Dominique Gonzales-Foerster and Yang Fudong

Join us at Bar Laika on Thursday, November 7, 9pm as we revist e-flux video rental (EVR), a seminal e-flux project organized in 2004 by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle. This week, we present Dominique Gonzales-Foerster and Yang Fudong.

Yang Fudong, City Light, 2000, 06:00
Two men walk on the streets of an Asian city. They execute the same actions with a slight delay. One of the men at times carries an umbrella and at other times a gun. Their walk across the city is intercut with scenes of the pair dancing with a woman, by themselves, and with each other. 

Dominique González-Foerster, Plages, 15:00, 2001
The action of González-Foerster’s Plages takes place in Rio de Janeiro on New Year’s Eve, presenting the viewer with a bird’s-eye view of Copacabana’s beach crowded with white-clad revelers gathering for a seasonal firework display. Structured around a sequence of memories that intermingle personal desire with utopian ambitions for the city, it references landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx’s pavement designs and architect Sérgio Bernardes’s plan to build helix-shaped apartment blocks. For González-Foerster, the beach—with its free social movement and fluid boundary between land and sea—is a symbol of possibility. Copacabana could be a utopia, but as it starts to rain and the film nears its end, a local fisherman makes a stark announcement: “Copacabana does not exist.”

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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.