found_footage at SPLIT SCREEN

Split screen tries to offer a panorama of the contemporary artistic creation in videoart focused exclusively on the resource of the split screen used by artists in their videos.

The split screen is not a new resource and has its own history, it has been used in all areas of audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and visual arts. In general, it can be called split screen when the frame is divided into two or more areas, and each area shows a different scene or a different view of the same scene, so that multiple images are shown at the same time. The resource of the simultaneous use of multiple layers of imagery expects to add depth and richness in narration, meaning, emotion and representation of time and space.

The writer Julie Talen, in her article published in salon.com about the return of split screen use in television series and videoclips, offers an interesting and brief history about this resource, and points to: "When so many images flicker at you, you see differently. You glance. You glimpse. Your eyes keep moving, and you use your peripheral vision, the kind of sight connected to fight or flight (and actually processed in a separate part of the brain than the direct gaze). You don't get the entire picture; you can't, and you learn to take this partial experience as being accurate enough". A partial experience that is given by the spacial exploration of the screen, which is divided into different areas where the action happens and the narration is fragmented.

In the same way, split screen also arises questions about the temporal perception. Precisely about that Talen asks: "The single biggest question when the screen divides is: where is now? Which panel is the single shared moment in time that heretofore defined single-channel movies? And when are the other panels happening: earlier, later or at the same time? Cutting up the screen unmoors the images in time. Clearly the simplest answer is to say that the frames are all now, all the same moment. You've divided up the screen but not the time". Obviously time is still the basis of the called time based works, like video, but with the split screen another dimension is open up to explore, the spacial.

Those are questions which are explored in many different ways by the artists featured here. The exhibition, in an attempt to concentrate the approach in the basis of the split screen resource, brings together only videos
divived into two screens.

Participant artists:
MARIANE ABAKERLI, VIENNE CHAN, BOLDIZSAR CSERNAK-RISKO, JESSICA FAISS, ALINE HELMCKE, YOUKI HIRAKAWA, JANKO KATIC & KRISTINA KOVACEVIC, TAMAR LATZMAN, MARIJANA MARKOSKA, PATRIZIA MONZANI, SOPHIE WARREN & JONATHAN MOSLEY, {VIVIMOS DEL AIRE} = BEZETA + PLISOTIC, MAYA WATANABE.

Curated by Pedro Torres
www.stuffinablank.com