Lorde Selys / Open Studio / Second Right

From 6th to 26th of October 2018, in the frame of her residency at A.I.R. FUTURA

Lorde Selys will be showcasing old moving-image works and new writings at Karlin Studios. The open Studio/Salon/Office/Repository/Performance & Screening room is located on your second right, after the entrance.

Dusty Talks (audio-visual reading): Friday, October 19th 2018, 7 pm.

Words, sounds and images derived from several artworks, territories, digital spaces and other ethereal albeit political passages speech out the linguistic residue of possible worlds, defying categories of time, gender, genre and ownership.

Lorde Selys is an artist working collaboratively with words, lenses, multi-definitions of space, their users and inhabitants. Her works, including texts, screenings, performances and installations has been presented internationally: in Belgium (Etablissements d’en face, Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, and De La Charge), Lebanon (Ashkal Alwan, 98Weeks, Centre Culturel Français & Beirut Art Center), France (Palais de Tokyo, No Found Photo Fair), Poland (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art), Italy (Mediterranea 16), Norway (Hardbakka Ruins Project), Germany (Arab Film Festival AlFilm), and Palestine (Al-Mahatta Gallery, Qalandia Biennale, Benjamin in Palestine). Between 2006 and 2010 she collaborated with the Aether9 group – an online platform for translocal story-telling and real-time performance. With the collective Radio Earth Hold, she enquires on the possibilities and pitfalls of international solidarity through sonic spatial, in collaboration with the Qualandia Biennale and the Serpentine Gallery. She currently researches human versus nonhuman logics of memory, their dramaturgic, and political form of cohabitation at the Visual Culture department at Goldsmith College, London. 

Currently on screen: 

1. Spring Cleaning / 9 min / 2009

Documentary video about an emblematic leisure zone on the flanks of Beirut, the "Sporting club", during low season, where different social bodies and physical matters get in close contact. Narrative on the relations of construction and erasement of space.

2. The Ragpicker, the film crew and the city / 6 min / 2011

This video is an accumulation of sequence shots where the film crew and the garbage collecting company share the same frame with the city as a background. It seems they are both working each one of them in their own manner, for the same sake; the representation of the city. Media and garbage.

3. Sorties (Picnic+Exodus) / 19 min / 2014

Sorties is a video project that includes potential leaking versions of different content and durations to be seen in screenings or on the web.

These photographs representing artworks are used as pretext, interface to speak of something else, of a here and now, namely Beirut, in its contemporaneity, made of de-phased narratives. A body of words made of several voices serves as a subtext and partition that is then interpreted, translated into connected and disconnected filmed spaces in the city.

This version of Sorties is a videographic essay which formalises here two types of drift:

Picnic (12 min) and Exodus (6 min).

Words (excerpts from the interview of 13 people) were composed into a score as to orientate one's gaze through the city, oscillating between the collective and personal, the remembering and the projecting. The two parted film works as a spacial loop from and out the art institution, as a point of visualisation for anachronistic and anatopic events, underlying both the permeability and opacity between a place of representation such as an art centre and its neighbourhood, the city.

Sorties were commissioned by the Beirut Art Center, Georges Didi-Huberman and Arno Gisinger for the project Atlas, Suites. Sorties stands also as an audio-visual anagram for Stories.

4. Notes on a Post-Work Shop / 9 min / 2016

Wandering around the ruins of a post-industrial Scandinavian city, a group of "creatives" are attending a workshop on notions such as full automation, the future of capitalism and a “world after work”. Among them; a dancer, a musician and a dog are playing and improvising with surfaces, vibrations and objects. The camera reads and visualises the apparent opposition between critical thinking and sensual touching, techno-political speculations and ancestral gestures. A fish dies.