Bleu Shut
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
Sound and image slipping out of synch and into discord, the programme includes (in London at least) a very special version of Hollis Frampton’s masterful (nostalgia) with a live narration by Michael Snow.
Relative patterns of occlusion and exposure occupy two screens. Each exposure fires a stroboscopic flash of colour: yellow for one screen; blue for the other, filling the centre of both screens with colour, haloed with after-images.
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
Work that focuses in on the static hiss and background noise of recording and pushes it to the fore.
The films in the programme take the essential and fundamental building blocks of cinema (combining sound and image through time) screw about with them, interrogate them and cast them anew.
Music is full of refracted brass and wind tones, distorted tape loops, dead silent air and the occasional piercing shard of sound.
Freeform Super 8mm documentation of Sunday at Instal 06 by filmmaker Matt Hulse.
Three panels offering opportunities to discuss how to build stronger alliances between the sex workers’ rights, migrants rights and reproductive justice movements and how to face, together, an increasingly punitive and reactionary system.
A live installation of the ‘Film Ist’: projected on 4 huge screens and an improvised soundtrack from 4 figureheads of the Austrian experimental music scene.
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in Moby Dick…he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.” – C. L. R. James
Shutter Interface is an expanded cinema piece: a series of machinegun bursts of chromatic relationships and visual harmonics in an overwhelming montage