OPENING
May 15th, 2009, 5.30pm
LOCATION
Centre Pompidou
Large cinema hall of the Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris
Michal Kosakowski’s JUST LIKE THE MOVIES is presented at the large cinema hall of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
LINKS
Centre Pompidou - Cinema
Programm “Artention” of North Rhine-Westphalia
Leaflet by the Centre Pompidou (pdf)
OPENING
April 8th, 2009, 8pm
LOCATION
Edificio Sabatini. Salón de Actos
Calle Santa Isabel, 52. Madrid
Michal Kosakowski’s JUST LIKE THE MOVIES is presented at the Auditorium of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
LINKS
Leaflet by the Museo Reina Sofia (pdf)
Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia
OPENING
April 3rd 2009, 6pm
Exhibition: April 4th - May 17th, 2009
LOCATION
Historisches Museum, Minoritenkirche / Dachauplatz 2-4 / Regensburg, Germany
Städtische Galerie “Leerer Beutel” / Bertoldstr. 9 / Regensburg, Germany
“Der katholische Faktor”
An exhibition on contemporary art from Poland and Germany, curated by Maciek Czapski and Christian Schnurer.
Michal Kosakowski is showing his early filmwork “IS GOD MODERN?” from 1997 in the beautiful space of the Minoritenkirche (church) in Regensburg.
LINKS
OPENING
January 30th, 2009, 6pm
Exhibition: February 1st - 13th, 2009
LOCATION
Landgericht Leipzig
Harkortstraße 9 / Leipzig
“Das Böse ist ein Eichhörnchen”
Michal Kosakowski’s JUST LIKE THE MOVIES is part of the group show of the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst / Klasse Intermedia.
Press release (in German):
Das Projekt “Das Böse ist ein Eichhörnchen” der Klasse Intermedia – gestartet im Herbst 2007 unter der Leitung von Prof. Alba D’Urbano und Franz Alken und in Zusammenarbeit mit der Kuratorin Angelika Richter – beschäftigt sich mit dem Thema des “Bösen” und wurde im Januar 2009 mit der gleichnamigen Ausstellung abgeschlossen.
Das Projekt nähert sich der Thematik unter der Voraussetzung, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phänomen des Bösen von ungebrochener Aktualität ist: Politische Schlüsselbegriffe wie Macht und Gewalt werden darunter ebenso verhandelt wie individuelle und private Bedeutungsräume. Das Projekt unternimmt aber nicht den Versuch, das “Böse” eindeutig fassen zu wollen.
In der Gesellschaftsgeschichte und Politik, in der Mythologie und in der Kunst unterliegen Zuschreibungen dieses Begriffs einem fortlaufenden Wandel von Instrumentalisierung und Inszenierung. Als normativer Begriff, besonders in der Ethik und der christlichen Religion, erscheint das “Böse” immer als universell und negativ. Die Geschichte des “Bösen” ist daher vor allem eine Geschichte der Polarisierung und Tabuisierung innerhalb moralisch-diskursiver Ansätze. Die Projektion auf das oder den jeweils Anderen kristallisiert sich vor allem in der Konstruktion von Feindbildern. Unsere Kulturentwicklung ist eng mit Krieg, Tod, Schuld und moralischer Verantwortung verbunden. Medien, Popkultur und Unterhaltung konstituieren sich über die Darstellung und angebliche Nicht-Überwindbarkeit von Gewalt. Dabei bedienen sich vor allem die Medien täglich mehr oder weniger offensichtlicher Verweise auf Bilder von Gewalt und Verbrechen.
Seit einigen Jahren – unter anderem bedingt durch das Widererstarken religiöser Interessen auf globaler Ebene – findet die Idee des “Bösen” eine Renaissance auch in der Politik. Komplexe Sachverhalte werden mit der daraus resultierenden Terminologie vereinfacht und Meinungen polarisiert. Spätestens mit dem politischen Schlagwort:”Die Achse des Bösen” wird deutlich, wie stark das “Böse” – und damit auch das “Gute” – kulturellen und historischen Relativierungen unterliegt: Terroristen können gleichzeitig Freiheitskämpfer sein, Staatsmänner werden andernorts als Teufel bezeichnet, Bürgerrechtler werden zu Kriminellen. “Gut” und “Böse” sind Gegenpole eines dualistischen Systems, sie sind standpunktabhängig und basieren auf kulturellen und gesellschaftlichen Regelwerken, die das menschliche Handeln normieren. Neben den Versuchen, das “Böse” einzugrenzen und zu domestizieren, besteht aber gleichzeitig eine von diesem Phänomen ausgehende Faszination.
“Das Böse ist ein Eichhörnchen” versucht eine Annäherung an diese faszinierende Ambivalenz des Bösen und untersucht dabei das kleine private Böse ebenso wie gesamtgesellschaftliche Fragestellungen des aktuellen politischen Geschehens. Die Ausstellung fand innerhalb der Räumlichkeiten des Landgerichts, also an einem Ort, der eng mit der Thematik des Projektes verbunden ist, statt. Sie lief parallel zum täglichen Betrieb des Gerichts – so stellten sich die Arbeiten außerhalb des rein künstlerischen Rahmens in die Kontroverse dieses funktionalen Ortes der Rechtssprechung.
LINKS
OPENING
Saturday, January 10th, 2009, 5–10pm
Exhibition: January 11th – 25th, 2009
LOCATION
KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e.V.
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Auguststr. 69, 10117 Berlin
Presentation of Michal Kosakowski’s JUST LIKE THE MOVIES.
Presented by Gabriele Horn and Katia Reich.
An event by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, supported by the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia.
LINKS
November 13th, 2007, 9.15pm
LOCATION
Cinema Teatro Italia
Via Gramsci 25
62100 Macerata / Italy
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES - Live Piano Performance by Paolo Marzoochi
CONCERTI D’INVERNO
Musiche degli ultimi cent’anni
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES - Live Piano Performance by Paolo Marzocchi
11 November 2007, 5.30pm
LINKS
WATCH
November 10th, 2007, 9pm
LOCATION
Teatro Cristallo
Dalmazia 30
39100 Bolzano / Italy
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES - Live Piano Performance by Paolo Marzoochi
In more than 600 Hollywood movies (produced before 2001) Michal Kosakowski looks for images of what he just saw and finds, in 52 films, the entire sequence of events that happened on that day in September 2001.
Almost all of us saw the events of September 11, 2001 on television. We knew these images from our cinematic experiences and thus found it almost impossible to recognise them as events that actually occurred, and even more difficult to accept them as such in the moment we witnessed them. It was at this early point in time that Michal Kosakowski stepped in: minutes after the event he was sketching out a first draft for his project.
In more than 600 Hollywood movies Michal Kosakowski looks for images of what he just saw and finds, in 52 films, the entire sequence of events that happened on that day in September 2001.
Intimately involved in the project, Paolo Marzocchi is a composer and musician. His perception of the 9/11 events led him a century into the past, right to the early days of cinema. For him it is the style of the silent picture era that sets the tone for Just Like The Movies.
LINKS
October 30th - November 11th, 2007
LOCATION
Teatro Cristallo / Sala Mostre
Dalmazia 30
39100 Bolzano / Italy
A solo show presenting the image collages of JUST LIKE THE MOVIES embedded in an installation in the Sala Mostre of the Teatro Cristallo in Bolzano, Italy.
LINKS
October 18th, 2007, 3pm
LOCATION
Filmforum of the Museum Ludwig
Bischofsgartenstr. 1
Köln - Germany
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES has been nominated for the BILD-KUNST Award at the KunstFilmBiennale in Köln and Bonn.
The world of images has come into motion. The ever increasing significance of the inter-disciplinary crossing of artistic borders between visual arts and cinema, arthouse movies and art film, museums and cinemas remains as the most important theme of the Cologne KunstFilmBiennale. This worldwide unique mixture of festival and exhibition takes place in Cologne and Bonn from 18th - 24th of October. Once again, short and feature-length films will be shown from and about artists who illustrate the interaction of the visual arts and the “seventh art”, film. With an International Competition compiling numerous premieres and a competition for young filmmakers, both with significant prize money, KunstFilmBiennale offers the latest overview of what is presently taking place cinematically in art and artistically in film.
LINKS
11 - 12 September 2007
Opening: 11 September, 2007, 8pm
Live Piano Performance by Paolo Marzocchi: 11 Sept 2007, 9pm
curated by Mariko Sakamoto
The Gallery SAKAMOTOcontemporary opens on September 11th, 2007 with the preview of the award-winning exhibition JUST LIKE THE MOVIES.
For the first time in Berlin the exhibition deals with the events of 9/11.
In more than 600 Hollywood movies (produced before 2001) Michal Kosakowski looks for images of what he just saw and finds, in 52 films, the entire sequence of events that happened on that day in September 2001. His reconstruction begins.
Intimately involved in the project, Paolo Marzocchi is a composer and musician. His perception of the 9/11 events led him a century into the past, right to the early days of cinema. For him it is the style of the silent picture era that sets the tone for Just Like The Movies. A century of image construction by the media collapses in the face of the events of September 11, 2001, in the early 21st century, the beginning of the third millennium AD.
Just Like the Movies is an attempt to re-construct the events of 9/11 by highlighting the parallels between the fictive worlds and the images of the real events.
LINKS
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES
Opening on August 4th, 2007
at ART KLINKA / LED ART GALLERY in Novi Sad, Serbia.
The idea of Michal Kosakowski’s short film Just Like The Movies, shown exclusively in Art Klinika (Novi Sad, Serbia) on July 4 2007, is based on the concept of déjà vu. From the moment I arrived in Art Klinika, half an hour before the screening, I had a feeling that this concept would spread to the whole evening: first, I was warned that few people visit Art Klinika on a Saturday night, regardless of what’s on. Then came a downpour, which delayed the start of the film by 30 minutes in order to give the “determined” the chance to make it, as this short film (21”) would be shown only once. When it became clear that no-one else would come, the screening went ahead for some twenty, I was told, “regular patients”. There was only one more detail missing to complete my feeling of “déjà vu”: in countless cinemas all over the world, when the words THE END appear the river of spectators, led by the sad smokers, gets up and leaves the premises, paying no attention to what’s on the screen, to those names of all the people who have worked on the creation of the film. On Saturday night this reaction did not happen.
The best in Kosakowski’s film is not even the skill with which the director has borrowed footage from Hollywood blockbusters and then pasted it into a mosaic reminding us of the barely visible border between fiction and reality, but the reaction of the audience during the credits. There was the answer to what triggered my feeling of “déjà vu”. I’ve seen this film about 20 times since its premier in Munich two years ago, with audiences varying from 20 to 300 people, but the silence and tension which accompanies the film is common to all audiences. It was the same in Art Klinika. No-one moved, until the screen went blank.
LINKS
23 June - 1 July, 2007
GRAND OPENING
Live Piano Performance by Paolo Marzocchi: 23 June, 8pm
at the Beijing Creative Art Center, China
curated by Beatrice Leanza & Pauline Doutreluingne
in co-operation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Beijing
Paolo Marzocchi performs live on the piano.
In occasion of the Grand Opening of Borderline Moving Images, starting off with the exhibition “Seduction” in the Beijing Creative art Centre, two performances will be featured as a prelude to the events unfolding in the next few days.
The Gehua Tower building is located in the very heart of Beijing city; siding the 2nd ring road, this is a suggestive intersection where the low-rise centre opens up to the view from the main space and the rooftop in a vast expanding horizon, while on the other the contrasting character of verticality and vibrancy of the city life and hectic pace provides a perfect scenario for a metaphorical communication with its intrinsic nature.
In order to highlight our commitment to this visionary and creative communication with the city texture and its subjective interpretation we are presenting two powerful performative events for the opening night.
While bringing forward the vocational multidisciplinarity of artistic experimentation, we’re presenting two live audio/visual sets that powerfully make use of moving images to construct evocative narratives; while dialoguing with the environment they solicit different ways of interacting with all of its different factors: the landscape, its sounds, the emotional bliss of the life within.
LINKS
1 April - 10 June, 2007
Opening: 31 March, 2007 - 17.00
LOCATION
Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr
Mülheim, Germany
Group show curated by Ines Wiskemann
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES
The images are quite similar to one another. In many cases, only a more brilliant resolution, a greater colour intensity or on occasion the enhanced clarity of the composition distinguish the movie image from the television picture. People look up in fright or flee; they squeeze through narrow stairways or are driven up steep streets by rising clouds of smoke and fire. The similarities shared by these pictures are not confined to their content alone, however. Also similar, indeed nearly identical, are the camera angles: central perspectives and steep views from below, close-ups and panoramic views, always adapted to the supposedly identical motif. And it is this formal coherence that is so irritating. If we had seen the pictures of the collapsing twin towers in an action movie or a science ficition film and not in a television news broadcast, it might never have occurred to us that they might represent real events. Yet the fiction now takes a strange turn when the real terrorist attack is experienced at least temporarily in a fictional mode on the television screen. (2007, Thomas Janzen)
Publication
KAVA KAVA - FACETS OF FEAR
Mülheim/Germany 2007, german/english, 128 pages
Editor: Beate Ermacora, Ines Wiskemann
Authors: Beate Ermacora, Nadia Ismail, Thomas Janzen, Miriam Jung, Christoph Kohl, Ernst-Uwe Küster und Ines Wiskemann
Links
VIDEOINSTALLATION
TRAILER
TV-REPORTAGE (GERMAN)
16 February - 25 March, 2007
Opening: 15 February, 2007, 7.30
Inaugural address by Prof. Dr. Bernd Scheffer (Munich)
Download pdf (german)
LOCATION
Lothringer 13
Städtische Kunsthalle München
curated by Uli Aigner
CONCEPT
Between 1996 and 2006 Michal Kosakowski produced 49 short movies on the subject of killing. 49 killings, dreamt up by inhabitants of the metropolis of morbidity – Vienna. In 1996, Kosakowski began to inquire into fantasies of killing – at first among his relatives and friends, then widening the circle to include artists, musicians and, eventually, actors.
Within a decade, Kosakowski made 49 short movies, an essential element of which is the fact that these killing fantasies were put into practice with the complicity of the respondents themselves and depicted in the 49 videos. The collaborations between Kosakowski and his fictitious killers and victims in scripting, acting and staging the films could not have been closer or more intense. Michal Kosakowski himself was in charge of directing, camera, editing and special effects for all 49 films.
The fantasies of violence, all of which seem to feed on the explicit violence omnipresent in film and television, are stunning. Not a single one of the 160 performers has a criminal record or was ever involved in any real acts of violence. And yet poisoning, torture, suicide, execution, ritual murder, violence by and against women, men, and children, murders motivated by sexual, political, and mental aberration come face to face with the recipients’ emotions, naked and uncensored.
The installation FORTYNINE will be first shown in the Städtische Kunsthalle Munich, Lothringer 13, through February and March 2007. Visitors who enter the 5×4x3 metre mirror-walled cube will be confronted by a 49-part HD splitscreen that mirrors their reflections to infinity.
The fact of interpersonal acts of violence, here anchored in present-day aesthetics, is also reflected in the emotions visible on the faces of the visitors, which are equally mirrored to infinity. 49 examples of fictitious killing collide head-on with the real emotions of the installation’s visitors. The collective experience of any emotion generates intimacy – and it is precisely this intimacy that acts as a further constitutive component of FORTYNINE: the confrontation of the individual with itself, in the face of the most atrocious examples of violence.
What Michal Kosakowski grants us is the rare occasion to experience a genuine taboo of our times and our Western society – death. A death that, for the time being, seems to present itself exclusively in the contemporary guise of the incessant violence staged by the media.
Uli Aigner 2007
INSTALLATION
Producer: Uli Aigner / LOTHRINGER 13 - Städtische Kunsthalle München
Construction: Ernst Homeier / Andreas Oswald GMBH
HD-Prpduction: Johann Auer / Yoda Design
Design: Rafal Kosakowski / REYA-D
PUBLICATION
MICHAL KOSAKOWSKI - FORTYNINE
Munich/Germany 2007, german/english, 58 pages
Editor: Uli Aigner
Concept: Michal Kosakowski
Authors: Uli Aigner, Michal Kosakowski
LINKS
Lothringer 13 - Städtische Kunsthalle München
Bernd Scheffer
9 March - 29 April 2007
Opening: 8 March, 2007 - 20.00
MAKING OF FORTYNINE - Discussion between Michal Kosakowski and Prof. Dr. Bernd Scheffer (LMU München)
ZKMax Showroom
Munich/Germany
curated by Diana Ebster
In der Videoinstallation „FORTYNINE“ konfrontiert Michal Kosakowski den Betrachter mit der Erfahrung eines Tabus unserer Zeit und unserer westlichen Gesellschaft, dem Tod: Als zeige sich uns der Tod nur noch im zeitgenössischen Gewand der medialen Gewaltinszenierung. „FORTYNINE INSIDE“ zeigt das Making of dieser Arbeit. Mittels einer Video-Doppelprojektion führt Kosakowski in die unendlichen, explizit gewalttätigen Weiten des Spiegelkubus von FORTYNINE ein. Zwischen 1996 und 2006 produzierte Kosakowski 49 Kurzfilme zum Thema Mord, ersonnen von Bewohnern der Welthauptstadt der Morbidität, Wien: Er befragte erst Verwandte und Freunde, dann KünstlerInnen, MusikerInnen und später auch SchauspielerInnen nach ihren Mordphantasien und ihrer Bereitschaft, diese Phantasien selbst darzustellen.
Die Gewaltphantasien scheinen tatsächlich samt und sonders von der medialen Allgegenwart expliziter Gewalt in Film und Fernsehen gespeist zu sein: Keiner der 160 Darsteller verfügt über ein Strafregister oder war je in Gewaltverbrechen real involviert. In der Installation FORTYNINE betritt man einen vollverspiegelten Kubus und sieht sich einem, ins Unendliche nach allen Seiten gespiegelten, 49-teiligen HD Splitscreen gegenüber. Das Faktum zwischenmenschlicher Gewalttaten, hier in einer Ästhetik der Gegenwart, zeigt sich auch in den Emotionen, die sichtbar in den Gesichtern der BesucherInnen stehen und gleichermaßen mit ins Unendliche gespiegelt werden.
Die Videoinstallation FORTYNINE ist noch bis zum 25.3.2007 in der Städtischen Kunsthalle München Lothringer 13 zu sehen. Die eigens als Reflex der Ausstellung produzierte und im ZKMax präsentierte Doppelprojektion von „FORTYNINE INSIDE“ reflektiert sowohl die Arbeit selbst mit filmischen Mitteln, als auch die Position des Betrachters in dieser Installation.
Links
4 November - 13 January, 2007
A group show featuring works dealing with notions of fact and fiction.
Featuring Michal Kosakowski’s JUST LIKE THE MOVIES.
With Michal Kosakowski, Jude Tallichet, Patrick Jacobs, William Lamson, Kate Gilmore, John J. O´Connor, Dan Zeller, Jonathan Schipper, Tavares Strachan, Noshe a.k.a. Andreas Gehrke, Peter Freitag, Nina Katchadourian, Brian Conley
Links
8 September - 9 October, 2006
FIVE YEARS AFTER
Group exhibiton on the occasion of the five year anniversary of 9/11
“Just Like the Movies” by Michal Kosakowski almost perfectly creates a “true/fictional” narrative of the 9-11 attacks using footage from dozens of movies like “Independence Day” and “Die Hard III.”
Links
7 April - 25 May, 2006
Just Like The Movies is a 21-minute video with music by Paolo Marzocchi. Almost all of us saw the events of September 11, 2001 on television. We knew these images from our cinematic experiences and thus found it almost impossible to recognise them as events that actually occurred, and even more difficult to accept them as such in the moment we witnessed them. It was at this early point in time that Michal Kosakowski stepped in: minutes after the event he was sketching out a first draft for his project Just Like The Movies. In more than 600 Hollywood movies (produced before 2001) Michal Kosakowski looks for images of what he just saw and finds, in 52 films, the entire sequence of events that happened on that day in September 2001. His reconstruction begins.
Intimately involved in the project, Paolo Marzocchi is a composer and musician. His perception of the 9/11 events led him a century into the past, right to the early days of cinema. For him it is the style of the silent picture era that sets the tone for Just Like The Movies. A century of image construction by the media collapses in the face of the events of September 11, 2001, in the early 21st century, the beginning of the third millennium AD.
The defencelessness we experienced when we stared at the live broadcast on the screens was similar to that felt by the first moviegoers who, with the Lumière brothers’ film, found themselves exposed to a train that seemed to rush directly at them at full speed. Now, however, it is today. 2006.
The underlying themes of provenance and use of images run parallel within the reality of production and the work itself. It has become apparent that the borders between political reality and media-generated fiction are wide open – one way or another. (Uli Aigner, 2006)
PUBLICATION
MICHAL KOSAKOWSKI - JUST LIKE THE MOVIES 2006
Munich/Germany 2006, german/english, 58 pages
Editor: Uli Aigner
Concept: Michal Kosakowski
Authors: Uli Aigner, Michal Kosakowski, Paolo Marzocchi, Goran Mimica, Joseph Denize
Image Collages
JUST LIKE THE MOVIES I-XIII
100×142 cm, Colorprint on Debond
SPECIALS
Lecture by Prof. Dr. Bernd Scheffer about “Filme als Frühwarnsystem”
4 May, 2006 - Lothringer 13 - Städtische Kunsthalle München
Download pdf (german)
Short Story “To Those To Whom It Seems To Be” by Goran Mimica
Download pdf (english)
Short Story “Last Action Zhero” by Joseph Denize
Download pdf (english)
LINKS
Lothringer 13 - Städtische Kunsthalle München
Joseph Denize
Goran Mimica
Bernd Scheffer
Vernissage Images at Flickr
)
Excerpt
Paolo Marzocchi Live Performance
Just Like the Movies
18 May, 2006
I started to think of the music as a glue for the heterogeneous material of the movie. You should not notice that in one scene it’s raining and it isn’t in the next, or that it’s winter in the early seventies, and few seconds later people are playing chess in Central Park, dressed in a much later style. And, in certain cases, I’d like to preserve in the music the “Hollywood feeling” the film images of the genre.
So I decided to write “silent movie” music, for piano solo. The naked sound of the piano contrasts starkly with the stunning impact of the images, binding them together. There is the “ghost” of Hollywood music atmospheres, as well a clear tribute to the ragtime-based music of the first silent movies. In certain passages, electro-acoustic sounds are added to the acoustic piano notes, and the performer has to interact with them. The electro-acoustic parts are taken from a piece “B1, Study for a Night-Crossing Journey” that I had written earlier, and fit the atmospheres of the film perfectly.
We can also say that our collective journey across the Night started with September 11th.
Paolo Marzocchi 2006
Links
Lothringer 13 - Städtische Kunsthalle München
Paolo Marzocchi
)
17 June - 20 June, 2004
Es war ein kunstsinniger und kommunikativer Abend, der 17. Juni, die österreichische Filmpremiere des Kurzfilms “Wait a Minute” von Michal Kosakowski. Alle am Film Beteiligten, darunter die zwei Autoren und Hauptdarsteller Goran Mimica und Joseph Denize, der Komponist Paolo Marzocchi und Soundprofi Heli Leitner kamen angereist um dem Ereignis beizuwohnen.
Vor der Präsentation des Hauptfilms und auch nachher, hatten die 150 Gäste die Möglichkeit 4 Video-und Filminstalltionen, inszeniert von Einvoll, zu durchwandern. Und bei Österreichischem Landwein, türkischem Landbrot und Vorarlberger Bergkäse ließ es sich im Zweihof wundervoll unter freiem Himmel bis spät in die Nacht über das Gesehene und Nicht Gesehene philosophieren. “Wait a Minute” wurde nominiert für das zweitgrößte Filmfestival Italiens in Pesaro und für das Pariser Filmfestival.
Links
