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Transitions is a celebration of adventurous filmmaking in its many shapes and sounds. Taking place from 9 to 14 March in Maastricht (NL), it brings together boundary-defying artists and those who appreciate and support them. Transitions features a free exhibition in fourteen locations and a cinema program.

FIND THE exhibition MAP HERE

FIND THE CINEMA PROGRAM HERE

FIND THE WORKS & ARTISTS HERE

EXHIBITION MAP

The exhibition features fourteen freely accessible locations around the Sphinx Quarter in Maastricht. It is open from Thursday 9 March until Tuesday 14 March. Daily opening hours are noon until 18h or 20h. See the map for details or download the map and program here.

Bloeistraat 11
Nienke Deutz
10 min / loop
12h-18h at The Masters

Guards
Francis Alÿs
29 min / plays every 30 min

Within the Temple Without
Matthew C. Wilson
10 min / loop

COBRA
Reut Shemesh
12h – 20h / on a loop

12h-20h at Muziekgieterij

A Situation of Bodies
Sky Syzygy
19 min / on demand

12h-18h at Loods 5

The Stairway At St. Paul's
Jeroen Offerman
9 min / plays every 10 min

Best of Breed
Valentina Gal
7 min / loop

12h-20h at The Social Hub

Schaamte & Trots
Michiel Ubels
Various / loop
12h-20h at Pathé Café

Transitions Film Days
13&14 March/10-18h
With: Johan Grimonprez, 
Erik van Lieshout, Sarah 
Vanagt, Anouk de Clercq 
and many others.
at Cinema Lumière

The Chocolate Bar
Bethan Huws
5 min / loop

12h-20h at Havensmeesterhuis

Three Transitions
Peter Campus
5 min / loop
12h-18h (Fri/Sa 20h)
at Vormstof

Videosketches
Johannes Langkamp
Various / loop

Time Sculptures
Roman Signer
Various / loop

12h-20h at Transport

All the World’s a Stage
Donna Verheijden
18 min / plays every 20 min

12h-18h at Grouwels

The Fan Fiction Wishing Well
Sarah Fitterer & Miles Worner
Interactive installation
12h-20h at the Meldkamer

Global Groove
Nam June Paik
28 min / plays every 30 min
18h-23h at Bureau Europa

Below the Deep South
Noémie Goudal
11 min / loop
12h-18h at Entre Deux

Super Taboo
Su Hui-Yu
19 min / plays every 20 min

Hommage à...I,III & IV
Lili Dujourie
Various / loop

12h-18h at Jan van Eyck

Meneer de Kikker
Lola Safari
Installation / loop

12h-20h at Grouwels

CINEMA PROGRAM (13&14 MARCH)

A two-day program in Cinema Lumière around adventurous filmmaking. Artists share ideas and strategies, miracles and road bumps with each other in an open and playful atmosphere. With Erik van Lieshout, Anouk De Clercq, Sarah Vanagt, Johan Grimonprez and many others. Click here for information & tickets.

WORKS & ARTISTS

The stairway at st. paul's

jeroen offerman (1970, nl)

9 min / 12h-20h at The Social Hub / plays every 10 min

The Stairway at St. Paul’s (2002) shows the artist Jeroen Offerman singing in front of the steps of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. The work plays with the notion that in the 60’s and 70’s, certain rock and roll recordings were supposed to reveal ‘Satanic’ messages when played backwards. Offerman rehearsed his performance for months, a fact that accidental onlookers would have been oblivious to. Only the viewer of the transformed video documentation realises Offerman’s dedication and daring, adding a powerful undercurrent to the experience. Presented by LI-MA.

Jeroen Offerman is a visual artist working in a wide variety of media such as film, video, performance, sculpture and installation. Frequently juxtaposing outside(r) with inside(r), Offerman uses strategies like repetition, emptiness and reversal to make viewers aware of their narrative attachments to objects and places.

Best of Breed

VALENTINA GAL (1994, NL)

7 min / 12h-20h at The Social Hub / loop

In Best of Breed (2017), the viewer enters a dimlit digital world inhabited by a purple figure of which only its contours and long flowing hair can be distinguished. The sounds – water dripping, a dog whining, the clanging of transparent chains – possess an almost tangible physicality. Flashes of surreal images appear like memories: an iPhone revolving in a tranquil sky, an abstracted dog race. Is the fluffy creature finding refuge in this world, or is it a captive of it? Presented by LI-MA.

Valentina Gal’s vibrant video installations investigate how humanity can position itself in a time and world where it is becoming harder to determine what is real. While world leaders hack one another and people set themselves ridiculous standards in the pursuit of social media glory, Gal questions the essence of the hyperrealism that humans seem to have embraced.

A situation of bodies

Sky Syzygy (1981, USA)

19 min / 12h-18h at Loods 5 / on demand

A Situation of Bodies (2018) is a film and installation that considers the erotics and aesthetics of hand soap and the action of hand washing. It inverts the public and private aspects of this daily activity and makes the whole practice of rubbing thick gooey liquid on our hands feel a bit strange and maybe even dirty.  We are invited to immerse ourselves in a sensory experience of soap and to watch others’ experiences of it, and wonder at the cross-contamination of bodies and soap.

Sky Olson is a white queer trans femme film and installation maker and multidisciplinary artist, a racial justice facilitator, and a data scientist. In her work, she focuses attention on minor gestures, hidden trends, tactile points of contact, and ideological forces, and draws on the choreographic and the quietly and deeply personal as tools in the fight for individual and collective agency and dignity.

Global Groove
Nam June paik (1932-2006, KR/USA)
28 min / 18h-23h at Bureau Europa / plays every 30 min

“This is a glimpse of the video landscape of tomorrow, when you will be able to switch to any TV station on the earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” So begins Global Groove (1973), a seminal work in the history of video art. This radical manifesto on global communications in a media-saturated world is rendered as an electronic collage, a sound and image pastiche that subverts the language of television. Presented by Bonnefanten museum.

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist who is considered to be the father of video art. He was the first artist to show abstract forms on a television, using a magnet to distort the image (in 1963), and the first to use a small portable video camera (in 1965). 

Guards

FRANCIS ALŸS (1959, BE)

29 min / 12h-20h at Muziekgieterij / plays every 30 min

Guards (2004) documents a performance orchestrated by the artist Francis Alÿs. The work gives a subversive twist to a typical London tourist phenomenon; the Changing of the Guard. What begins as one guard marching through the empty streets ends in the strangely beautiful choreography of a ritual display of power, accompanied by the hypnotic cadence of stamping boots. Presented by Bonnefanten museum.

Francis Alÿs’ work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture and social practice. In 1986, Alÿs left behind his profession as an architect and relocated to Mexico City. He has created a diverse body of artwork and performance art that explores urban tensions and geopolitics. Employing a broad range of media, from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence.

Within the Temple Without

MATTHEW C. WILSON (1982, USA)

10 min / 12h-20h at Muziekgieterij / loop

Within the Temple Without (2019) is a dreamlike journey into the economic unconscious. With its unstable frame and convulsing images, the film explores the lineage between ancient alchemical traditions and the Central Banks that drew upon them to develop their credit-based currencies. As financial systems now mainly exist in the virtual sphere, Wilson’s work challenges the conventional notion of rationality as the natural economic order. The unsettling realisation permeates the film that in the end, only the gods have their eyes on the powers that be. 

Matthew C. Wilson is an American artist, filmmaker and researcher based in the Netherlands. In his videos, sculptures, and installations viewers meet a range of agents that are entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects utilise research-based, site-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches to track the inertia of Modernity through contemporary ecological crises and into speculative futures.

COBRA

REUT SHEMESH (1982, ISR) & RONNI SHENDAR (1979, ISR)

6 min / 12h-20h at Muziekgieterij / loop

Preview. COBRA (2021) brings together two worlds of expression that rarely touch: traditional German carnival ‘Garde’ dancing and contemporary art. At the work’s core lies the manifestation of gender roles and female representation during traditional carnival festivities. Between the prevalent approach in contemporary dance to emphasise individuality, and the power of community from which the ‘Garde’ dance draws, an unusual aesthetic emerges as well as a political forcefield. With COBRA, Reut Shemesh and Ronni Shendar direct their gaze onto a desire for representation of an authentic identity – if such a thing can even exist. Presented by IMAI.

Reut Shemesh, born and raised in Israel, is a choreographer and media artist who works with experimental film and poetry. Being a woman, an artist, a mother, an immigrant and a former soldier, she interlaces her own lived experiences into her work. She lives and works in Cologne. Ronni Shendar is an Israeli visual artist based in Berlin working in video, light, and stage work. For the past ten years she has created scenography and film for choreographer Reut Shemesh. Shendar carefully crafts scenography, building on abstract minimalism to capture colors, moods, and emotions. Her sharp aesthetics are coupled with a desire to bring intimacy and vulnerability to both film and stage.

The Chocolate Bar

BETHAN HUWS (1961, UK)

5 min / 12h-20h at the Havensmeesterhuis / loop

The Chocolate Bar (2004) is a short film with three personas, three locations and a host of camera angles, starring Welsh actor Rhys Ifans in cross-dressing (with a brief appearance of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Bottle-Rack’). In this film, Huws interweaves Duchamp’s artistic legacy with the genre of the screwball comedy and creates comic misunderstandings and a real tower of Babel around the ambiguous terms ‘bar’ and ‘mars’. Presented by Bonnefanten museum.

Bethan Huws’ oeuvre ranges from discreet interventions in existing spaces to watercolours, and from small sculptures and readymades to all sorts of textual works and 35-mm films. Her work focuses on making us aware of how we look at the world and how strongly we ourselves construct reality as we know it, with the aid of language, among other things. 

Three Transitions

PETER CAMPUS (1937, USA)

5 min / 12h-18h (Fri/Sa until 20h) at Vormstof / loop

In Three Transitions (1973), Peter Campus presents three self-portraits that play with the relationship between the inner and the outer man. Making intricate use of video effects, Campus constantly changes his own image, finally to make it disappear in the last fragment. As Three Transitions moves between deadpan humour and seeming self-destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality. Presented by Bonnefanten museum.

Widely regarded as a pioneer of video art, Peter Campus creates complex installations that engage and amuse, while leading the viewer in a journey of discovery and self-awareness. From the early closed-circuit video installations he began making in 1971 to the more recent work drawing from nature, Campus’ entire oeuvre deals with processes of perception and vision, exploiting the specific characteristics of both the electronic and the digital image.

Meneer de Kikker

LOLA SAFARI (1996, NL)

Installation with video / 12h-20h at Grouwels Vastgoed

Lola Safari once had a stuffed animal named Meneer de Kikker (Mister the Frog). He and she were inseparable. After years of comfort and friendship, Mister the Frog ended up in storage. A decade later, Mister the Frog suddenly popped up in Lola’s head. She wondered how he had stood the test of time, and what it would be like if he too had moved on with his life. As a visitor you now have the chance to find out for yourself.

Lola Safari’s brightly coloured work is full of childhood sentiment and often features animals, particularly those species not easily humanised. Lola combines sculpture, photography, graphic design and video into installations that, by enlarging the theatrics of everyday life, allow the viewer to experience it with compassion and humour. 

All the World’s a Stage - Ways of Seeing

DONNA VERHEIJDEN (1989, NL)

18 min / 12h-18h at Grouwels Vastgoed / plays every 20 min

All the World’s a StageWays of Seeing (2013) visually explores the meaning of the image in a world of constant retinal input. It questions the creation of today’s apparent or staged realities within mass media and politics. It reveals mythical truths and unveils true illusions by deconstructing and reconstructing realities that we often take as given. Close your eyes and you’ll see. All The World’s a Stage­­­­­ is a tribute to, and narrated by, John Berger. Presented by LI-MA.

Donna Verheijden is a designer, artist and filmmaker. Verheijden graduated from the Sandberg Institute. As a contemporary image maker, Donna sees it as her responsibility to analyse and criticise today’s apparent or staged realities and ImageScapes. Her main research focuses on mass and social media, its seductions and underlying power structures. 

Videosketches

JOHANNES LANGKAMP (1985, DE)

Various / 12h-20h at Transport Artspace / loop

In 2011, Johannes Langkamp set himself the task of making a video every day for a month. They are mostly short, awkwardly recorded films in which he uses slapstick humour to create visual illusions. This was followed by his “Videosketchbook”, a series of short films in which the camera itself is the main subject: squashed between lift doors or mounted on a drill. In a childlike way, Langkamp lets his imagination run wild: a box becomes a bird and a spinning lamp makes the world spin. Now he shows a selection out of the 600+ sketches he has made so far. Presented by Odapark

Johannes Langkamp experiments with the features and movements of video cameras and smartphones, as well as with their possibilities and limitations to capture perspective. The camera often becomes the main protagonist, sharing with us the way in which it registers reality.

Time Sculptures

ROMAN SIGNER (1938, CH)

Various / 12h-20h at Transport Artspace / loop

Roman Signer’s “time sculptures” (1975-1989) involve setting up, carrying out, and recording experiments or events that bear aesthetic results. Day-to-day objects such as umbrellas, tables, boots, balloons, hats and bicycles are part of Signer’s working vocabulary. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions and the propulsion of objects through space. His super-8 films, with which he started in 1975, occupy a unique place within art at the intersection of performance, land art and minimal art. Presented by Bonnefanten museum.

Roman Signer started his career as an artist later in life at the age of 28, after working as an architect’s draughtsman, a radio engineer and a short stint in a pressure cooker factory. From a seemingly restricted palette of processes and materials, Signer generates a poetics whose tones range from the melancholy to the thrilling, from the charming to the violent, from the grave to the irresistibly silly.

Schaamte & Trots

MICHIEL UBELS (1989), NL

Various / 12h-20h at Pathé Café / loop

 

“In 2016, I graduated from the art academy in Maastricht. Since then, I have directed, among other things, a tragicomic documentary about a man in midlife crisis, an awkward blind date filmed in a hotel room and a provocative musical church service. As an artist, I think shame is a wonderful emotion. Yet I regularly feel the pressure to approach a project from an informed, contemplative stance. Especially with sensitive topics such as mental health, sexuality and religion, a cautious approach seems almost a prerequisite. But this is not without risk. In my experience, it is more exciting and honest to fully admit discomfort. In listening to my own perverse curiosity, each project is also a confrontation with myself. I cannot hide behind the camera but become part of the emotional chaos myself.

Although my work is appreciated by a select audience, I am regularly faced with – understandable – criticism: Is it ethically justified for me, as a conflict-seeking amateur psychologist, to film people in such a vulnerable position? This is a difficult question to which I do not have an unequivocal answer. Within this context, I present (with a strong sense of shame and pride) my unfiltered work of the past seven years.”

The Fan Fiction Wishing Well

SARAH FITTERER (1996, DE) & MILES WORNER (1998, GB/CH)

Interactive / 12h-20h at the Meldkamer

Sarah Fitterer and Miles Worner are taking over the Meldkamer to create The Fan Fiction Wishing Well. Using its enchanted ai powers, the Well translates whispering audience fictions into animated video collages which overfill and pour out surreal images of alternative endings, fluffs and crossovers. It explores the playful, subversive potential of fan fiction and video-making that is often missing in stratified film production.  

Sarah Fitterer is an interdisciplinary designer/artist/ filmmaker/shrimp-seductress/fan- fiction-fan. Through world building and speculative narration, she critically examines utopian potentials of technologies, more-than-human relations, monetary systems, and the agricultural protein transition. Simultaneously operating in the realms of academic and embodied research, her work manifests through video, installation and performance. 

Miles Worner is a British-Swiss designer, world record holder and duck based in the Netherlands. His work spans formats and paradigms, registering the imperative honesty bared in the self-initiated, the expressive, the diy and the non-canonical as evidenced and speculative means to debase the established and the highbrow. There he finds new means for how design can go beyond the limitations of authorship and reposition itself as a mobility of the people.

Bloeistraat 11

NIENKE DEUTZ (1986, NL)

10 min / 12h-18h at The Masters / loop

In Bloeistraat 11 (2018), inseparable best friends spend their last summer holiday of childhood amusing themselves around the house. As summer progresses their bodies start to morph and shift and an awkwardness descends on their friendship. Puberty seems determined to interrupt their bond.

Nienke Deutz is a director and artist working mainly within the field of animation. She applies a variety of techniques to innovative effect, frequently combining the use of miniature sets with drawing and plastic cutouts. A recurring theme in her work is feeling out of time or out of place.

Super Taboo

SU HUI-YU (1976, TW)

19 min / 12h-18h at Jan van Eyck Academie / plays every 20 min

Adapted from historical texts, the narrative in the two-channel video artwork Super Taboo (2016) came from a pornographic publication, previously known as “a small book”. The work leads us back to the 1980s Taiwan, where pornographic content was edged to the periphery of the audio-visual system. In the video, the renowned actor Chin Shih-Chieh (金士傑) guides the viewers into a surreal erotic scene by playing the role of an urban white-collar worker who mutters the plots of the “small book” in his hands. Presented by Jester.

SU (Su Hui-Yu) obtained an MFA from Taipei National University of the Arts in 2003, and has remained active in the contemporary art scene and the film society ever since. His recent projects engage collective memories and ideologies while exploring the mechanism of oppression and liberation tied to Taiwan cultural values.

Hommage à ... I, Hommage à ... III, Hommage à ... IV

LILI DUJOURIE (1941, BE)

Various / 12h-18h at Jan van Eyck Academie / loop

This presentation brings together three early video works of Lili Dujourie, from a series of five Hommages (1972). They are recorded in real time, without additional montage work, and show a space that unfolds over time and a character who remains bound to this space. Sensuality, the passage of time and boredom all feature in Dujourie’s video work. In this video the model – Dujourie herself – plays not only the role of object, but is also the subject of the work; an artist and a viewer. Presented by Jester

Since the late 1960s, Lili Dujourie has been working on an oeuvre that hovers between painting and sculpture. She uses materials that contain a contradiction: materials that are soft and hard, agile and immovable. From that material she explores the space between floor and wall, movement and stillness, between painting, sculpture, photography and video. Courtesy of Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Collection Flemish Community and Collection of IKOB – Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst.

Below The Deep South

NOÉMIE GOUDAL (1984, FR)

11 min / 12h-18h at Entre Deux / loop

Below the Deep South shows a forest with several photographs arranged in successive backgrounds, echoing geological stratums, playing with scales and depth, and causing an optical illusion.

Slowly, a fire destroys and disintegrates the layers and the scenery, forming a new landscape every second. The video is inspired by recent discoveries that have been made in Antarctica. Through deep drilling, scientists found coal deposits and discovered that there was once a tropical landscape in this territory. Goudal’s work is an invitation to contemplate the position of mankind within the world, and with it also our future. 

Viewmaster Projects presents Below the Deep South in a completely stripped-down sunken and dark retail space in the heart of Maastricht. This otherwise inaccessible dystopian space enhances the experience of the contrasting burning jungle and the accompanying soundscape of singing forest birds. 

Noémie Goudal’s practice involves the construction of ambitious staged, illusionistic installations within the landscape, documented using film and photography. Goudal’s interventions are underpinned by rigorous research examining the intersection of ecology and anthropology, interrogating the limitations of theoretical conceptions of the natural world.