Event | Cinema Wed 15 Feb 2023
19:00 – 20:30

The screening “Between Dog and Wolf” will bring together for one evening four contemporary artists, Elsa Brès, Andro Eradze, Patrick Goddard and Benjamin Mouly, alongside the French filmmaker and biologist Jean Painlevé, who died in 1989, and Louise Lawler, with her historic sound piece Birdcalls (1972-81).

The films presented on this occasion all reveal singular types of relationships between humans and animals. In the course of nocturnal wanderings or waking fantasies, crows, stray dogs, wild boars and seahorses often become the main characters in these fictional or documentary creations.

Through the points of view they choose, these artists question the part of the dream contained in our relationship with the different actors of the living world, with whom we share the same living spaces.

In company of the film makers Benjamin Mouly and Elsa Brès.

 

Programme :

Patrick Goddard, Whoopsie’s Dream, 2022, 20 min
In English with French subtitles

Patrick Goddard was born in 1984 and lives and works in London. A graduate of Oxford and Goldsmiths Universities, he primarily creates video, sculpture and installation, while also working with photography, painting and drawing. His narrative and politically charged works undermine themselves with self-defeating black comedy as they trace the artist’s clumsy attempts to create personal and political integrity. His work addresses a wide range of topics: ecology, the Anthropocene and the animal, racial politics, gentrification and urbanisation.

Benjamin Mouly, For the birds, la sieste, 2022, 15 min

Man has decided to go and rest in the fresh air. He curls up in a comfortable carpet of grass and a raven invites itself at his side. From dusk to dawn, finding sleep becomes a perilous enterprise for our two guests.

Born in 1987, Benjamin Mouly is a visual artist. After a year of residency at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid between 2019-2020, he lives and works in Marseille. Benjamin Mouly develops a multidisciplinary practice crossed by the question of the image. Using video, photography, installation or performance, he invests the gap between the bodily and visual experience of an unstable reality and the standardised techniques of its capture.

Andro Eradze, Nightvision, Limited access, 2021, 3 min

Andro Eradze, born in 1993, lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at the Shota Rustaveli Film Academy, as well as at the MFA program of the CCA-T (Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi). Eradze’s practice explores the potentiality of animism as a method. Photography, installations, experimental film practices and video merge into a project contemplating the fading present, in which the Anthropocene flickers, and everything functions independently of it. Drawing on the legacy of alternative approaches to reality – surrealism and magic realism – his images blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

Jean Painlevé, The Seahorse (L’Hippocampe), 1934, 15 min

Jean Painlevé was a French filmmaker and biologist who was born in Paris in 1902 and died on 2 July 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He studied zoology and biology before devoting himself to cinema. Throughout his career, he developed innovative techniques that allowed him to film underwater and to produce close-up shots. He made more than 200 films, and participated in the democratisation of the animal documentary – his film L’Hippocampe was a real public success. Close to anarchic thinking, he joined the Resistance at the beginning of the war and made Le Vampire (1945), a film dealing with Nazism through the study of a South American bat. The Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris devoted a major retrospective to her in 2022.

Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1972–81, audio, 7 min
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut

For this work, Louise Lawler, an American artist born in 1947, made the names of various well-known male artists – including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre and Donald Judd – sound like bird calls. The humour and wit is counterbalanced by the fact that these white male artists are continually acknowledged as being at the forefront of art, its discourses and histories, with no symmetrical attention given to the significant contributions of women artists and artists of colour in discussions of advanced aesthetics.

Elsa Brès, Aux coups de fusil qu’on entend, 2022, 16 min

Elsa Brès was born in 1985 and lives in Bréau, in the Cévennes. She graduated from Le Fresnoy – studio national d’arts contemporains in 2017 and from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture in 2012, where she taught architectural and landscape theory. Her films and installations focus on forces of resistance in contemporary landscapes, mixing research, narratives and experimentation. She is currently developing a new film in the rural French region where she lives, which deals with wild boars as allies in the struggle: Les Sanglières.