Film as Sculpture. WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels

It is quite common today to find cinematic approaches to the artistic practice – various kinds of approach which extend beyond the moving image to include performances, live works, and sculpture as well. Film as Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Elena Filipovic at Wiels (Brussels), looks to a new generation of artists who aim to create works that are in between two seemingly contradictory media: Films, and Sculpture. The exhibition is clearly linked to the legacy of 1970s Expanded Cinema, putting the slippery relation between the moving image and the sculptural object in foreground. The artists involved in the exhibition work with film or video that are also physical environments, their works are complete only within that sculptural-cinematic scenario. While enjoying the exhibition we have the perception that every artwork is the result of an hybridation process. A process started years ago, but still ongoing.

Films and sculptures don’t remain pure; they become building blocks to be used in original ways. Rosa Barba sees the filmic image’s celluloid, light, as well as the projector itself as potentially sculptural elements that dissolve traditional hierarchies between moving images and the machines that make them possible. Rachel Harrison brings together common objects and cinematic apparatuses. João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva manipulate the filmic form with a sculptural attention to the means of presentation, screening a selection of their films on a specially designed platform that is at once pedestal, stage, and viewing bench. The result is that what is emphasized is the sense of media heterogeneity.

Rosalind Krauss sustains in Sculpture in the Expanding Field (in October Vol. 8, Spring 1979) that Sculptures could be anything, because they could encompass a much broader range of media such as “photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself” – and we could add that this definition is true for art as much as it is for sculpture.

Film as Sculpture, curated by Elena Filipovic, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels through August 18, 2013

Zbynêk Baladràn & Jiři Kovanda, The Nervous System, 2011. Ten rolls of positive film strips, nylon thread, 100 m of flax strìng, a duvet and a cactus. Installation view, Kunstverein Milan, 2011. Courtesy of the artists and hunt kastner artworks, Prague.

Bojan Šarčević, The Breath-Taker is The Breath-Giver (Film C), 2009. Super 16 mm film, colour, sound; perspex, 300 × 300 × 200 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.

Rachel Harrison, AA, 2010. Wood, bubble wrap, cardboard, acrylic, tennis shirt, A/V cart, DVD player, speakers, projector, extension cord, five hair rollers, pack of gum, ear plugs, and American Apparel video, color, sound, 18 minutes (2009). Courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photography by Brian Forrest.