This is an unexpected shortlist. It baffles me. For once I’m stumped.
Best known for his quasi-documentary films on Irish peace activist Bernadette Devlin and ill-fated car-maker John DeLorean, Duncan Campbell is nominated for his film installation in the Scottish pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, It for Others. Campbell’s film was concocted from a strange mix of footage: African masks and other artefacts, images of perfume bottles and snack packaging and shots from a dance piece by British choreographer Michael Clark in which the performers, shot from above, contort themselves into the shapes of equations. Campbell’s film was not without its pleasures, but was terribly long. It lost me somewhere. Bravely, and perhaps unwisely, he paired this work with a projection of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s 1953 film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die), about the commodification of African sculpture. It was all too easy to abandon Campbell for Resnais and Marker.
Also showing at Venice, film work by James Richards paired censored images in a state art library in Tokyo — imported art books in which customs officials had scratched out depictions of genitalia using sandpaper (an act that seems to be as prurient as the pictures they are trying to protect the public from), with languorous underwater footage shot by the artist with a cheap camera. Except to note the denial of pleasure in the censored images, and the sensual image-grabbing of the underwater shots, I didn’t make much of this either. Richards, for me, is an unknown quantity.
I have never understood Tris Vonna-Michell’s melange of film and video footage, photographs and objects, which often entail a peripatetic quest: looking for obscure French artist Henri Chopin; revisiting the sites of his own adolescent rites of passage (including a trip to Japan where he slept rough for a while); and travelling to Detroit or Leipzig (where Vonna-Michell destroyed his entire archive of photographs and student work in a shredder). This comes together in his films, photography, objects, live performance and concrete poetry — and takes a lot of unpacking.
Canadian-born, Glasgow-based Ciara Phillips is a printmaker who mostly works in silk screen and often works collaboratively. Her images flow from the wall onto banners and textiles. There are signs, abstractions, patterns, words. It is her lightness that seems to be the point in a Turner shortlist that’s intent on being more serious — or at least more difficult and demanding than usual. Apart from the work of Phillips, there are few concessions here to visual pleasure or the easy headlines the prize often attracts.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
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