Laura Belem, Carolina Cordeiro, Cao Guimaraes, Cinthia Marcelle, Eder Santos - Brasilianische Videokunst

For occasion of its 10th anniversary Galerie Anita Beckers presents two parallel exhibitions which focus on two of its program strongest points. By presenting young innovative international artist positions and putting an emphasis on video art, Galerie Beckers reflects on the general principles which have been leading its activity and shaping its identity throughout the last decade.

Instead of opting for a revisionist or retrospective exhibition in the line of the best of the best in the last 10 years, Galerie Beckers blinks forward and states its role as a showcase for works and perspectives just recently being produced. The curators of the Brazilian part of the show Pedro Mendes Siruffo and Matthew Wood will also release a new book of contemporary Brazilian art later this year.

Having travelled around different cities and venues and acquired various forms in the meantime Séverine Hubard's artwork "I Found a Job But No Garden" meets its final stop at Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt. What is to be seen now in the shape of two boxes of wood has been successively reassembled and disassembled, its diverse configurations and uses documented in the series of accompanying pictures. First a parking hut, then turned into chairs, table and seat for a lecture at the artist's studio, later a staircase and then a table to celebrate the artist's anniversary in Montreal, the piece finally met the shape of two compact boxes as presented in the gallery today. Unlike previous installations, here Hubard doesn't rearrange found elements but chooses to reuse the same raw material as a way to explore as many variations as possible within a set of given (apparently) limiting conditions.

Speaking of process and recycling, Séverine Hubard's installations, urban interventions and videos always focus on construction and the active artificial transformation of the world. By exploring the consecutive geometric rearrangement of the different elements, Hubard achieves a tension between order and explosive chaos, destruction and construction, systematicity and imprevisibility - principles which remain at the core of her artistic thinking.

Eder Santos: Call Waiting, 2006

Video installation with 16 bird cages

Click on image to enlarge.

In our basement, the second part of the "10 Years Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt" is devoted to an ongoing collaboration between Anita Beckers and the Brasilian curators and Gallerists Pedro Mendes Siruffo and Matthew Wood. "Weight / Weightlessness" - Laura Belem, Carolina Cordeiro, Cao Guimaraes, Cinthia Marcelle, Eder Santos - presents a video installation and a screening program as a result of this cooperation, thus made accessible to the public in Frankfurt for the first time.

"In these works by five Brazilian video artists, the qualities of weight and weightlessness function as pictorial analogies to free will and determination in both human experience and artistic production. The videos use a visual language which creates tensions between a fate-like gravity. The intractable of Belem's billiard balls and Cao Guimaraes' video "Sin Peso" (Weightless) act as a counterpoint where the gravity and hoopla of a marketplace is exchanged for a still sky and the prismatic pitched tents. The common thread among these artists is the fact that these are inheritors of the Duchampian problematic of matter and non-matter. Brazilian video artists deal with make shift and commonality: they come from a different world, in a simple way. The poetry is brought about its quietness and not from action. Narrative is loose, what keeps the work together is the final affect: the viewer gets suspended from their habitual reality". (Pedro Mendes Siruffo/ Matthew Wood)

Within the context of the exhibition a discussion on the current gallery organization system will take place in October 25th 2008.