Clemens von Wedemeyer and Cerith Wyn Evans

Join us at Bar Laika on Thursday, September 5, 9pm as we revist e-flux video rental (EVR), a seminal e-flux project organized in 2004 by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle. For the first in a series of weekly screenings, we present Clemens von Wedemeyer’s Occupation and Cerith Wyn Evans’ Pasolini Ostia Remix.

Clemens von Wedemeyer, Occupation, 8 min, 35 mm/DVD, stereo, 2001–2002
A night scene is about to be filmed. Standing within a large rectangular marker on the ground, two hundred extras await their cues, but the director and production staff are arguing. The atmosphere grows increasingly tense. The restless crowd develops a life of its own as the film crew attempts to keep the situation under control.

Clemens von Wedemeyer is an artist based in Berlin, Germany. His films often encompass multiple storylines and viewpoints, adopting both cinematic and documentary conventions, screened in architectural installations.

Cerith Wyn Evans, Pasolini Ostia Remix, 15 min, video, 1998-2003
Pasolini Ostia Remix is set on the beach of Ostia where Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead, murdered in 1975. A group of people are installing a handcrafted wooden structure holding up a text made up of fire works. The sentence gradually spells “on the banks of the Livenza silvery willows are growing in wild profusion their boughs dipping into drifting waters”, and is taken from Oedipus Rex (1967), the most autobiographical of Pasolini’s films.

Cerith Wyn Evans began his career as a filmmaker producing short, experimental films and collaborative works. Since the 1990s he has created artworks that focus on language and perception. 

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This Fall we would like to revisit e-flux video rental (EVR), a seminal e-flux project organized in 2004 by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle. EVR started with a handful of artists videos at a tiny storefront on Ludlow street and went on to become a video archive of more than 1000 films and single channel video works by more than 600 artists that traveled to more than twenty cities all around the world, until it finally found a permanent home in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana in 2011.

EVR was conceived as an alternative means for distribution and circulation of video art. In spite of the fact that many artists of the 1960s and 70s were drawn to working with video because it was relatively inexpensive and easy to reproduce and distribute, the subsequent assimilation of video art into the precious-object economy of the art market has significantly limited access to video works. EVR began as a functional reflection and inversion of this process. Comprising a public screening room, a film and video archive that grew with each installation of EVR, and a free video rental shop, VHS tapes could be watched in the space or checked out and taken home once a viewer has completed a membership form.

We plan to view the entirety of the contents of EVR at Bar Laika in a series of weekly screenings. This may take a few years… 

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.