Fonction/Fiction

Rod Dickinson, Michael Klier, Manu Luksch, Pavel Pavlov, David Tomas

Opening on January 10 at 5 pm
The exhibition is presented from January 10 to February 23, 2008
The gallery is open from Tuesday to Saturday, from noon to 5 pm

The project is organized by Vincent Bonin and France Choinière

A book of essays revolving around the same topic will be published in the spring in the series Les essais.
The book will feature texts by Clint Burnham, Thomas Levin, Viva Paci, Charles Stankievech and Blake Stimson.

Fonction/Fiction explores artistic practices which, by re-directing the functional images which fill our environment – images deriving from statistical systems, surveillance systems, etc. – give rise to fictional works of art. Whether the art in question is photography or its various technological extensions, the works exhibited here display an unsettling approach to reality in which all things visible are first treated, filtered, by a recording system. The exhibition explores the forms of concordance, subordination, assonance and dissonance which structure these works in an intermediate space in which function and fiction are reversed or, at the very least, negotiate their relationship. Apart from its searching reflection on the image, Fonction/Fiction re-evaluates the history of the gaze, inviting us to re-think our relationship with the world, a world in which almost everything is mediatized beforehand.

For Faceless, Manu Luksch recovered images of herself taken over a period of four years by London’s surveillance cameras. Following a precise scenario, these images serve as raw material for a futuristic fiction film. Rod Dickinson, in The Milgram Re-Enactment, uses a psychological experience like a ready-made, recreating it with actors and filming it. Creating distance from the original experience, he constructs around the scientific document the space necessary for the birth of fiction. The minimalism and hypnotic movement of David Tomas’s work, reminiscent of the succession of points of view on a surveillance monitor, borrows the subjects and operating modes of so-called functional images all the while disturbing their continuum: alternative forms of fiction tunnel their way in our anticipation as viewers. Pavel Pavlov, for his part, has created a follow-up to his project Parking Lots. This project, subjected to a spatially overdetermined procedure, can regenerate itself endlessly. Pavlov breaks this cycle by confronting two temporal series of the pro-ject showing us only the transformations in between the two states. In counterpoint to these recent works, Michael Klier’s 1983 film Der Reise, a kind of totalitarian “city film” made out of surveillance images shot “from a giant’s height”, invites the viewer to visit deserted urban spaces and institution buildings where human presence is limited to disciplinary or punitive interventions. Our gaze scans and searches for an invisible fiction in this chance flux, in these banal images which nothing justifies. The fiction appears in the wait for the event, in the relationship that is established between these disaffected images, devoid of any narrative.

Dazibao thanks the artists, Montevideo Time Based Arts and Amour Fou for their collaboration and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Montreal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.

Rod Dickinson’s work explores ideas of belief and social control, most often in the form of video installations and live events. His recent projects include: restaging Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1961 experiment of obedience to authority, where subjects were asked to administer ostensibly real electric shocks to others; re-enacting the audio-based psychological warfare program used by the FBI in Waco, Texas, in 1993; and re-imagining a failed 1894 terrorist attack on the Greenwich Observatory to see what effects it would have had if successful. Dickinson is also part of the net art collective Low-fi and his work has been presented extensively in the United States, Europe and Australia. Rod Dickinson was born in 1965, he lives and works in London. He received an MA in Hypermedia Studies at Westminster University and is currently a lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of West England.

Born in Karlovy Vary in 1943, Michael Klier is an independent film and video maker based in Berlin. Before he began making films himself, he acted in several films by Harun Farocki and Rudolf Thome, among others. His first film, Der Riese, which has received numerous awards, addresses the issue of video surveillance in public spaces. The work combines footage from surveillance cameras, including ones in shopping malls, public squares and airports, with photographic images from banks, supermarkets, department stores and other institutions. His later films include The Grass Is Greener Everywhere Else (1989), Ostkreuz (1991), the documentary Out of America (1995) and Farland (2004). He has also directed a series of film-portraits about figures such as Jean-Luc Godard, Henri Alekan, Juliette Binoche and François Truffaut, on whose films Klier assisted earlier in his career. Renowned for the body of his work, Klier studied philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin.

Throughout her films, telematic performances and other interdisciplinary works, Manu Luksch is consistently preoccupied with the affect of emerging technologies, particularly surveillance technologies, on daily life, social relations and political structures. Her 2001 online road movie Broadbandit Highway, for instance, was made by re-appropriating and manipulating Internet streams from various traffic surveillance cameras. Luksch’s most recent project, Faceless, uses real CCTV footage of herself. The artist recovered these images under the UK’s Data Protection Act in order to construct a science fiction thriller. She has exhibited her work mostly in Europe and Australia. Luksch also served as the artistic director of the Munich Media Lab from 1995 to 1997, co-founded Art Servers Unlimited in 1998 and, in 1999, founded ambientTV.NET. Luksch was born in Austria in 1970 and now lives and works in London. She received an MA from the University of Vienna.

Artist and writer Pavel Pavlov’s work concentrates largely on examining and transforming the seemingly quotidien aspects of urban and suburban landscapes. His 2004 series of photographs Paysage avec cabanes II, for instance, documents identical red and green cabins on île Notre-Dame, while his earlier series Parking Lots systemically itemizes the lots’ numbered sections. In both of these series, Pavlov evokes questions about the artificiality, anonymity and standardization of landscapes as well as about the conceptual construction of an image, referring to different developments in the history of the gaze and optics. Pavlov has presented his work in solo exhibitions in Montreal, Quebec and Toronto, he also participated in the collective show Territoires urbains presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2005 and at the Oakville Galleries (Ontario) in 2006. Pavlov was born in Bulgaria in 1973 and has lived and worked in Montreal since 2000. He is currently working toward his PhD at Université Laval.

Born in Montreal in 1950, David Tomas is a Montreal-based artist, anthropologist and theorist whose interdisciplinary works explore the cultures and transcultures of science, technology and their imaging systems. His most recent solo exhibition, Filmworks + an object of contemplation at Montreal’s Joyce Yahouda Gallery, examined the nature and culture of images at the threshold of media. Tomas has exhibited his work internationally and has held visiting research and teaching fellowships. He is also an active and renowned writer and theorist whose publications include: Beyond the Image Machines: A History of Vision Technologies (Continuum, 2004), A Blinding Flash of Light: Photography Between Disciplines and Media (Éditions Dazibao, 2004), DUCTION, co-authored with Michèle Thériault (Éditions Carapace, 2001), an Internet book entitled The Encoded Eye, the Archive, and its Engine House (www.cddc.vt.edu/encodedeye) and Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings (Westview Press, 1996). He currently teaches at the École des arts visuels et médiatiques at UQAM.