Centre Pompidou at the University of Technology, Sydney

Hors Pistes is an annual event at the Pompidou Centre featuring a program of internationally acclaimed moving image works. This year they have come to Sydney!

The University of Technology in association with the Alliance Francaise is thrilled to present a selection of these astounding and audacious works.

Screening at UTS' Bon March Studio over four Thursday evenings from 16 Aug-6 Septmber.

Program

• August 16, Flatform & Christelle Lheureux

  Flatform
  Flatform is a group of Italian artists who make experiments with the moving image that disorientate and unsettle viewers’ sense of space, time, motion, and perspective. Strange, beautiful and thrilling, Flatform films appear to defy the laws of physics (and cinema!).

  Christelle Lheureux
  Christelle Lheureux is a professor of cinema at the Swiss school HEAD and her installations and films carry her trademarks: a gracious tone; a dilated temporality; and fragile, finely-drawn characters. In Lheureux's La Malade Blanche (The White Disease), a little girl from a village in the Pyrenees is lead by a wild boar into caves with prehistoric paintings that are disappearing because of the mysterious "white disease".

• August 23, Salma Cheddadi & Erik Bünger

  Salma Cheddadi
  Salma Cheddadi’s film, Sweet Viking is a portrait of Jara, a 30 year old Icelandic singer, who is on a quest to find her father. It is also a portrait of Iceland, a land of lunar landscapes, sulphur, wind, pagan culture and dazzling pale light. Cheddadi works across performance, film and installation and is a graduate of the National School of the Art de Cergy.

  Erik Bünger
  Bünger studied composition at the Royal Stockholm College and now works as an artist, type-setter, musician and writer. Gospels is a captivating “assemblage” work made from fragments of interviews with famous Hollywood stars that builds towards an enigmatic reflection on God, religion, passion. Bünger’s The Third Man follows a man obsessed by the soundtrack of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. In this fascinating essayistic meditation, Bünger revisits the history of the cinema to prove that the song is a parasite infecting mankind, and a means of controlling our brain.

• August 30, Herman Asselberghs & Phil Collins
  

  Herman Asselberghs
  The Belgian artist, Hermann Asselberghs, is also an art critic, theorist, and professor of cinema in Brussels. Asselberghs’ Speech Act, begins with a reflection on the most expensive film in history, James Cameron's Avatar. It then morphs into a polemic on power relations between Europe and Africa and becomes a political film about what seeing means. "If you want to see the world, close your eyes".

  Phil Collins
  Phil Collins is an internationally recognised visual artist (nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize) whose films employ a diversity of forms: The Meaning of Style offers a poetic meditation on English colonial history and Malaysian subculture; Soy Mi Madre explores melodrama and the popular South American telenovela TV form; and in Marxism Today, Collins mixes personal contemporary interviews with extraordinary archival footage to investigate what became of the old teachers of Marxism-Leninism in East Germany.

• September 6, Valérie Mréjen, Andrizzi and Lindeen
  

  Valérie Mréjen
  Valerie Mrejen is a novelist, visual artist and videographer. Her work was represented in the Pompidou Centre’s first Hors Pistes program in 2006 and has remained definitely and defiantly "off piste". The program showcases three of her recent video works (the first is made in collaboration with Bertrand Scheffer).

  Mauro Andrizzi and Marcus Lindeen
  Argentine Mauro Andrizzi and Swede Marcus Lindeen's, Accidentes Gloriosos stems from an award from the prestigious Danish CPH:DOX festival, that sponsors the production of a film by two directors from two different countries. Accidentes Gloriosos interweaves nine stories about death and transformation: ranging from a man dying in an Arctic expedition to another waking up with a transplanted pig's heart. Beautifully photographed in pearly black and white, a dark film but not a sad one.