Wavelengths 3: Time and Tide

Bridging eras, epochs, and the cosmos, this programme brings together new works by three major artists and a tribute to a recently departed legend, each reflecting on the fluid nature of time and its passing.

Shot on 65mm film using a self-constructed camera and projected on a 70mm print, Forever…Forever by Austrian experimentalist Johann Lurf captures a year of days, nights, passing clouds, and flowing water. Dedicated at once to the artist’s late father and newborn son, the film rises above formalism to offer a deeply felt reflection on time as fleeting and eternal. Perspective and permanence also inform Ben Russell’s playful La Prospettiva (1653), filmed in the Colonnade at the Palazzo Spada in Rome, capturing the central composition of the Baroque illusionism masterpiece but also modest moments of the labour  dedicated to its upkeep.

Next, we pay homage to the recently departed Armenian-Italian artist Yervant Gianikian, whose work with Angela Ricci Lucchi offered an invaluable contribution to world cinema writ large, and to the history of Wavelengths in particular. In their 2001 piece, Electric Fragments No. 1 - Rom (Men), 8mm footage documenting a Roma family’s migration across Italy trades a cold ethnographic regard for one of pathos.

The programme concludes with James Richards’ Fevers. Taking as his starting point — less by way of invocation than summoning — the text from Marguerite Duras’ Les Mains négatives and Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, Richards weaves together stirring fragments composed over the last four years, including repurposed material from friends and collaborators — like Wavelengths alum Steve Reinke — to produce a haunting reflection on the present-day.

JESSE CUMMING 

Content warning: extreme strobing