Press Release | Formverk, Eskilstuna | 2009-03-07
The Exquisite Corpse Video Project and The Vitruvian Woman Video Installation
March 14 – April 19, 2009
Press show Friday March 13 at 10.00 am
(TUESDAY, March 10, 2009—Eskilstuna, Sweden)—The Exquisite Corpse Video Project and The Vitruvian Woman are two international video collaborations involving more than 40 artists from around the world. The exhibitions, which were initiated, respectively, by Kika Nicolela of Brazil and Michael Chang of Denmark, open on Saturday, March 14 at 18.00 pm, with participating artists from England, Norway, Brazil, Denmark and Sweden in attendance.
With these experimental new media projects, participating video artists are forging a new kind of collective consciousness, involving a sharing and shaping of ideas through sound and vision. Their success in working cooperatively across cultural divides has strengthened their respect for each other as artists, global citizens and representatives of a new way of connecting people from all corners of our planet.
The Vitruvian Woman Video Installation
Instigated by Copenhagen artist Michael Chang, The Vitruvian Woman is an international video collaboration that will have its world premiere at Formverk. Inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous drawing of The Vitruvian Man, video artists from around the globe are coming together to create a single multimedia sculpture called the The Vitruvian Woman.
The installation incorporates nine monitors, each representing the nine regions of the body: head, heart, stomach, sex organ, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg, and feet. 33 artists from 14 countries have collaborated on this multimedia sculpture, which premieres a total of 87 minutes of video art in simultaneous concert—resulting in a high-tech, gestalt portrait of the The Vitruvian Woman.
Exquisite Corpse Video Project
Instigated by award-winning Brazilian video artist Kika Nicolela, the Exquisite Corpse Video Project is another international video art collaboration that had its world premiere at Formverk last year.
In this project, each artist makes a single one-minute video and sends the last ten seconds of it to the next contributor, who then mixes and incorporates these seconds into his or her own minute. The last ten seconds of these are sent to the following artist, and so on.... The name "Exquisite Corpse" originates from the Surrealists of the 1920’s, who experimented in this manner with drawing, painting and text.
This Exquisite Corpse Video Project originally started with three "corpse" threads of 8-10 artists each. These three first three threads were premiered at an exhibition held at Formverk in June 2008, and, since then, the project has continued to grow. The final Exquisite Corpse Video Project, Vol. 1 includes a total of nine threads, with 80 video works by 37 artists from all over the world. The project has now been previously shown in Brazil, Canada, Greece, Mexico, South Africa, and the USA.
At the present time, this ever-expanding group of artists is working on the Exquisite Corpse Video Project, Vol. 2, premiering this fall. In this collaboration, each artists has a choice of making their segments between one and two minutes, but must elaborate on a theme assigned to each five-person thread.
www.formverk.se