Outtake from Rouzbeh Rashidi’s feature film TRAILERS (180 Minutes, DSLR, 35mm, 16mm, Super8mm, VHS, Stereo, Colour, Ireland, Switzerland, Portugal, U.K and Iran 2016)
Produced by Experimental Film Society. Funded by Arts Council Ireland.
Alice Maher and Vicky Langan - Vox Materia at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
Thursday 15 November, 2018. Crawford Art Gallery.
Vicky Langan will present 3 performances in response to Alice Maher’s Vox Materia, in the library of the Crawford Art Gallery. Interacting physically with Vox Materia’s bronze elements and drawing on the ideas raised by the show, Langan will layer physical gesture with scraps of sound to create an intensely personal response to Maher’s work.
Vox Materia comprises a multi-part installation of sculpture and works on paper. Stemming from Maher’s consideration of a 12th Century mermaid carving, this show meditates on voice and silence. The mermaid is a hybrid creature that transgresses boundaries between human and animal, and is often associated with traumatic loss of voice.
Maher deploys the mermaid not as a motif, but as an ambiguous and powerful conceptual tool to explore ideas of language, embodiment, agency, and autonomy.
The artist begins by adopting and documenting contorted postures; creating strained silhouettes that gesture towards a language of the body in extremis. Vox Materia exploits the tactile, contingent qualities of woodcut and watercolour to articulate amoebic, inter-elementary forms while hand-held sculptural forms create new material and corporeal vocabularies
This new work is presented alongside Cassandra’s Necklace (2012), Maher’s first live-action film, in which the mythical protagonist wanders an arid, glittering landscape in search of her voice, literally a necklace of unspeaking tongues. Both bodies of work demonstrate Maher’s ongoing exploration of the burdens of silence and silencing in her recent practice.
Vox Materia is curated by Pluck Projects and was commissioned by The Source Arts Centre, Thurles, with support from Creative Ireland and Tipperary County Council.
Photographs by Dervla Baker
Behind the scenes…
Working with Alice Maher’s sculptures in advance of the Vox Materia exhibition at the Crawford Art Gallery.
Alice Maher bought me Hillbilly's last night.
— Vicky Langan (@vicky_langan) November 16, 2018
EFS @ Thai Film Archive
Experimental Film Society (EFS) is a group of filmmakers dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it has succeeded in forging a new and radically alternative Irish cinema. Its defiantly independent vision, both deeply informed by film history and utterly modern, has animated over five hundred shorts and features over its eighteen-year existence. Its films adopt an exploratory approach to filmmaking and foreground mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the often-startling sensory interplay of sound and image. As EFS filmmakers experiment with cinema, they allow it equally to experiment on them, creating richly experiential works that chart an uncomfortable territory that is at once uncannily familiar and utterly alien.
Two EFS programmes in collaboration with Filmvirus Program are screening at the Thai Film Archive, Thailand, 3rd of November 2018.
EFS founder and director Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Phantom Islands (2018) exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. Directed with Rashidi’s trademark visual intensity, it follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.
EFS Short Film Programme:
1_Universal Film (2018) By Jann Clavadetscher (4min, 2018, Ireland)
“The universal film acts upon us as a force, blending and rearranging impossible scenarios served with a dash of ants.”
2_Ghoul (2018) By Michael Higgins (8min, 2018, Ireland) *World Premiere*
“The ghosts of a man and his dog haunt a field in rural Ireland.”
3_Double Blind (2018) By Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain (36min, 2018, Ireland) *World Premiere*
“Experimental filmmaking / performance duo Langan & Le Cain embrace the mood and iconography of classic Gothic literature and cinema to their raw, mysterious and often erotically charged universe. Two isolated storybook characters wander through the remains of a shattered B-movie found abandoned half-edited on a mouldy VHS tape. This darkly intimate work, suggestive of intensely personal rituals, is at once haunting and discomforting.”
4_Antler (2018) By Atoosa Pour Hosseini (15min, 2018, Ireland) *World Premiere*
“Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s work with Super-8 conjures a mysterious territory that exists between memory, subjective perception and the objective materiality of the filmed image. Antler pushes deeper into this realm, seamlessly combining archival footage of animals and reptiles in their habitats with newly filmed material of the artist and an assistant at work in a botanical garden.”
I was working in the lab late one night...
EFS @ WORM, Rotterdam
Filmwerkplaats: Experimental Film Society Programme
Wed October 31st, Doors: 20:00 (Start: 20:30, End: 23:00)
WORM, Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam €6.00
A programme of Experimental Film Society films will screen at Filmwerkplaats, WORM in Rotterdam this October.
Experimental Film Society (EFS) is a group of filmmakers dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it operates as a company for the production, archiving and promotion of films by associated artists and filmmakers. EFS filmmakers experiment with cinema and they allow it equally to experiment on them, creating richly experiential works that chart an uncomfortable territory that is at once uncannily familiar and utterly alien. This programme also features a short by The Underground Film Studio, the home of projects by filmmaking duo Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais.
Filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain will be there in person to give a quick talk and answer questions.
WORM is a physical and mental state of being that offers hangouts that offer a workable alternative to dominant cultural movements. From here they clearly state, and distribute their mission, artistic practice, and legacy. Filmwerkplaats is WORM’s own artist-run film lab. A workspace dedicated to DIY analogue practice, geared towards artists interested in film as an expressive, physical medium. Their screening programme encompasses a wide range of subject matter, showing works by members and guest-filmmakers throughout the year.
1. Universal Film (2018), Jann Clavadetscher, 4mins, Ireland
2. The Family Vault of James Hyland (2017), Michael Higgins, 14mins, Ireland
3. INT. LANDSCAPES (2018), Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais, 9mins, Europe
4. Refining the Senses (2017), Atoosa Pour Hosseini, 12mins, Ireland/Switzerland
5. Homo Sapiens Project (161-170) (2013), Rouzbeh Rashidi, 8 min, Ireland
6. Brine Twice Daily (2015), Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain, 20mins, Ireland
EFS @ Fedaxv 2018
Experimental Film Society (EFS) is a group of filmmakers dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it has succeeded in forging a new and radically alternative Irish cinema. Its defiantly independent vision, both deeply informed by film history and utterly modern, has animated over five hundred shorts and features over its eighteen-year existence. Its films adopt an exploratory approach to filmmaking and foreground mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the often-startling sensory interplay of sound and image. As EFS filmmakers experiment with cinema, they allow it equally to experiment on them, creating richly experiential works that chart an uncomfortable territory that is at once uncannily familiar and utterly alien. The series of EFS films screening at the Festival de Diseño Audiovisual Experimental de Valdivia, Chile showcases several directors currently producing feature films under the EFS banner.
EFS founder and director Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Phantom Islands (2018) exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. Directed with Rashidi’s trademark visual intensity, it follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.
Inside (2017) is the first feature to have emerged from the longstanding collaboration between Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain, which has produced numerous short films. It excavates the sensations, desires and elusive chimeras of one woman’s inner life. Taking place in the isolated setting of a remote country cottage, it summons a haunting portrait of a woman adrift in a personal reality formed of her domestic rituals and frustrations. At once lyrical, unsettling and perverse, Inside is a chart of the growth patterns of solitude.
Michael Higgins’ eerie and meditative Drifting Cities (2017) shows two actors playing two lovers before meeting death in a car crash. They drift through muddled memories and moments in search of one another. Italian journal CinePensieri calls the film “evanescent in the widest meaning of the term… Is it the cinema that turns into the world or vice versa? In both cases, in Drifting Cities the two elements fuse together to such an extent that it’s difficult to recognise the border between the reality and the medium that represents it”.
23rd to 25th of October 2018, Valdivia, Chile.
More info disenoexperimental.cl
meadow, meadow, meadow | Seoul Performing Arts Festival, South Korea
Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF)
Main Hall, Daehakro Arts Theater Oct 26th & 27th, 2018
Multi-disciplinary artwork in collaboration with artists from Finland and Ireland
Dancers: Ruairí Donovan, Alli Mattila, Elina Pirinen, Maria Saivosalmi, Aino Voutilainen, Cathy Walsh, Vicky Langan, Aleksi Holkko , Seán Ó’Dálaigh
About the Performance
Three differently beautiful, fragile and intimate meadows, three individual artistic visions that can and cannot live without each other. Together, they form a contemporary landscape, where complex and simple physical, vocal and visual events affect each other and are moving forward with the inevitability of a slowed down avalanche.
Synopsis
Meadow, Meadow, Meadow, a triptych of no less than five director-choreographers, premiered at Zodiak – Center for New Dance in March 2015. The authors are choreographer-dancers Elina Pirinen and Maria Saivosalmi from Finland, Irish performing artists Ruairí Donovan and Cathy Walsh. Meadow, Meadow, Meadow invites viewers to witness and take part in the slow storms of the solar plexus, shared and lonely physical acts, many forms of extremism, a crime that had already taken place, and strange tenderness. This non-story is not a catharsis, but it radiates warmth and comfort.
Zodiak Center for New Dance
Zodiak is an experimental, pioneering center of contemporary dance that focuses especially on artists, the community, and audience work. Zodiak's facilities are located at the Cable Factory in Helsinki. Zodiak is a key producer of and venue for contemporary choreographic works and performances in Finland. Zodiak also actively engages in diverse audience work that stems from Zodiak's productions and the community of artists and participants around it. Zodiak's program is artistically curated and primarily based on open applications. Zodiak is supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education, Arts Promotion Centre Finland and City of Helsinki.
Inside & Brine Twice Daily | Cienclube Academia das Musas, Porto Alegre, Brazil
To Live And Shave in La + Guests
Play Ground, | ‘Ecstatic Visions’, Brighton, UK
On this coming Tuesday (24/07/2018) the Exploding Appendix Avant-garde Art and Research Group will be meeting from 7:30pm upstairs at The Marwood (52 Ship Street Brighton, England, BN1 1AF) to discuss artistic projects and ideas. This week alongside more informal discussions we will be screening five short films selected by Daniel & Clara.
Artists Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais have been collaborating since 2011 on moving image work, performance and photography. Since meeting they have worked exclusively together seeing themselves as two halves of a single artist. Alongside their work as artists they also publish their own magazine Film Panic. Throughout 2018 they will be collaborating extensively with Exploding Appendix as resident artists and, alongside this interview, will be collaborating on events, screenings and film projects.
The screening will present a selection of short films by a medley of contemporary filmmakers. This will be the first part of a two part screening of ‘Ecstatic visions’. The second will be presented later in the year. The Programme for part 1 is presented below.
ECSTATIC VISIONS
Part 1
Five New Visionary Films Selected by The Underground Film Studio
Total Runtime: 64mins
In The Arbor Of The Bitter Orange (Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian)
IN THE ARBOR OF THE BITTER ORANGE
2017 | 7 mins | Super8 | Dir. Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian
IN THE ARBOR OF THE BITTER ORANGE is a short Surrealist daydream captured by Scottish Borders duo Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian on monochromatic Super 8 in a sleepy seaside town in the north of Portugal.
Telekinetic Pleasures (Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais)
TELEKINETIC PLEASURES
2018 | 8 mins | VHS | Dir. Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais
TELEKINETIC PLEASURES depicts the aftermath of a bizarre scientific experiment that involves chickens, reptilian and human subjects, two of whom have survived and are portrayed by the directors themselves – artefacts of their psychic transmissions are captured here on videotape.
Play Ground (Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain)
PLAY GROUND
2017 | 16 mins | DV | Dir. Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain
PLAY GROUND is a tribute to the great Dutch filmmaker Frans Zwartjes. Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain play two characters locked into patterns of desire who seem unable to connect in this playful but ultimately melancholy film.
Miraculous Aqueduct (David Finkelstein)
MIRACULOUS AQUEDUCT
2018 | 16 mins | HD | Dir. David Finkelstein
A poetic exploration of the strategies for unleashing creativity, both scattershot and focused.
MIRACULOUS AQUEDUCT is a journey through an interior landscape filled with tarot cards, towers, and centurions; a collage of words, images and music, in which the film’s two narrators discover that acknowledging inner blocks is the key to overcoming them.
Bom Dia Carlos (Gurcius Gewdner)
BOM DIA CARLOS
2016 | 17 mins | HD | Dir. Gurcius Gewdner
Dedicated Carlos Reichenbach, Lucio Fulci and Andrzej Zulawski, BOM DIA CARLOS is a film about the coming apocalypse, about a man who fears to shit, about demonic voices from within but ultimately it is a film about uncontrollable creative and bodily expression that bursts forth in the most deliriously grotesque manner thinkable. Vomit bags recommended!
Play Ground | The Barlow Index 5, Brighton
The Barlow Index #5
Sunday August 12th
The Cowley Club, Brighton
EFS @ Suspaustas laikas
Experimental Film Society (EFS) is a group of filmmakers dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it has succeeded in forging a new and radically alternative Irish cinema. Its defiantly independent vision, both deeply informed by film history and utterly modern, has animated over five hundred shorts and features over its eighteen-year existence. Its films adopt an exploratory approach to filmmaking and foreground mood, atmosphere, visual rhythms, and the often-startling sensory interplay of sound and image. As EFS filmmakers experiment with cinema, they allow it equally to experiment on them, creating richly experiential works that chart an uncomfortable territory that is at once uncannily familiar and utterly alien.
Two EFS programmes are screening at “Compact time” The Cinematography & Alternative Art Festival, 26th-29th July 2018, Nida Lithuania.
Phantom Islands, Rouzbeh Rashidi (2018, 86mins)
EFS founder and director Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Phantom Islands exists at the boundary of documentary and fiction. Directed with Rashidi’s trademark visual intensity, it follows a couple adrift and disoriented in the stunning landscape of Ireland’s islands. Yet this deliberately melodramatic romance is constantly questioned by a provocative cinematic approach that results in a hypnotic and visceral inquiry into the very possibility of documentary objectivity.
EFS Short Films (58mins):
1_Universal Film (2018), Jann Clavadetscher, 4mins, Ireland
2_The Family Vault of James Hyland (2017), Michael Higgins, 14mins, Ireland
3_INT. LANDSCAPES (2018), Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais, 8:35mins, Ireland/Portugal
4_Refining the Senses (2017), Atoosa Pour Hosseini, 12:35mins, Ireland/Switzerland
5_Brine Twice Daily (2015), Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain, 20mins, Ireland
Rouzbeh Rashidi will be in attendance to introduce all screenings. EFS is deeply grateful for the support of Arturas Liutostanskis and Suspaustas laikas. Info HERE
Double-Blind at Cork Midsummer Festival
Double-Blind
Film/performance by Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain
June 18th, 9.30pm, St. Luke’s Church Crypt, Cork
Limited Capacity - booking essential. Tickets €10: http://www.corkmidsummer.com/programme/event/double-blind
Descend into the atmospheric St. Luke’s Church Crypt and become immersed in a live performance that unfolds against a richly textured film installation. For this new work, experimental performance / filmmaking duo Vicky Langan & Maximilian Le Cain embrace the mood and iconography of classic Gothic literature and cinema to their raw, mysterious and often erotically charged universe. Their darkly intimate work, suggestive of intensely personal rituals, is at once haunting and discomforting.
Made possible through the assistance of Cork Film Centre and Experimental Film Society, and developed with the support of a Cork City Council Individual Artist Bursary.
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Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain
Over the course of a nine-year filmmaking collaboration, Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain have created a distinctively intimate cinematic universe that has more recently expanded to include live performance. This audio-visual partnership is built on the strikingly fitting match between Langanʼs magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cainʼs distinctively jarring, disruptive visual rhythms. It has resulted in fifteen moving image works to date, including the Arts Council funded feature film Inside made for TULCA 2017, and an ongoing series of performances that began at the 2017 Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival. These performances emerged from Play Ground, a 2017 short film created with the support of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris as a tribute to the late Dutch filmmaker Frans Zwartjes. In 2018, they created a new performance, Double-Blind, for Cork Midsummer Festival.
Langan / Le Cain are closely affiliated with Experimental Film Society, a company dedicated to the creation of uncompromisingly personal, formally challenging filmmaking. Based in Dublin, it has succeeded in forging a new and radically alternative Irish cinema. Through its distribution, their films have been widely screened at international venues and festivals.
In 2016, Langan and Le Cain both attended the MA course in Art & Process at Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, and subsequently participated in the exhibition slips, speaks at 12 Star Gallery, London that drew on the work of selected CCAD MA graduates. They have had retrospective screenings at Microscope Gallery, New York, and the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. Their film Light/Sound is part of the permanent collection of the Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Paris.
Select recent screenings, exhibitions and performances have taken place at: VISUAL as part of Carlow Arts Festival; VAI Get Together, IMMA; Process Festival, Riga; American Medium Gallery, New York; Cineautopsia: Festival de Cine Experimental de Bogotá, Colombia; Cinemateca Nacional de Ecuador, Quito; Triskel Christchurch Cinema, Cork.
For a full filmography and list of all Langan / Le Cain events, please visit: https://maximilianlecain.com/langan-le-cain/
For information on Langan & Le Cain’s extensive solo careers:
vickylangan.com / maximilianlecain.com
Phantom Islands & Inside at Festival ECRÃ, MAM, Brazil
Two recent feature films from Experimental Film Society (EFS) will screen as part of the Festival ECRÃ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil this July. Phantom Islands (Rouzbeh Rashidi) and Inside (Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain) are in many ways complimentary films that mirror each other in several aspects. Both are wordless, delving back into the origins of cinema to conjure portraits of characters and couples immersed in psychic breakdown within vividly rendered Irish landscapes. Both present extremely fragmented narratives that blur inner and outer worlds, and are driven by intensely atmospheric visuals and soundtracks. And both rely on boldly physical performances that owe as much to performance art as to screen acting.
ECRÃ Festival is an experimental film festival that arose from the desire to question the film industry and its “primordial elements” and to give space for filmmakers to experiment freely in audiovisual production. It takes place between July 17th and 22nd at the Cinemateca do MAM Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
New Article on Inside by Nikola Gocić
From film writer Nikola Gocić:
With my fourth article for EFS Publications, I open my mind wider and take a deep dive into the turbid sea of Maximilian Le Cain's and Vicky Langan's psychological inwardness, in an attempt to find representative artefacts and bring them to the surface. In other words, a few thoughts on Le Cain's solo feature debut, Cloud of Skin (2015), and his latest and most accomplished collaborative effort with Langan, Inside (2017). Read the full article here: https://goo.gl/SuHq7p
Encountering the Land | VISUAL Gallery, Carlow
Presented by Carlow Arts Festival and VISUAL Carlow
Wednesday 6 June – Sunday 2 September 2018
Bastian Birk Theusen, Vicky Langan & Maxmillian Le Cain, Fergus Doyle, Ella de Burca, Lisa Fingleton, Laura Fitzgerald, Ruth le Gear, Saidhbhín Gibson, Eileen Hutton, Bernadette Kiely, Catriona Leahy, Maria McKinney, Yvette Monahan, Miriam O’Connor, Sarah O’Flaherty, Kenneth O’Hallaron, Laurence O’Toole, Curro Rodriguez, Bennie Reilly, Blaise Smith, Deirdre Southey, Aine Stapleton. Including selected works from the Arts Council Collection by Charles Brady, Barrie Cooke, Gerard Dillon, James Dixon, Mairead O’hEocha, Martin Gale, Patrick Hall, Alice Maher, Patrick Pye, Nano Reid.
How does rural life inspire us? What are the challenges facing farmers today? Do you know where your food comes from and how it’s produced? These questions and more are asked in engaging and creative ways by the artists selected for ARTWORKS 2018.In an exhibition that includes photography, painting, film and performance, the romance and the rough of rural life are considered. Ideas relating to our agrarian history, the rural as a sanctuary and the land as provider, are presented.
This years selectors are artist and farmer Orla Barry, Sean Kissane, Curator, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Emma Lucy O’Brien, Curator VISUAL, Carlow.
There will be two awards for outstanding work presented:
The Hotron ARTWORKS Award and the Éigse Prize for work by a recent graduate.
Both prizes are sponsored by Hotron Ltd. Award winners will be announced at the Festival Launch on 6 June.
Open Ear festival, Sherkin Island - June 2018
Programme: http://openear.ie/programme
Tickets: https://eventgen.ie/open-ear-2018
PLAY GROUND at Visual Artists Ireland Get Together / MExIndex, IMMA
Play Ground, the Langan / Le Cain film tribute to Frans Zwartjes, is one of four films selected by MExIndex for a programme that will screen repeatedly throughout the Visual Artists Ireland 'Get Together'. Billed as 'Ireland's National Day for Visual Artists', this day-long event features talks, panel discussions, 'speed curating' and specialist clinics. It takes place at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) on Monday May 21st.
Full programme details here.
NAWR concert series | BBC Building Swansea Studios
NAWR ANOIS is a series of 7 concerts, running from February to July 2018. The series showcases the diverse music of contemporary Irish, Welsh and international artists. The series aims to develop deeper connections between Irish and Welsh composers, sound artists and musicians. The concerts will take place in the historic BBC Building in Swansea Studios at UWTSD. The series will feature: Mick O'Shea, Softday, Vicky Langan, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Analog On, Rachel Ní Chuinn, and Clang Sayne.
Supported by Culture Ireland as part of GB18: Promoting Irish Arts in Britain.
Supported by Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
Phantom Islands & Inside at Cineautopsia, Colombia
Inside (Vicky Langan / Maximilian Le Cain) and Phantom Islands (Rouzbeh Rashidi) will screen at Cineautopsia: Festival de Cine Experimental de Bogotá (May 16th - 19th).
The Experimental Film Festival of Bogotá / CineAutopsia was born from the search for an authentic, radical and propositive cinema. It promotes a cinema that evokes the practice of freedom. It supports creators of audiovisual art, especially from Bogotá, Colombia and Latin America, by offering them the possibility of sharing their experiences and ideas. In this context, the main interest of the festival is to interact with the public through creative laboratories, artistic interventions, guest shows, talks and film screenings, positioning itself as a creative epicenter where different expressions that derive from the cinema converge with the other arts.