THE DREAMERS
12. Febr - 01. March 2008Noé Sendas likes to construct a great number of characters, (Ex: The Lodger, The Collector, The Hunter). Each character works like a Benjaminian collector, as a distinct assembler of moving and still images, with an eye for encounters that slip unnoticed through our hands, recovering, renovating and re-evaluating our relationship with modern-day objects.
The Dreamers consists of two object-installations and one video-installation. It presents a collection of Dreamers, captured from several different films, which the artist takes as his material and transfigures with his own concerns, with his ability to arrange, tinker and prompt involuntary memory and unanticipated links. Sendas thus personifies the leitmotif of this show, the Dreamer as the ones who scent and imagine spirits in things and simultaneously, the one who dreams of living the lives of many different people.
Fallen, 2008 (sculpture)
A figure/sculpture mimicking the fallen Angel from Wim Wenders –1987 Der Himmel über Berlin (The Sky Over Berlin aka the Wings of Desire), Damiel after making his decision, and falling out of the sky with his armour, will be presented on a Berlin sidewalk in front of the gallery during the showing hours.
Re-staging, to be more precise, objectualizing the legendary fall, part of the Berliners collective imaginary. Sendas returns to the Becketian eternal present, given coherence only by one's individual perception of the situation one finds oneself in, however absurd it might be, however much of it is memory and how much of it is happening now.
The Pillow Case, 2008 (audio object)
Inside a white pillow attached to the wall at heads height a monologue can be heard.
This monologue is a re-edition of fragments of a dialogue that punctuates the film Dodes' ka Den by Akira Kurosawa. From the original dialogue in which a man and his son, who live inside a ruined automobile, have a long conversation about building their own house. The artist presents us with a never-ending description of construction of an idyllic home, never ending as the Dreamer repeatedly initiates his idealization, as he always finds an excuse to re-start from ground zero. As we hear the monologue, time passes away, and we also give up on house and restart our wandering.
‘Dead Weight’ (Side A), 2008 (video installation)
In the video 'Dead Weight', we see a man on the verge of jumping from a window. Down below, a man who sees him runs inside the building, attempting to rescue whom he can only presume is about to jump. The rescuer becomes the rescuee, that is, he only comes to occupy the place of the suicide: on the ledge, poised and ready to jump. The video work was made with images from films that have fallen in the Public Domain.
Noé Sendas (1972) was born in Brussels, lives and works in Berlin and Lisbon.
“Noé sendas is a Berlin-based Portuguese artist. Since the beginning of his career, in the mid-‘90s, he has developed an ouvre based on the politics of collecting. In his videos, sculptures, and digital photographic collages he brings together diverse components of western culture and, like a DJ armed with a sampler, mixes them in order to assign them new meanings. In many of his works one recognizes influences from literature and cinema- for example, citations from Joyce and Beckett, Hitchcock and Godard. These references become, further, part of an exploration of the age-old theme of the Double, an exploration in which self-representation often plans plays a significant role (…)”
Education
CASA DE VELAZQUEZ, Madrid, 2008 (residency -international studio program)
KUNSTLERHAUS BETHANIEN, Berlin, 1999-00 (residency -international studio program)
CITÉ INTERNATIONAL DES ARTS, Paris, 1998 (residency -Marie de Paris program)
SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, Chicago, 1997
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ARTS, London, 1993
AR.CO- CENTER FOR THE ARTS, Lisbon, 1992-96
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- Fallen, 2008
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- film still series, 2008
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- The Pillow Case, 2008
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- ‘Dead Weight’ (Side A), 2008
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- Dead Weight’ (Side A), 2008
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