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Exhibitions

In the Vestibule with Jef Cornelis


Date & time
Thursday, June 16, 2016 –
Friday, August 12, 2016
10:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Cost

This event is free

Where

J.W. McConnell Building
1400 De Maisonneuve W.
Room LB 165

Wheel chair accessible

Yes

De Langste Dag (The Longest Day) Still from De Langste Dag (The Longest Day), 1986. Colour, 6 hrs. 15 min. 48 sec. ©VRT. Courtesy ARGOS (Brussels)

Presented in collaboration with ARGOS – Centre for Art and Media (Brussels)
Curated by Michèle Thériault

This summer, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery presents five programmes that include a selection of television broadcasts directed for the Belgische Radio en Televisie (BRT) network from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The five programmes are presented Monday to Friday, 10:30 am to 5 pm, in the gallery vestibule.

Please visit our website for the program schedule and for more information on the programmes.
(Also note that the gallery is closed on June 24th and July 1st)


Jef Cornelis is a Belgian director of a vast number of films and programs for the Flemish Belgian Radio Television network (BRT—now the VRT). From 1964 to 1996, he directed more than 100 films on a broad array of topics related to the areas of contemporary culture and art, Flemish landscape and architecture, literature and music. These films and programs are compelling to us today for their experimentation with the televisual format, technique and style, their choice of subject matter and in the way debate and conflict played out. Indeed, many are outrightly prescient.

Cornelis was motivated by a relentless curiosity for the medium of television and its communicative properties and formats combined with a profoundly inquiring mind. Fascinated by different forms of knowledge and social constructs and how they intersect with contemporary culture and society, he explored the televisual format to stage, frame or give free rein to their encounter in a critical and often provocative manner. His desire to foster debate, to render here and now the crux of an exchange, and to bring image and place together lead him to realize live films and programs using satellite links in the 1980s, such as in the series Icebreakers (Ijsbreker, 1983-84) and in the marathon six hours film The Longest Day (De langste dag, 1986).

In the last decade, his work has been increasingly presented and discussed in the context of contemporary art (ironically there is very little place for it in television today) in art academies and museum symposia notably Inside the White Tube: A Retrospective View on the Television Work of Jef Cornelis (ARGOS, 2016), In Focus: Jef Cornelis at the Liverpool Biennial (2014), Barely There, Part 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2011) and Are You Ready for TV? at MACBA Museu d’art contemporani (2011, Barcelona).


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