I See, So I See So. Messages From Harry Smith
September 5th – December 20th 2015, Temporary Gallery Cologne
Exhibition curated by Regina Barunke and Anja Dreschke
With Peter Adair, Kasper Akhøj & Tamar Guimarães, Wallace Berman, Franco Pinna, Harry Smith, Suzanne Treister, Rosemarie Trockel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
"My movies are made by God; I am just the medium for them". The experimental filmmaker, mystic and ethnomusicologist, Harry Everett Smith was a major protagonist of American counterculture of the 1960s and was especially well known in Europe for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music. His works combine autobiographical links to 19th-century occultism and spiritism with anthropological (sound) studies on the shamanism of the Lummi Nation und experiments with psychedelic substances in the attempt to visualise synaesthetic and mystic experiences. Using Harry Smith’s life and work as its starting point, the group exhibition "I See, So I See So. Messages from Harry Smith" presents artists and theorists working at the interface between visual art, film and anthropology. In their examinations of mediumism as a ritual, experimental and artistic practice, each of them raise specific questions concerning media semantics, exploring the politics of the aestheticisation, commodification and globalisation of ecstatic practices and their experimental appropriation and transformations through the means of art. The "medium" itself - in its two-fold sense as technical media and personal medium - presents itself in this way in the crosshairs of divergent artistic and scientific approaches and connections.
IMAGES
1— exhibition view 2 — Harry Everett Smith: String figure, Courtsey by John Cohen. 3 — Suzanne Treister: Hexen 2.0 Tarot. London: Black Dog Publishing 2012. 4 — Peter Adair: Holy Ghost People (USA 1967), film still. 5 — exhibition view 6 — Kasper Akhøj & Tamar Guimarães: A Família do Capitão Cervásio (Capitain Gervasio's Family), 2013/2014 7 — Harry Everett Smith 8 — exhibition view 9 — Apichatpung Weerasethakul, Windows, 1999, video still. 10 — Harry Everett Smith: Film #17, Mirror Animations Extended, 1962-1976. 11 — Harry Everett Smith: Film #14, Late Superimpositions, 1964. Courtesy Harry Smith Archives, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles Photos: Simon Vogel
TALKS AND SCREENINGS
23 Oktober 2015
Francis McKee: Even the Dead Rise Up29 Oktober 2015
Joachim Koester und Michaela Schäuble: Tarantism Revisited. Ecstatic and Mimetic. Practices in Art and Anthropology
Joachim Koester: Tarantism, 200730 Oktober 2015
Ulrich van Loyen: Mit der Stimme eines Anderen. Macht und Besessenheit im Kult des 'Heiligen' Alberto. Filme von Luigi di Gianni3 November 2015
Henning Engelke und Rani Singh: Harry Smith
Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main4 November 2015
Henning Engelke und Rani Singh: Harry Smith. Underground Ethnographer7 November 2015
Harry Smith: Film #12. Heaven and Earth Magic, 1957-6212 November 2015
Ilka Becker: Magic Mushrooms (Bruce Conner, Storm De Hirsh, Étienne O'Leary, Gary Lee-Nova, Harry Smith)29 November 2015
Heike Behrend (und Armin Linke): Satan Crucified, 20113 Dezember 2015
Rainer Knepperges und Ehler Voss: Ghost Hunting17 Dezember 2015
Erhard Schüttpelz und Carlo Peters: Halleluwah!
Harry Smith: Film #1-5,7 Early Abstractions, 1939-56
REVIEWS
Messages from Harry Smith. Frieze. Issue 177, March 2016
I See, So I See So. Kunstforum Bd. 237 Globale, 2015.
Folkes Stimme. Sueddeutsche Zeitung. 6.12.2015.