WET Lounge #5 at TENT Rotterdam
Friday 14th February, 2020, TENT Rotterdam
With works by Irina Botea, Sophie Bates, George Kuchar, Keren Cytter, Auto Italia, Annika Larsson and Maya Schweizer.
WET Lounge #5
Conversations, modes of address and dialogue are tools which we use to form perspectives and opinions among friends, lovers, strangers and colleagues alongside the many gestures we perform and enact through our bodies. The video works presented in WET Lounge #5 investigate relationships between characters on screen who are played by the artists themselves, friends, non-professional and professional actors. Using performance, role-play, re-enactment and rehearsal these artists and filmmakers grapple with and question identities, issues of representation, hierarchical power structures and stereotypes; bringing to the surface the complex relationships between character and performer.
The works engage with and take inspiration from existing forms of moving image from episodic reality TV to advertising and fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Through our collective watching we relish and indulge in moments of tension, disagreement and awkwardness. The works included use tropes to tease out or heighten our experience and add layers of humour and critique, challenging established cinematic and televisual languages by embracing the DIY nature of their working conditions, a move which becomes not simply an economic choice, but also an aesthetic practice.
About WET Lounge
WET Lounge is a series of five expanded screenings. The events take place between mid 2019 and early 2020, and are hosted by TENT Welcomes. During each Lounge, we will showcase works by artists operating in the gaps between video art and cinema, taking a broad view of what can be considered cinematic in order to incorporate elements of performance, music and installation. We will be treating TENT as a potent space, somewhere between the communality of cinema and the architectural experimentation of contemporary art.
Image credits:
Above: Maya Schweizer, Before the Rehearsal
Below: Event photos by Marta Hryniuk
