vital cell, one that generates the film, as in Robin Rhode's work, while at other times it offers an inverted mirror to the nature of film. This is the case of the photograph of a marine surface that appears as the final shot in Snow’s long zoom shot in Wavelength, in which the flow of the film finds its own goal in a fixed image which, however, documents the eternal movement of water. In his Garland 5, on the other hand, T.J. Wilcox superimposes the nostalgic feeling of preserved time in old documentary films on the crepuscular mood – as Susan Sontag defined it – of the photographic form.

 

 

 

In Unisono by Giulio Paolini and in Untitled by Francesco Barocco, the photographs that appear are documentations of works of art whose liminal and absolute time complicates the dialogue between photos and videos, so that the sense of duration inherent in film, its impermanence, even if present, appears to us as if it were reabsorbed by the eternal time of art history, through the enduring presence of the work over the centuries.

Works screened continuously:

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1966/2003, 16mm, colour, soundtrack, 15’

Giulio Paolini, Unisono, 1974, video, b/w, silent, 1’

T.J. Wilcox, Garland 5, 2005, 16mm, colour, silent, 6’49”

Robin Rhode, Promenade, 2008, video animation, b/w, soundtrack, 5’

Francesco Barocco, Senza Titolo, 2004, video, colour, silent, 7’6”

Overall duration of the programme: 35 minutes

 

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FIAF - Federazione Italiana Associazioni Fotografiche
Cs. San Martino 8, Turin, Italy
Tel. +39 011 5629479
www.fiaf.net