Friday 11 December 2009, 19.00

Featuring films by Alice Anderson, John Bock, Sebastian Buerkner, Jean-Charles Hue, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lisa Oppenheim, Steve Reinke, Michael Robinson and Mark Aerial Waller.

During 2009 tank.tv has had the pleasure of exhibiting the work of eighteen artists in a series of eighteen online solo shows. To celebrate the range and quality of work shown tank.tv have invited nine of the artists included in 2009’s programme to screen a work that was not seen online, in the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern. The resulting programme features several UK premieres amongst the selection from emerging and world-renowned artists working with the moving image today.

2009’s Solo Show Programme on tank.tv has been an attempt to survey the range of strategies and styles that have and are being used by artists working with the moving image. As a result, the programme to be screened this evening is an eclectic but far from exhaustive selection that takes in animation, documentary, fictional narrative, film, video as well as a range of approaches to these multifarious techniques.

All eighteen solo exhibitions are available to view via the tank.tv online collection.

Programme duration 70 minutes.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended

  

John Bock, Frau im Hotel, 2006, 3 min

Frau im Hotel features a young woman struggling to resist the dubious temptations of a rather unappetising chocolate cake. Torn between cigarettes, pills and the cake the woman is best by other trials - a hole in her dress, a fire alarm and boredom. A dramatisation of the trivial this video looks for meaning and revels in its absence.

Alice Anderson, THE NIGHT I BECAME A DOLL, 9 min

This new work from Alice Anderson, THE NIGHT I BECAME A DOLL, is the next chapter in the story begun in her previous work The Dolls Day, which was exhibited as part of her online show in May. Continuing to work with disturbing narrative and gothic style Anderson's THE NIGHT I BECAME A DOLL is a surreal fairytale interwoven with many of the artist's familiar concerns.

Steve Reinke, My Name is Karlheinz Stockhausen, 2009

This is a new work by Reinke who exhibited 32 videos from his series The Hundred Videos on tank.tv in March. In his work Reinke reveals intimate, difficult details with a lightness and dark humour that cuts through the dense self-referential work of many of his contemporaries. Engaging with topics as diverse as literature, sex, science and art, Reinke's voice constantly questions the consistency of the relation between what one sees and what is happening.

Thomas Hirschhorn, 10 minutes of The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, 2009, 10 min

'This is an art-project in complete exaggeration, in overcapacity but also in love: in the love for art, the love for philosophy and the love for working for a non-exclusive audience.' Thomas Hirschhorn. New videos from the festival, created by Thomas Hirschhorn and the Bijilmer community, were uploaded daily to tank.tv. Each video documented the various events and happenings from Hirschhorn's festival and remained online for a single day before being replaced with new footage. We are pleased to present ten minutes from the festival this evening. The artist has requested that no subtitles be added to the piece, that it should be experienced in the same way as each viewer might have experienced a visit to the site in June.

Jean-Charles Hue, Gilberto, 2008

Jean Charles Hue is an artist who works in the field of video, currently based in Tijuana, Mexico. Whether they explore his own family universe or are framed in wider or urban or personal contexts, his works all explore the status of human beings today. His films can be understood as fragments taken from life, sometimes with more poetic components, others with more realistic ingredients.

Michael Robinson, If There Be Thorns, 12 min

'Never have I been a blue calm sea. I have always been a storm.' Stevie Nicks. 'If There Be Thorns shifts between two worlds as if, as in children's books, the real world were a cover over a wormhole into a TV land of slo-mo sitcom monsters. A dark wave of exile, incest and magic burns across the tropic of cruelty, forging a knotted trail into the black hole.' - MR.

Mark Aerial Waller, PARIS-Franprix, 11 min

The unsolicited social and economic networks that surround a supermarket in the crumbling 20th arrondissement in Paris, become a site for looking at memory, respect, hope and despair as the product is followed from its 8 am bulk delivery to its 8 pm disposal and eventual consumption.

Lisa Oppenheim, Yule Log, 2008, 16mm, 6 min

Oppenheim is interested in how the present viewer sees media of the past and to study this she takes materials from archives and transforms them with editing effects that distill her interpretation of how an image's meaning changes over time. In Yule Log a soothing image of a fireplace at Christmas-time deteriorates through several repetitions, each one a 16mm copy of the last.

Sebastian Buerkner, Triband, 2009, 4 min

Sebastian Buerkner creates animations using Macromedia Flash, a technique self-taught whilst studying at Chelsea College of Art, London. The visual environments he creates offer poly-sensorial experiences, subtly set in situations at the edge of dreaming and waking. Buerkner's films oscillate between the quasi-fantastical (non-)narratives of Surrealism and the abstraction of Russian Constructivism. Whilst highly playful, Buerkner's sophisticated audio-visual vocabulary enables him to engage forensically with ideas of time, space, speed, colour and weight.

tank.tv is an online gallery and inspirational showcase of artists' film and video. Dedicated to exhibiting both emerging and established international artists on the web, we present exhibitions throughout the year and hold events at some of the world's most respected institutions such as Tate Modern, the V&A and the ICA. Each show has an audience from all around the world, which can also access our collection of over 650 previously exhibited moving image works.