The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Artist Carlos Casas together with eminent composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock will discuss their approaches to film, video, and soundscapes. Sharing their experience of collaborating on Avalanche—the project on view in Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II—Casas and Niblock will expand on notions of improvisation and site-specificity.

The work Avalanche documents Hichigh, a village in Tajikistan and one of the highest located villages in the world. With each iteration and presentation, the work will change according to the context and space it’s being presented.

++

BIOGRAPHIES

Carlos Casas (Spain/France) works with film and the sonic. His last three films have been awarded in festivals around the world including Torino, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City. He has recently concluded a trilogy of films, END, dedicated to the most extreme environments on the planet: Patagonia, Aral Sea, and Siberia. Avalanche is a lifelong project and site-specific film based on one of the highest inhabited villages in the Pamirs, a mountain range in Central Asia. His films have been shown in festivals such as the Venice Film Festival; Rotterdam Film Festival; FID Marseille; BAFICI Buenos Aires; Jeonju International Film Festival, South Korea; Documenta Madrid; FICCO Mexico; and others. His works have been presented at institutions including Tate Modern, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hangar Bicocca, Milan; Bozar Bruxelles; Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro; MIS São Paulo; Centre Pompidou and Fondation Cartier, Paris; Centre Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona; MALBA, Buenos Aires; and GAM, Torino. He was Creative Director of Colors Music and Films from 2005-08 where he developed audio-visual projects and music research in various regions around the world. He is Co-founder of Map Productions and the visual sound label Von Archives. Casas is Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, United States, and ECAM, the Madrid film school. He was an NTU CCA Singapore Artist-in-Residence from December 2017 to February 2018.

Phill Niblock (United States) is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video, and computers. Since the mid-60s he has been making music and intermedia performances shown at numerous venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; the Kitchen, New York; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge; World Music Institute, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Metz; and the Maerzmusik Festival, Berlin. Since 1985, he is the Director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation (EI) in New York, which he joined as member in 1968. He is the Producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1,000 performances) and the curator of EI’s XI Records label. In 1993, he was part of the formation of an EI organisation in Gent, which supports artists-in-residence. Niblock’s music is available on the XI, Moikai, Mode, VonArchive, Touch, and Extreme labels. In 2014, he was the recipient of the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York. Recently, he presented films and photographs from 1970 and ’71 at Tate Modern, London, with music from the past three years.

++

A public programme of Stagings. Soundings. Readings. Free Jazz II.