Stray Light

In February 2013, the New World Symphony presented Making the Right Choices: A John Cage Centennial Celebration, a spectacular three-day festival dedicated to the music and ideas of John Cage. As part of the festival, NWS hosted a new video installation entitled NWS: 4’33″, created by New York-based composer, director, performer and recording artist Mikel Rouse; which consisted of video performances contributed by Cage fans via a special YouTube site set up by Rouse. The public was invited to record and submit their own video, and visit the installation during the festival to see their work in the SunTrust Pavilion at the New World Center. These videos will be included in an online Archive of the event, a lasting tribute to this defining and seminal artist.

The decision to move to Holland doesn't sound like a wise idea. Why move to a country that could be flooded at any moment? For the last 25 years, the political climate has shifted. The public debate on migration has become harsher, more heated, and polarized. What would have been considered right-wing xenophobia back then, is now considered mainstream. Populists simplify complex realities into good and evil, victims and perpetrators: ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Their rhetoric often consists of dehumanizing words and metaphors. One of these is ‘water’. In reality, water is not an immediate threat to the average Dutch person; but it is a huge threat to the thousands trying to reach the Netherlands. People trying to survive the Mediterranean Sea in rubber boats. Trying to survive winter on the Aegean coast in primitive tents. To them, water really is deadly.

"Water reflections are never static, its fluid form constantly plays with the light in new and totally unique ways. Trying to capture this process naturally leads to an imperfect representation. Embracing this, ‘a puddle of water held in shape by my thoughts’ plays with the materiality of the digital image with the border between digital grain and the movement of the water constantly blurring. This ongoing research project consists of clips recorded over the last two years. - During the Leaving Space exhibition (2024) the work was presented as an installation using an old LCD screen, a wash-stool and other spacial elements. The space where the screen was installed could only be observed from the outside through the glass doors but not entered.

Sistine Chapel is an audio-visual collage of new footage and samples from Paik’s past videos, which featured many of his friends, collaborators, and public figures. It was Paik’s own way of summarizing his artistic career with video. The film installation consists of fast-paced and overlapping images that completely cover the gallery walls and ceiling—one of the most under-appreciated parts of architecture, according to Paik. With its electronic visuals and booming audio, interspersed with periods of silence, the immersive installation stands in stark contrast to the experience of its namesake.

In Antarctica, an artist prepares his installation simultaneously with a group of scientists conducting research. An essay on the persistence and loneliness of the creative act; like the flight of a butterfly in chaos theory or a silent prayer. A sensory experience. A visual poem made of ice, snow and wind.

Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.

Giovanni Segantini rose from humble origins to become the most important of Italian pointillists, and one of the most important symbolist painters in the 19th century. This film focuses on his way of feeling nature as a source of artistic and spiritual inspiration.

An unnamed passer-by is forced to trace a circular route inside an abandoned tram station, facing loss and time. The broken walls act as a channel, transmitting fragmentary, blurred and analogical memories. 

During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."

A movie about James Tissot (1836-1902), a French painter and portraitist

Zineb Sedira pays tribute to the history of African Cinema and the filmmakers who had inspired her.

Michael Palin heads for rural Pennsylvania and Maine to explore the extraordinary life and work of one of America's most popular and controversial painters, Andrew Wyeth. Fascinated by his iconic painting Christina's World, Palin goes in search of the real life stories that inspired this and Wyeth's other depictions of the American landscape and its hard grafting inhabitants. Tracking down the farmers, friends and family featured in Wyeth's magically real work, Palin builds a picture of an eccentric, enigmatic and driven painter. He also gets a rare interview with Helga, the woman who put Wyeth back in the headlines when the press discovered he had been painting her nude, compulsively but secretly for 15 years.