People Like Us – Exhibited at Maxxi in Rome

People Like Us are currently exhibiting at Maxxi gallery in Rome. It includes a 20 minute screening of a previous People Like Us live a/v set entitled “Live Excerpts“, and also in the gallery space there is a monitor showing/airing People Like Us downloads from UbuWeb, and the video “The Sound of the End of Music“.
The exhibition is called Expanded Video.

EXPANDED VIDEO
21 April – 5 June 2011
curated by Anne Palopoli and Oscar Pizzo

Expanded Video presents an Italian preview of a number of video works and live performances by Jacob TV, Masbedo, Martha Colburn and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett). 
Organized in collaboration with the Music for Rome Foundation, the series arises from the confrontation and interaction between different forms of creativity that define a common idiom in which listening and seeing become analogous and equivalent episodes. 
The works of the selected artists, in which the diverse idioms fuse and integrate perfectly, are linked by a shared emancipation from the ties and conventions of the individual media. Sound becomes narration and the image dissolves in an ever-different rhythm.




EXHIBITING:
MAXXI, Gallery 5

Masbedo

Theorem of incompletion, 2008
5’38” – Music by Lagash, Borgar Magnason – editing Giuseppe Domingo Romano for Except s.r.l. – courtesy Noire Contemporary Art
Masbedo’s work stages the difficulties underlying the relationship between man and woman and the consequent destruction of intimacy: pieces of glass abandoned on a table in a desolate Icelandic landscape are destroyed by shouts and gunfire. Filmed in Iceland, a location in which the limits are tangible, the work tackles the theme of the conditioning to which man is subjected in contemporary society.

Jacob TV
THE NEWS, a reality opera, 2011 in progress
17′ circa – Jan Boiten, videos, scenography; Kristen Kerstens, videos – Courtesy Jacob TV
The News is the latest work by the Dutch musician that will be presented at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2012. At MAXXI Jacob Tv presents a preview of a selection from this opera in which images taken from the media are deconstructed and reconstructed with a syncopated rhythm.

Martha Colburn
Dolls VS Dictators, 2010
11′ – Musica/music composed by Greg Saunier (of Deerhoof) and foley sound by Michael Evans – courtesy Martha Colburn
In this video Martha Colburn stages the killing of a number of dictators from history. Thanks to the stop-motion technique, dolls and puppets traverse a fantastic landscape causing the spectator to fall into a surreal world in which the laws that inform reality are overturned.

Cosmetic Emergency, 2005
8′ – Musica/Music Jad Fair, Mick Hobbs, Hilary Jeffery, Coco Solid – courtesy Martha Colburn
Cosmetic Emergency focuses on contemporary society’s obsession with appearance. The idea of beauty is analysed through the presentation of images taken from current affairs and old films, paintings and documentaries. In a collage of sounds and representations the video investigates the motivations that push contemporary society in this direction.

People Like Us/Vicki Bennett

Live Excerpts, 2002-2007
16’27” – courtesy Vicki Bennett
People like us assembles scenes and sound familiar to us from films, documentaries and archive images in a sequence the breaks up the linear cinematographic narration. This work brings together five live tracks of significance from the British musician’s output.

The programme also included a live performance of Genre Collage at Auditorium of Rome.
24 May, 21.00
People Like Us – GENRE COLLAGE
Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Teatro Studio


Download more info:
Maxxi website 1
Maxxi website 2
Expanded Video exhibition info pdf
About Genre Collage
About Genre Collage 2