27 Aug 2010

One year before the 5th Biennial of Moving Image opens: a Contour 2011 newsflash

Contour vzw is pleased to announce that Anthony Kiendl has been appointed curator for the 2011 Contour Biennial.

Kiendl is the Director of Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Canada. Previously, he was Director of Visual Arts at The Banff Centre, and Curator at the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Canada.

Every two years, Contour Mechelen organises the Biennial of the Moving Image, also known as 'Contour.' The biennial offers a platform to curators and artists working with different forms of moving image, from film and video to installation. The biennial also stimulates a dialogue between contemporary art and architecture in the city of Mechelen, Belgium.

Kiendl will curate the next edition of Contour under the title 'Sound and Vision: Beyond Reason.' The title of the biennial is taken, in part, from David Bowie's 1976 song 'Sound and Vision,' and the focus of the exhibition will be on the inter-textual ground of popular music and art.

Issues of personal agency, alternative social or political agendas, and alternate realities appear in countless musical invocations spanning geography, time and history. These musical 'notes' form a sub-rosa historiography and collective imaginaries that are transmitted across borders through the body, live performance, radio waves and more recent technologies of communication. Sound and vision are at the boundaries of cultural transformation and change, especially in the ways they implicate the excesses of the human body as a conduit and agent in radicalizing social practice.

As a point of reference, Malcolm McLaren declared, 'No matter how shallow people say pop music is, and in particular its origins (part organized crime, part teenage werewolf), it continues to confound, astound, and seduce something deep inside all of us—that is the desire to change the culture and possibly, if it only be for a moment, change life itself.'

'Sound and Vision' repeatedly points back to the human body and physical experience through music, perception, architecture, and play. 'Play is unproductive and useless,' Herbert Marcuse wrote, 'precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitative traits of labour and leisure; it 'just plays' with reality.'

From Brion Gysin's 'Dreamachine' to punk rock, afro-futurism and disco, Contour will play throughout Mechelen, locating installations within re-purposed architectural spaces ranging from cathedrals and schools to theatres and beyond.

Curator: Anthony Kiendl