Film Matters

Exhibition duration: April 30th – May 20th, 2010
Opening: April 29th, 2010, 20:00 
Curated by: Barbara Piwowarska
Artistis: Tony Conrad, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, William E. Jones, Silvia Kolbowski, Zofia Kulik / KwieKulik, Jeff Preiss, Józef Robakowski, Mel Brooks

Does the matter of film matter? You can smash it, you can kill it, you can redeem it. Matter is the wound of the work. This is a story about disappointment with the material.

Assuming that “matter” is something between a thing and representation, Film Matters examines the dialectics of the two titled matters – including negotiation between the double meaning of the word – material and content.

With the participation of non-filmic and filmic artists it attempts an overview of the critical and conceptual gestures of disappointment with material, presenting works in which form is reduced or minimized to its matter, and approached from unusual points of departure. All of the films in the exhibition keep their distance from the formal apotheosis of filmic language (they are anty-filmic or even pickled in a jar), revealing filmic traps, holes and wounds, with a special interest in the material and performative potential of destruction and reconstruction. At the end of the story is the oldest and funniest film in the exhibition from 1963: Mel Brooks’ and Ernest Pintoff’s Oscar-winning animation The Critic constituting the unique marriage of a spectacular formal victory and its total failure.

The exhibition is dedicated to Vilmos Zsigmond and Christina Dimitriadis Organised in collaboration with: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Athens