[spectre] Premiere: Conceptual Paradise by Stefan Roemer (Modified by Geert Lovink) [u]

[sonja engelhardt]

Conceptual Paradise: There Is a Place for Sophistication

a film by Stefan Römer

Sat. 10 December 2005, 8 pm

Blackbox Kino, Filmmuseum Düsseldorf
Schulstraße 4, Düsseldorf
Reservations: 0211 - 899 24 90

Music by Gustav and Vert.
Both musicians will be playing live on stage:

Gustav, Vienna
Adam Butler (aka Vert), Cologne

Press Release for the Documentary Film Conceptual Paradise

In three years of filmic research, the artist and author Stefan Römer
has interviewed numerous outstanding international artists with his
film team. In engaging in intellectual exchanges before the camera,
Stefan Römer is able to develop a special filmic mode of reflecting on
the state of international contemporary art.

The film essay Conceptual Paradise: There Is a Place for Sophistication
traces out the debates that allowed the intellectual art movement of
“conceptual art” to emerge in the 1960s and led to the most relevant
questions in art today. The artists speak about their own artistic
practices and the socio-historical development of the various
conceptual movements. In so doing, it becomes clear that there can be
no one valid definition of conceptual art, since a permanent engagement
also makes up its theoretical and philosophical complexity, including
for example the question of whether there can be art without an object.

In these discussions with the most interesting artists and art
theorists alive today, the fiction and ideal of art as political
engagement are brought to life. The history of art is a history of
struggles around strategies of representation. This makes this film
about conceptual art also a film about filmmaking. Stefan Römer
reflects in numerous passages of the film with the well-known German
filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky about the documentary as a genre.

With the documentary essay Conceptual Paradise, Stefan Römer continues
his analytic engagement with forms and modes of narrative for artistic
documentation. Beside his extensive body of photography, his recent
work includes the Super 8 film Corporate Psycho Ambient (235 media Köln
on DVD 2004) and The Analysis of Beauty, a short film produced on the
basis of single photographic montages (on the DVD Loop Pool by Graw
Böckler, commissioned by Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen 2005).
His filmic praxis extends back before the period of video activism in
the mid-1990s, including interview videos, for example on the 1993
exhibition Unfair, and numerous multimedia punk performances in the
1980s.

Artists:
Vito Acconci, William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Art & Language
(Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden, Charles Harrison), Michael Asher, John
Baldessari, Robert Barry, Hartmut Bitomsky, Mel Bochner, Gregg
Bordowitz, Klaus vom Bruch, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Luis
Camnitzer, Jan Dibbets, Mark Dion, Atul Dodija, Sam Durant, Valie
EXPORT, Stano Filko, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Renée
Green, Shilpa Gupta, Hans Haacke, Res Ingold, Július Koller, Joseph
Kosuth, Jiri Kovanda, Sonia Khurana, David Lamelas, Sol LeWitt, Thomas
Locher, Marcel Odenbach, Yoko Ono, John Miller, Christian Philipp
Müller, Adrian Piper, Stephen Prina, Yvonne Rainer, Allan Ruppersberg,
Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Allen Sekula, Vivan Sundaram, Peter Weibel,
Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Willats, Heimo Zobernig u.a.

Curators/Theorists: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Alexander Alberro, Geeta
Kapoor, Sabeth Buchmann, Gregor Stemmrich, Charles Harrison, Geert
Lovink, Georg Schöllhammer, Hedi Saxenhuber.

In cooperation with Museum K21 Kunstsammlung im Ständehaus Düsseldorf.

Made possible with the financial support of Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

We will publish a conceptual book with the same title.