08.01.2016
QUAD Gallery, Market Place, Derby
6pm, FREE, booking essential

Rib Gets In The Way (52'15", 2014), narrated in the first person by Reinke, addresses mortality, the body, the archive, and the embodiment of a life’s work. The final and longest section of the video presents an animated children’s adaptation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85). Explaining the motivation behind this long-planned project, Reinke notes, ‘Nietzsche is the only fun, reasonable way out of any moral or political quagmire’. The hand drawn animations in this and earlier sections of the video are by Jessie Mott, a visual artist and writer whose work consistently engages a menagerie of human, animal, and celestial forms and with whom Reinke has collaborated on several previous videos.

Steve Reinke was born in a village in northern Ontario, Canada, and is an artist and writer best known for his videos. His work is screened widely and is in several collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa. His tapes typically have diaristic or collage formats, and his autobiographical voiceovers share his desires and pop culture appraisals with endearing wit. He has also co-edited several books, including Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video (with Tom Taylor, 2000), and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman, 2005).