Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

An evening on… is a thematic evening featuring live performances as well as screenings and installations.

Sculpting the Land casts a new light on one of Art History’s oldest themes: landscape. With Guy Sherwin, Courtisane’s Artist in Focus, shattering the illusionary threedimensionality of the portrayed landscape in his performance and with Courtisane’s first production: ‘Draw a Straight Line and Follow It’ by Luke Fowler and Lee Patterson. In March 2009, they followed a straight line through the centre of Ghent, connecting two green spots, recording what they met on their way.
This is the complete programme:

River Yar – Chris Welsby & William Raban (UK, 1972, 2×16mm, 35’) – screening
This film on two screens was shot from a watermill on Isle of Wight. A camera took one frame each minute during three weeks in autumn and spring.

Cobra Mist – Emily Richardson, Chris Watson & Benedict Drew (UK) – performance
Land-escape-art, existential, visceral and elemental (Andrew Kötting)
Cobra Mist tries to unravel the mysterious relationship between the landscape of Orford Ness and traces of its military past.

565685981—> 565615566 / Draw a Straight Line and Follow It – Luke Fowler & Lee Patterson brengen Composition # 10 van La Monte Young – in opdracht van Courtisane festival
Filmmaker Luke Fowler and sound artist Lee Patterson walk along a straight line through Ghent and document their walk in image and sound. They give their personal reinterpretation of La Monte Young’s score for Composition 1960 #10 which has only 1 instruction: “Draw a straight line and follow it.”

Paper Landscape – Guy Sherwin (UK) – performance
Sherwin uses a super-8 film, a transparent screen and white paint to confront the two-dimensionality of a screen with the illusionary three-dimensionality of the captured image. During Filmfeedback, a screening/talk at Sphinx on Sat 25 April, he will elaborate on his artistic practice and on this performance.

13 Lakes – James Benning (US, 2004, 16mm, 130’) – screening
Thirteen ten-minute static takes from different lakes in the United States. The segments repeat the same basic framing, presenting the horizon-line in the centre of the frame, dividing lake and sky into approximately equivalent fields. Human interference is reduced to a mere rimple on the water’s surface. An exercise in weightlessness for the viewer.

What am weyoui waiting for? – Richard T. Walker (UK, 2008, dvd, 9’ 26”) – installation
This piece finds singer/songwriter Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) singing to the landscape in a lament devoted to intense Sublime experiences promised (but yet to be delivered) in the 18th century by writers such as Kant and Burke.
As in most of Walker’s work there is continual parallelling between an attempt to attain and understanding of (and the consequential unity with) nature.
Earlier, Courtisane presented Richard T. Walker’s video Successive inconceivable events on this theme.