17.03.2011
Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón, Spain

18 March - 12 September 2011

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Phantoms of Nabua features in the Electric Nights exhibition, curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Laurent Le Bon and Benjamin Weil.

Electric Nights takes its name from Les nuits électriques, a short film directed by Eugene Deslaw in 1928, in which he focused on city lights at night-time, sequencing street lamps, neon signs and shop windows of Paris, Berlin and Prague almost as if it were a fireworks show. Similarly to fireworks, film is an intermittent ephemeral projection of light in the darkness. Through a selection of works from the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the exhibition, borrowing the visual recourses of pyrotechnics, wishes to demonstrate the continuity between spectacles of fire and the art of the moving image: flowers, stars, rain, fire, storms, fountains, volcanoes...

Presented in open plan and conceived both as a parcours and as entertainment, like a classical exhibition, the show follows the principle of fireworks, alternating installations with projections. The moving images are presented on screens in different sizes and formats hanging at varying heights in the space. The principle of horizontal vision is thus altered and we experience the exhibition as if we were at a fireworks show: looking at the sky.

Exhibited artists: Constantin Brancusi, Brassaï, John Cale, Claude Closky, Eugene Deslaw, Audouin Dollfus, Helga Fanderl, Fischli/Weiss, Cai Guo-Qiang, Brion Gysin, Andor Kertész, Ange Leccia, Jean le Pautre, Claude Lévêque, Rose Lowder, Anthony McCall, Dora Maar, Ana Mendieta, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Yoko Ono, Anri Sala, Roman Signer, José Antonio Sistiaga, Israël Sylvestre, Rui Toscano, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cerith Wyn Evans.

Films