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Merging dreaming (a field of projection) and staging (a space of self-training), this exhibition aims at analysing the subjectivity under construction, in a process, during the rehearsal, while mastering before the final performance occurs. It is a study of a mechanism of illusion and imagined realities with a focus on the notions of the theatrical, the performative and the mise-en-scène. How the convention is being negotiated? How the artificiality is played out in a drama of genuine gestures and intentions? How the belief is born and spelled out on the crossway of a direct and mediated behaviour, between the real and virtual environments?
Appropriating Mieke Bal’s treatment of theatricality as a form, medium, or practice, in which the object of cultural analysis performs a meeting between (aesthetic) art(ifice) and (social) reality, the exhibition reconsiders the mise-en-scène as a collective reception, a mediation between a play and the multiple public. It aims at pointing out the connections between the mise-en-scène and subjectivity as it is revealed in the reality of dreams: after Bal, it asks what dreams can tell us about staging; what staging can tell us about dreams; what dreaming occurs on, or through the stage in the examples of mise-en-scène. Imaginary and oneiric are intertwined with unreal and conventionary, as in the post-studio site-specific Dogville where Freudian uncanny field of critical imagination combines dream space and Brechtian strategies of sabotaging the reality effect.
Theatre and theatricality as well as cinema and cinematicity are regarded as both the subject matter and a particular stylistic. As such the exhibition aims at investigating the condition of a (moving) image in its fluent oscillation between the theatrical stillness, suspended movement of the dia projection and the cinematic flux; through the insight into the production of a spectacle it examins the intensity of attentiveness and the status of contemporary spectatorship. Referring to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Alain Resnais’ L’anée dernière à Marienbad, Videodreams: Between the Cinematic and Theatrical focuses on the recent video environments and video multi-screen installations. As such, the exhibition itself becomes in a way a strongly site-specific event in the new building of the Kunsthaus Graz designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. Kunsthaus’ unusual biomorphic architecture foregrounds the aspects of the performative space with an advanced theatricality. Searching for new contexts for the viewing conditions of the video-based works and trying to reach new audiences, the exhibition also aims at expanding its performative space through staging video works behind the Kunsthaus’ own territory – in such environments like Schauspielhaus, Schubert Cinema and Grazer Mausoleum.
With works by Fabienne Audéoud (FR)/John Russell (GB), Barbara Bloom (US), Janet Cardiff (CA)/George Bures Miller (CA), Stan Douglas (CA), Rodney Graham (CA), Teresa Hubbard (IE)/Alexander Birchler (CH), Joan Jonas (US), Katarzyna Kozyra (PL), Mark Lewis (CA), Sharon Lockhart (US), Aernout Mik (NL), Tony Oursler (US), Judy Radul (CA), Catherine Sullivan (US), Artur Żmijewski (PL).