A personal story of the materiality of contamination
Yelena Popova's reflections on the materiality of contamination and the Kyshtym nuclear disaster of the 9th September 1957.
Fig.1 Yelena Popova (2010). still from 'Unnamed', short artist documentary telling a personal story of a secret town in Russia, 10 minutes.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Bellon & Marker: Remembrance of Things To Come
"[Denise] Bellon’s daughter Yannick and Chris Marker collaborated to create a biographical portrait of Bellon using news footage, narration and her own photography. The result is Remembrance of Things To Come (2001, 42 minutes, black and white, English), a detailed time line of the peaks and valleys of twentieth-century Europe as seen through the eyes of an artist. The film’s fluid stream of black and white images and newsreels is mesmerizing. As Bellon’s work focused on surrealist art, sports, the human body and "exotic" locales such as Africa, the film’s deliberate mix of photographs and moving images operates both as a loving homage to its subject and as free-standing work of exquisite cinematic art."
(Rodney Perkins)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Object Memory Archive: A Structured-repository Of Personal Objects
"OMA is an internet-based project to which users can make audio-visual contributions, and navigate and view their own and other people's entries. These entries can be interactively arranged according to various semantic categories. The purpose is an easily accessible distributed platform for everyone who wants to archive and share important events in their life where such events are associated with specific objects. These objects then become the place-holders and psycho-physical focus for the events and memories that are precious to us."
(Agnes Hegedüs)
OMA is a QUT artist-in-residence work by Agnes Hegedus, created in collaboration with Grace Peng, Johanes Soetanto, Dave Wallace.
The "Object Memory Archive" is a project created by Agnes Agnes Hegedüs as an on-line development of her earlier works "Their Things Spoken" and "Things Spoken".
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Their Things Spoken: a catalogue of Their belongings
"Their Things Spoken by Agnes Hegedüs refers to the gulf between the conservation and valuation of officially recognized cultural representations and the information content of bearers of personal significance originating in apparently unimportant, unknown biographies. The artist distributed among visitors to the ZKM a leaflet asking, 'Why not put your favorite object in a museum?' This question stimulated the museum visitors to reflect upon rituals of appreciating and keeping, and to relate the museum exhibits to the relics to which they attribute private significance.
Using a Polaroid camera to document contributors and objects, and a tape recorder for their stories and comments, she imposed no restrictions on the choice of personal favorites.
Her concern was to warehouse the portraits of people and objects in the most neutral possible way, so that every image and statement is equally valid. The DVD-ROM storage medium allows the body of contributions to be archived exactly as they were documented. The stories stand for themselves and, like an atlas of everyday life, show a random collection of people whose relationship to the world is revealed through the objects they identify with."
(Ursula Frohne)
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Jean Tinguely: Self-destroying Machine
ArtMuseum.net
The piano began playing. Jean had reversed the belt for his big meta-matic painting machine which was the centre piece. The painting on the long roll of paper was supposed to spill out over the audience. I could very easily have reversed the belt, but he took my arm away and said "Don't touch, Billy." He had decided that whatever happened should happen. Some time later the weather balloon was supposed to blow up and explode but there was not enough gas in the gas tank we had bought, so it ended up hanging limply. The piano on the right side had a candle on the keyboard which in the third minute was lighted by an overheating resistor. Three minutes later a bucket of gasoline above the candle was tipped over and the piano began to burn gloriously while it was furiously playing away.A small bassinet had been filled with ammonia. When I closed the switch to start the machine, Robert Breer's task was to pour titanium tetrachloride into it. The combination of ammonia and titanium tetrachloride produces, as you all know, white... in this case white smoke, which poured out of the bassinet, until it finally engulfed the specially invited, elegantly dressed audience. It was all over in 27 minutes. The audience applauded and descended on the wreckage for souvenirs. Jean called the event "Homage to New York.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
