Bolzano, June 09, 2023. Museion Passage – a freely accessible space dedicated to enhancing the museum's collection and its links with the local territory – hosts Time Frame, curated by writer and curator Saim Demircan. Staged in a re-installation of Dan Graham’s 2008 Sonic Youth Pavilion, this screening program is the second chapter in our initiative centered on film and video as an artistic medium, following and continuing a collaboration with the ZeLIG School for Documentary, Television and New Media in March.

Time Frame continues our research into the documentary format. For this focus, Demircan presents three different approaches to documenting art, which reveal aspects of artistic practice or exhibition histories that might otherwise go unseen. Each of the exhibited film and video works by filmmaker Jeff Preiss and artists Juliette Blightman and Jason Hirata, deal with different concepts of framing time, like the lifespan of a gallery, a live record of a show, or the labor spent on the production of images.

Using homespun camera shots or unconventional editing techniques, these structural, collaborative, and subjective approaches sit somewhere between an artwork and a document. Locating Preiss, Blightman and Hirata in Graham’s pavilion creates a bridge with the late artist’s own early, experimental use of the moving image. Much like Graham’s installations, the gallery, exhibition, or performative event becomes a vessel in which to record bodily movement, mimic the human eye, or convey the experience of an artwork.

In his research, Demircan reconsiders the agency of documentary films of art and exhibitions as an autonomous art form in itself and not as an applied practice. Left to conventional usage, the afterimage of exhibitions, openings or performances can only offer an uncritical or unilateral view of history. As such, Time Frame proposes alternatives, or counterpoints, to the processes of standardization that documentation has undergone in recent decades. Especially during its evolution from what was primarily a record-keeping practice into something that has increasingly become a form of publicity on social media.

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