IMMERSE brings together 9 renowned international contemporary artist to KINOKINO.

The curator Roberto Ekholm | EKCO has curated pieces that explores and celebrates the cinematic medium and to highlight KINOKINO’S importance as a historical cinematic landmark for Sandnes and Stavanger.  Many of the artists will for the first time be exhibited in Norway.

The cinematic experience has captured and hypnotised audiences of all ages since the beginning of filmmaking. Fictional or factual subject matters have explored all possible narratives and pushed our minds and emotions beyond the everyday while marking our memories with a blurring between the real and the imagined.

Deleuze writes “The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions”  (Cinema 2: The Time image).

In film/video art, the artists question our understanding of time, space and materiality. They use editing to manipulate a given narrative, to force us to shift our way of thinking. Images are frozen in time while infinitely falling and rotating; repeated and looped imagery, the artists makes us aware of the “pregnant moment”. Looked upon over and over again, we notice the unnoticeable in the original footage. In the cinema we accept that gravity has it owns rules, pain has no limits and love erupts like fireworks on the screen right before our eyes. “Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.” Slavoj Žižek

Immersed in the visual we are pushed to reflect on life and of our existence.

Stan Brakhage, an highly influential non-narrative film maker manipulated the material of film by painting directly onto celluloid, scratching the films surface, fast editing and utilizing the effects of multiple exposers. We can see his influences today in artists’ manipulation of the material be it old VHS tapes or pushing the digital media to new understanding about time, space and light. Like Brakhage they are trying to reveal the universal in the particular.

Immerse brings together a group of international artists, each exploring or using film and video as a medium. Through installations, multiple screens and tactile paintings they explore the medium of film/video. They question representation and the portrayal of the chosen subject. What are our desires and hopes? As Žižek points out about film: “It doesn’t give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.”

These artists heighten our awareness to the power of cinema, its hypnotic medium and conceptually challenging narratives, causing us to questions our existence and the surrounding.