Confined Innocence: Victor Alimpiev, Johanna Billing, Mircea Cantor

Thirteen is a lucky number when it comes to Windsor’s Media City Festival. This internationally-recognized program of new and alternative video has been engaging audiences for thirteen years. The AGW is pleased to partner with Media City this year on Confined Innocence. Curated by Jan Schuijren, who lives in Amsterdam, Confined Innocence brings together three works that validate our core emotional response to genuine experiences: the simple, hearfelt understanding of what we see, hear and feel.

In Russian artist Victor Alimpiev’s Summer Lightnings ( Russia 2005), roaring thunder outside interacts with the choreographed gestures of young girls sitting in a classroom. As if driven by an invisible force, they intermittently drum their painted fingernails on the table. The collective tapping creates a serene tension in the room. With no further clues to offer, the emotional charge increases as we wait endlessly for the climax.

Departure (Romania/France 2005), by Mircea Cantor, shows a gallery space in which a wolf and deer tensely inhabit the room together. Eerie in its disturbing silence, the wolf latently stalks the deer. The play of their instincts throws the viewer back and forther between a sense of wonder and fear. Mircea Cantor was born in Romania in 1977, and currenlty lives and works in Paris and Romania.

In Swedish artist Johanna Billing’s Magical World (Croatia/Sweden 2005), images of the desolate streets outside a rundown cultural centre in a suburb of Zagreb, Croatia leads inside the building where a group of children are rehearsing a song called the Magical World. Singing in English their expressions, both timid and confident, reveal their struggle to grasp the meaning of the lyrics. Nevertheless, there is a pervading feeling of hope. Billing’s work will be presented at Artcite Inc.