[spectre] Back to Berlin--Exhibition of video works by Linda Wallace

[Geert Lovink]

Back to Berlin
An exhibition of video works by Linda Wallace
http://www.machinehunger.com.au

Open from January 31 to February 11
Tuesday to Sunday 12 noon till 8pm
Artist talk / drinks, 5pm, Thursday February 1

NewYorkRioTokyo Gallery
http://www.nyrt.net/
Eberswalder Str. 4, Berlin

(Eberswalder Str station, U2 line. Opposite Berlin Mauer Park, after 
the police station if walking from U-Bahn)

Back to Berlin is a transmedialepartner 
event.http://www.transmediale.de/ 

The video works showing in Back to Berlin speak to the experience of 
being between places, of being both here, there and there, all the time 
immersed within the strange overlap between media and televisual 
non-space and lived realities.

The three video works are filters for one or another global media event.

entanglements (2004) takes as its starting point the 2003 invasion of 
Iraq as seen through the siphon of Australian television. Concurrent 
with the invasion was the hit series The Block, a home renovation 
competition. These and other images, for example, pictures from the 
2002 Moscow Theatre Siege are woven together and projected through 
curtains, as television becomes the window on the world.

The three-screen Living Tomorrow (2005) began as one thing and ended as 
something quite different as a huge event pierced the narrative 
mid-production. This event was the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van 
Gogh in late-2004. The murder is woven into a larger story told by 
hand-made subtitles over segments cut from the soap opera “The Bold and 
the Beautiful”, itself the highest rating television show on the planet 
watched daily by over 450 million people.

TOR (2006), the most recent work is by comparison simpler and shows 
snippets from the journey on the M19 bus down Berlin’s Kurfuerstendamm 
on the evening of Germany’s win over Argentina in the 2006 World Cup. 
The faces in TORbeg the question: who are the Germans?

“The art of Linda Wallace invites us to reflect upon our televisual 
environment. Day-time soap operas, classic cinema, European song 
contests, news broadcasts and the pervasive images of war and terrorism 
are juxtaposed and interspersed in both linear videos and multi-screen 
projections. Her work takes as its starting point the context of 
communications media which she describes as “a vast labyrinthine 
media-datascape”. Our relationships with both the natural and urban 
environment, and with each other, are increasingly negotiated via 
electronic means. This is a world in which commercial television 
actively maintains conventional and homogenous categories around 
identity, politics and gender. In response, Wallace fragments, re-mixes 
and re-dubs the television image, introducing a spectrum of meanings 
back into the digital screen. This is not to say that she is attempting 
to reinstate a kind of ‘truth’. Rather, her project forges links 
between cultures as they are mediated in a televisual landscape.” (from 
the essay by Victoria Lynn 
http://www.machinehunger.com.au/LivingTomorrow/Lynnessay.pdf-- German 
translation by Andreas Kallfelz available on the website.)

Linda Wallace has a PhD from the Australian National University. Her 
video work has been shown extensively, and she has also curated a wide 
range of international media exhibitions. Linda Wallace lives and works 
in Amsterdam.

contact Linda Wallace at

put:::    lwallace ::::then the @ sign, then::::    xs4all.nl

NewYorkRioTokyo Gallery
http://www.nyrt.net/
Eberswalder Str. 4
D-10437 Berlin
+49 (0) 30 440 33 678
mobile +49 (0) 177 788 51 77