Tectonic Plate is screening at Cinema Theatre Arthouse Momo in Seoul, South Korea on Wednesday the 25th of May (20:30h). The event is part of ”S.O.S. – Art for a Time of Urgencies”, the 9th Ewha International Media Art Presentation, curated by Pontus Kyander.
S.O.S. –Save Our Souls is a large scale project to respond to the 130 year anniversary of Ewha Womans University.
Tectonic Plate is screening at Basel’s Bildrausch Filmfest on Thursday 26 May, 2016 at 22:40, followed by a Q&A with Mika Taanila. The venue is Stadtkino Basel.
Tectonic Plate is a cameraless film about fear of flying, security checks and time zones.
After returning from a lengthy business trip to Tokyo, the nameless protagonist is inexplicably stuck at a hotel nearby the Helsinki airport. The events are fixed to the character’s life-style of constant jet lag and multitasking. The use of various technical devices, such as phones, computers and heart rate monitors, slivers his time-management and modifies the consciousness.
The episodes of on-screen texts and of moving image alternate in the narration of this dualistic work.
The techniques used for the moving images are photocopying documents related to air-travel directly onto clear 35mm film and darkroom exposure of objects placed on 35mm reversal film (photograms).
”In the ’camera-less’ experiment Tectonic Plate, visual-artist Mika Taanila’s photograms and poet Harry Salmenniemi’s stark intertitles simulate the jet-laggy anxiety of international air travel. Pages from security pamphlets are distorted into rough particles of grain; a five-minute zoom-out transforms words into geometric patterns. These shifts between legibility and abstraction often literally force the viewer’s eyes to refocus, dislocating both cognitive and sensory perception; the resulting dissociative panic produces a very bodily feeling of free fall. The physically droughts photograms, which alternatively evoke encephalographs or airport x-rays of carry-on items, anchor the out-of-body paranoia in an unshakable tactility.”
– Chloe Lizotte, Film Comment
Distributed by Light Cone (Paris) and AV-arkki (Helsinki).
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buy Blu-ray Box Set at Lux Shop (London)
Selected screenings:
The lettrist feature film Tectonic Plate (2016, 74 min) is screening at Cinematek – the Royal Cinémathèque of Belgium as part of Art Brussels, courtesy of balzer projects, Basel. The cinema program is called Seeing in the Dark and curated by Belgian artist Anouk De Clercq.
Time and venue: 19 April at 17:30, Salle Ledoux, Cinematek.
link to full program “Seeing in the Dark”
The single-channel video installation My Silence will be part of ПРАЗНИКНАБУКВИТЕ Buchstabenfest (“Letter Party”). The annual event takes place in a former Custom Houses directly at the border between Austria and Slovenia.
The three-channel video installation The Most Electrified Town in Finland is part of a group show from the collections of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. The show is titled “Collection 2, History, Regrowth and Future” and consists of recently acquired works by Fumiaki Aono, Kazuo Kadonaga, Kazunori Fujii, Mika Taanila and Kenji Yanobe.
November 28, 2015 until May 8, 2015
The film Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow (1998) is screening on 35 mm film print in Filmcasino Vienna’s afternoon matinée, accompanied by Microtopia (2013) by Jesper Wachtmeister. The event at Margaretenstrasse 78 starts at 13:00h.
This summer’s Mänttä Art Festival will present a selection of artworks by 30 artists and one artist group. The exhibition, curated by Anssi Kasitonni is titled Going Commando.
The 16mm film installation Ihminen ja tiede (“Man and Science”, 2011, 27 sec loop) by Mika Taanila is part of the exhibition. Additionally Mannerlaatta – the original Finnish version of Tectonic Plate (2016, 74 mins) – will screen on big screen as part of the opening program at Bio Säde on Sunday June 12 at 13:00h (free entrance).