save the weekend

ULRIKE FESER to behold 'next exhibition'

EDGAR ARCENEAUX ‚An arrangement without tormentors'

Film screening
Friday April 28th , 2006, 6pm -10 pm
Saturday April 29th, 2006, 11am - 6pm
Sunday April 30th, 2006, 11am - 6pm

tormentor: "1. a fixed curtain or flat that resides on each side of a theatre stage that prevents the audi-ence from seeing into the wings of the stage. It hides the machinery for raising and lowering sets as well as the lights in the ceiling."

The film installation "An arrangement without tormentors" consists of a double projection.
Projected are two recordings of a performance of the musical composition "I want to dance" (2001) by the American conceptual artist Charles Gaines. While in the recording made at the California African American Mu-seum in Los Angeles the composer himself performs, in the Witte de With in Rotterdam it is the pianist Nora Mulder. Considering the filming situation, the title of the work can be taken literally. During the recording, the public were free to move around the set that didn't attempt to disguise technical details or use any staging effects.

The composition for 2 voices and piano is constructed symmetrically. In 46 strophes, it tells the story of Charles Gaines' father who had to give up his dream of becoming a dancer because of poverty and racial discrimination in the America of the 30s. The artistic works of Charles Gaines frequently relate to mathe-matical systems, infinite cycles and repetitions that work as a generative principle for the works.
In Edgar Arceneaux's films the music is repeatedly cut in an apparently random fashion, to then start a new scene with a different strophe. However the breaks and change of strophe belong to principles of a mathe-matical theory of probability. Therefore Edgar Arceneaux makes formal and conceptual references to Charles Gaines by permanently interrupting his composition, ruling out any singular experience for the listener. Overlapping sound as well as visual fragments, background sound and visual interference con-tradict the expected aesthetic of a concert-film recording.

The mixture of clearly structured and improvised procedures is used by Edgar Arceneaux to "draw", using the film medium, a very personal portrait of the artist Charles Gaines. At the same time he opens up a phenomenological discourse on the medium of film.