OTTO;OR, UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE : BRUCE LABRUCE
Directed By Bruce LaBruce
94 Minutes
Germany/Canada -2008
6th October 2008

A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by under-ground filmmaker Medea Yarn, whobegins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is trying to finish "Up with Dead People," the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that there is a wallet in his back pocket that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember a few details, including memories of his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.

Bigert & Bergström:
LAST SUPPER
12 AUG ‘08 - 3 SEP ‘08

The last supper has been given to prisoners facing the death penalty as long as the punishment has existed. The tradition stems from funeral rites where the deceased person was given food on his deathbed to protect him on his journey to the afterlife. Today, the ritual of giving the last supper to the condemned person has been de-tached from its origin, and can be perceived to be as absurd as the punishment it accompanies.
Last Supper focuses on this discrepancy between historical "meaning" and contemporary use of a tradition that has lost its connection with the past.

The film mixes documentary material with sculptural installations and animated graphics. The main character is the former death row chef Brian Price, who reconstructs one of the 200 final meals that he prepared during his time as inmate in Huntsville State Prison, Texas, US.
The film was shot during 2004 in the US, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Kenya, South Africa and Sweden.

Wu Wenguang
China Village Self-Governance Project
4-Channel Video Installation
7 June 2008 – 27 June 2008
Gallery Hours Everyday 12pm – 8pm
Opening Party: 7 June 2008 7PM
The Year 2005 saw the beginning of the groundbreaking China Village Documentary Project, which, for the first time in China, opens a visual channel from the villages by putting video cameras in the hands of villagers across the nation. This project represents a new direction for documentary filmmaking in China. In its first phase, the selected topic for documentation was village self-governance:

”What difference has twenty years of democracy in China’s 700,000 villages made?” Headed by China’s premier documentary filmmaker Mr. WU Wenguang and Mr. JIAN Yi, filmmaker and photographer with the EU program, a group of enthusiastic young people based in Wu Wenguang’s Caochangdi (“Land of Grass”) Workstation in Beijing were the main executors of all these activities.

SPECULATIVE ARCHIVE
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
17 May - 6 June 2008

“Authority and hegemony reside less in the capacity to make commands than in limiting the range of political discourse and choices. Having previously focused on unmasking those processes whereby the past is covered up, Meltzer and Thorne show that it is equally, if not more, imperative that the future remain visible in the dissentient telling of—and listening to—multiple, divergent stories.”

Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne produce videos, photographs, installations, and published texts. From 1999 to 2003, their projects centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed and realized, specifically in relation to faith and global politics.

Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), the 2006 California Biennial, Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery (London) travelling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among many others.

The Complete Blindness Series
Tran T. Kim-Trang
26 April - 25 March 2008

"A rare video artist who is equally comfortable talking about Freud and the Khmer Rouge." Steve Anderson, The Independent Fourteen years after beginning The Blindness Series, Tran T. Kim-Trang completedEpilogue: The Palpable Invisibility of Life (2006, 14 min.) -- inspired by the exhibitionMemoirs of the Blind, curated by Jacques Derrida for the Louvre Museum. Vastly different in style, the eight videos of the series investigate blindness and its metaphors. In addition to the Los Angeles premiere of Epilogue, the screening tonight includesamaurosis (2002, 28 min.), a portrait of blind guitarist Nguyen Duc Dat; alexia (2000, 10 min.), about "word blindness"; ekleipsis (1998, 22 min.), which explores hysterical blindness among Cambodian women refugees; ocularis (1997, 21 min.), a piece on surveillance technology; kore (1994, 17 min.), an examination of the relationship between vision and sexuality; operculum (1993, 14 min.), which focuses on cosmetic eyelid surgery; and aletheia (1992, 16 min.), the introduction to the series.

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Pig’s Eye
Tuksina Pipitkul [Haru]
29 MAR ‘08 - 23 APR ‘08

Although outwardly evoking anime-style monsters and plush collectibles, Tuksina “Haru” Pipitkul’s sculptural installations offer pointed critiques of political issues involving non-human animals in Thailand. Her previous work has addressed the mass-cullings of chickens during the bird flu scare, the illegal trade of crocodiles, and the exploitation of elephants in downtown Bangkok’s tourist centers. “Pig’s Eye,” her new solo show, takes as its focus the public slaughter of 4,000 pigs in Nakhon Pathom by rural Thai farmers protesting the falling price of pork. In addition to this major sculptural installation, the show includes a new video that investigates the human phenomena of war, genocide, and catastrophe in the guise of a Godzilla movie.

Artist Bio:

Tuksina Pipitkul graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts from Silpakorn University and an M.A. from California State University. In addition to her graduate study in the US, she held an artist’s residency in Moriya, Japan. Her most recent solo shows have been at Cedar Art Center in California and the Japan Foundation Gallery in Bangkok. Her work has been exhibited in Thailand, Australia, Italy, Serbia, Japan, and the US. She currently teaches in the School of Fine Art at Bangkok University. This is her second time exhibiting at Conference of Birds.