Places limited to 15 so book early to avoid disappointment
Bookings: Alliance Française, Enterprise House, 36 Mary Street, Cork. Tel: 021 4310677
more info: www.corkfrenchfilmfestival.com

e v+ a 2008 & The National Sculpture   Factory present   In Conversation:   Hou Hanru & Annie Fletcher   Venue: Dominican Biblical Institute,   corner of Cecil and Dominic Street   (near LCGA), Limerick   Date: Saturday 8 March 2008   Time: 3-5pm   Admission Free. All Welcome

OPEN / INVITED e v+ a 2008 –Too Early For Vacation and the Limerick City Gallery of Art, in collaboration with the National Sculpture Factory, presents the e v+ a 2008 Curator, Hou Hanru, in conversation with Cork Caucus co-curator Annie Fletcher, discussing the relationship between art and society.

Born in 1963 in China and based in (moved to) Paris in 1990s, Hou Hanru is now a San Francisco based critic and curator, where he is Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Chair of Exhibition Studies and Museology at the San Francisco Art Institute.  He was the curator for the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007), in Turkey, the latest in a long list of projects that explore the relations between contemporary art and cultural and social change.

Annie Fletcher is an Irish independent critic and curator who lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent projects include Be(com)ing Dutch in the Age of Global Democracy at Van Abbemuseum (co-curated with Charles Esche) If I Can't Dance - I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (co-curated with Frederique Bergholtz) and Cork Caucus: on art, possibility and democracy with Charles Esche, Tara Byrne & Sean Kelly (NSF) and Art/Not Art in Cork, Ireland 2005 (www.corkcaucus.org). 

This lecture will take place on Saturday afternoon, the 8^th of March, the opening weekend of e v+ a 2008.  The Dominican Biblical Institute is a new venue, with extra capacity. It is located near the Limerick City Gallery of Art, on the corner of Cecil and Dominic Street (across from Costello's Tavern).

Free admission.  All welcome.

The National Sculpture Factory is committed to being a national resource, and thus are delighted to collaborate with e v+ a on this occasion and present part of our programme outside of Cork. This event launches a special series of Cork Caucus legacy events, and is in association with the NSF Lecture Programme 2008. 

For more information on our lecture programme and other NSF projects and events, contact the NSF Programme Manager: Treasa O'Brien.

Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood)

Precociously gifted French director Leos Carax first caught the attention of critics and cinema lovers when only 23 with his debut feature Boy Meets Girl in 1983. Mauvais Sang three years later developed his ambitious poetic vision even further. Taking his directorial name from an anagram of his first two names (Alex Oscar Dupont), naming the protagonist in his first three films his real name Alex (played by the extraordinary Denis Lavant in all three), and starring Juliette Binoche, his then real-life partner, in Mauvais Sang and his subsequent feature Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf (its title and theme perhaps another pun on his real name Dupont?) all hint at the personal but cryptic style of Carax.

Mauvais Sang is many things - a colour-saturated film noir; a love letter to the history of cinema (taking in references to silent film, Buster Keaton and Chaplin, film noir, nouvelle vague); a giddy combination of some of the most dynamic sequences in cinema with brooding enigmatic tableau vivants where nothing seems to happen, but beautifully; a cautious love story dealing with what Carax terms in French the "inespere" (the un-hoped for, or that which one doesn't dare hope for - a typically Caraxian ambiguous combination of love as the fulfillment of hope, the danger of getting what you wish for, and that which you hope for not to happen).

The plot involves Lavant, a street huckster in Paris in the near future, being hired by his late father's criminal associates (one played by veteran actor/singer Serge Reggiani) for his sleight-of-hand skills to steal a serum for an AIDS-like disease which is affecting those who "make love without being in love". He falls for Binoche, the mistress of the gang boss, and their love story intertwines with the theft plot, which unravels somewhat via unlikely twists such as Lavant's preposterous taking himself hostage, but narrative coherence is not the point for Carax here. Hyper-aware of cinema's history, but refusing the postmodern options of ironic distance or beautiful images devoid of depth (associated with the "cinema du look" of Beneix and Besson in the 80s), he is trying for nothing less than to re-invent cinema in a fusion of modernist experimentation with intense passionate engagement.

Focussing on Lavant's rough-hewn physical charisma and the more delicate features of the young Binoche, Mauvais Sang features new types of cinematic character, neither realistic nor archetypal, physically embodied but somehow angelic, and merging with the cinematic medium itself as moving images. Carax's audacious flourishes, painterly mis en scenes, literary-cryptic dialogue, and heightened use of pop and classical music combine with Jean Yves Esscoffier's rich Godardian cinematography to produce a unique cinematic poetry.
- Alan Murphy
    

Mauvais Sang will be screened in the original French version with English subtitles.  This free film screening coincides with the Cork French Film Festival 2008.

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Beuys (still a discussion)
By Seán Lynch

A small mound of chalkdust was located in Cork in recent months. Originally, this dust fell from a blackboard used by Joseph Beuys in his lecture at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, on September 26 1974.  A local clergyman erased Beuys’ notes and drawings afterwards. A young man in the audience then collected the chalkdust off the floor, and put it in his pocket.  The next day’s Cork Examiner summarized the ideas discussed that evening, ‘Beuys shows man as an essential creative being in a state of evolution.  He searches for a means of restoring this sense of creativity in all spheres of life.

Following the success of Kenji Endo's Replicant sculptural installation on the exterior of the NSF building last year, we have commissioned artist Sean Lynch to create a project in  2008, with the only stipulation being that it must have a visual manifestation on the exterior wall.

Sean has been developing a work since September 2007, and has made a couple of site visits to Cork to research events that might be in the collective memory and historical photographs and signage in and of the city.  Through this research and a previous project he has made, he became aware of the Joseph Beuys lecture that took place in the Crawford Gallery in 1974.  The story goes that a priest wiped the chalk from the blackboard after the lecture (in other locations where Beuys lectured, the blackboards were kept and preserved as artworks or fetishised souvenirs of the 'shaman' artist).  Seán recently met an artist in Cork who was present at this lecture and who gathered the chalk dust after the priest's erasure.  The artist, who has asked to remain anonymous, has given this chalk dust to Sean, who plans to photograph it and present it as a large scale photographic work on the exterior of the National Sculpture Factory early in 2008.  The NSF's 2005 project Cork Caucus: on art, possibility and democracy was partly inspired by Beuys' idea of the artist as social engineer, his naming of Ireland as the 'Brain of Europe' and his proposal to establish the 'Free International University' in Ireland. In this context, the chalk is like a physical residue or signifier of (a) history - a visual hinge on which stories and memories may rotate and be brought back into consciousness.  Even the story elucidated in this paragraph has the potential to change or inform that story, or at least to elongate it.

Sean's practice investigates the stories at the edges of main events, and often references public sculpture and architecture as visual symbols of the collective memory.  Mike Fitzpatrick has described his practice as a type of 'activism towards history'.  It is also a way of remembering something sidelined or anecdotal, repositioning its place in history through new
framings and contexts, and like the moral of the time machine, ultimately changing the nature of that history itself.

Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch is an artist based in Frankfurt and County Kerry.  He studied history at the University of Limerick and Fine Art at the Stadelschule, Frankfurt. He has exhibited solo exhibitions at Galway Arts Festival, Ritter & Staiff, Frankfurt, and Limerick City Gallery of Art.  He has taken part in recent group exhibitions at Office Baroque, Antwerp, the Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen, the Lucas Cranach Preis, Kronach, and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork.