Tuesday 25 May 2010 at 18:00:

Auto-Kino! Cape Town, with Phil Collins & Siniša Mitrović

Phil Collins & Sinista Mitrovic presented a one-night event in which the artists introduced the Auto-Kino! project, which was followed by a screening of a few artists' films that were shown in Auto-Kino!. The screening was followed by a-DJ set.
Some of the artists whose films were included in the screening program are Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Christine Noll Brinckman, Marcel Broodthaers,  Lucile Desamory, Christia n Jankowski, Claudia Schillinger, Klaus Telscher, and more.

Auto-Kino! was recently shown at the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin, and is inspired by the 1950'sIn the 1950s the then extremely successful drive-ins were considered seedy "passion pits" and a moral hazard to youth. In Germany and Europe drive-ins never achieved the same popularity as in the USA: car-ownership was too scarce, ticket prices too high, and winter-month temperatures too low.

Auto-Kino! incorporates the attractions of this now almost extinct mode of spectatorship. Phil Collins and Siniša Mitrović, who jointly run the visual arts company Shady Lane Productions (Berlin/Glasgow), have programmed more than 100 titles covering a broad range of film and video, from the 1920's onwards, which generally relate to two main concerns. On the one hand, the works revolve around the sensual circuitry and emotional impact of moving images, positioning the viewer as a desiring subject. On the other, they explore the duality of authenticity and manipulation embedded in cinematic representation. The simultaneous erection and abolition of cinema's visual pleasures lie at the heart of significant parts of both contemporary filmmaking and visual arts – a traditionally maintained distinction which Auto-Kino! proposes is as blinkered as it is obsolete. Engaging the far-reaching implications of the phenomenon of drive-ins, Auto-Kino! offers the audience a fresh perspective on the promiscuous liaisons between film and the moving image in other visual media.

Wednesday 26 May 2010 at 18:00:

Renata Lucas

Renata Lucas. Cruzamento (Crossing) (2003). Rua Dois de dezembro com Praia do Flamengo (Castelinho do Flamengo). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by Rubens Mano. 

The Redcat gallery in Los Angeles describes Renata Lucas’s practice as "a critical interpretation of how our built environment determines actions, behavior and social relationships, and by extension, society’s dependency on the preservation of prescribed definitions of space, property and order. By offering an alternative spatial imagination—one that brings into consideration malleability, manipulation and play—Lucas provokes the possibility of new subjective and collective engagement within our built environment."
 
Born in 1971 in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, Lucas has had solo exhibitions at the Galeria Millan Antonio in São Paulo, A Gentil Carioca in Rio de Janeiro, Castelinho do Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro, Paço das Artes in São Paulo, at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte and at Redcat in Los Angeles. She participated in the 27th Bienal de São Paulo in 2006 and in the Venice Biennial in 2009. Lucas received her BFA and MFA at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. In 2009 she had a short residency at the Berliner Kuenstlerprogramm/DAAD in Berlin and the Capp Street Residency in San Francisco. Currently she stays in Stockholm on a IASPIS residency. She lives and works in São Paulo.