No Ordinary Love
Carte blanche for Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Date: Tuesday, June 1st, 2010, 7 p.m.
Location:Kunsthalle Wien: ursula blickle videolounge
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay followed the invitation of VIS to be this year’s artist in residence of quartier21/MQ. In the months of May and June the Canadian artist will take up residence in the quartier21 at the MQ, where he will exhibit a sound-installation and present numerous videos well worth seeing during the course of the festival. The festival invited Nemerofsky Ramsay to put together a programme of short films, combining his own work, where his development as a video artist comes to the fore, with films by filmmakers who inspired him and with whom he has already worked.
“Ever the romantic, I always have my eye on sensual delights that are on a desperate quest for expression: an unrequited yearning for one’s beloved, the reinterpretation of love songs into autobiographical “tools” and the not always pure delight of gazing at oneself in the mirror.”
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Nemerofsky Ramsay was born in Montréal in 1973, has since been commuting between Canada and Europe and describes himself as a “writer of diaries and an aspiring bon vivant”. For ten years he has been working with songs, lyrics and self reflective performance, thereby examining the human singing voice, the untranslatability of emotions into language and the various ways of deforming expressed emotions in technology and popular culture.
Nemerofsky Ramsay’s videos are received in a film and art context and are shown at festivals, as well as in galleries in Canada, Europe and East Asia. The Canadian won numerous prizes, e.g. at the Hamburg Short Film Festiva, at the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival and the Globalica Media Arts Biennale in Poland. Among other places, his works are exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada.
FILM PROGRAMME
Je changerais d’avis
Canada 2000, 4 min
Director: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
How do you say “I love you” in the era of information technology? A frantic love song, filtered by simultaneous translations, webcams and weather reports.
New York Is Disappearing
Germany 1999, 11 min
Director: Heiko Kalmbach
A couple of eccentric slackers who had their heyday in the East Village of the early eighties is stranded on an island filled with apathy and pipe dreams, cramped and exposed to the violations of the restaurateurs of Avenue B. A poetic lament with Penny Arcade.
Live to Tell
Canada 2002, 5 min
Director: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
The ubiquity of CCTV cameras as a witness for a choral performance of an 80s ballade by Madonna.
Rain
France 2007, 7 min
Directors: Alice Kok, Pascal Lièvre
A bus ride through rainy Hong Kong inspires one to rewrite the lyrics of a 90s Madonna-ballade as an illogical but phonetically pleasing Cantonese text.
I am a Boyband
Canada 2002, 4 min
Director: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
A cloned boy band gets together with an Elizabethan madrigal singer to express their pain of a lost love and simultaneously examine the state of depicting masculinity in today’s pop music.
I wanna make me feel good
Canada 2003, 4 min
Director: Vincent LeDuc
The Montréal artist Vincent LeDuc casts himself as a run-of-the-mill girl pop group, consisting of three pouting girls, and is caught up in a circle of prefabricated vocals and cool, individual dance moves.
Audition Tape
Canada 2003, 8 min
Director: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Male white, gay, 6 ft tall, 11 stone, good singing voice, desperately looking for employment as a dancer with the Russian girl band TATU. History, sexuality and identity collide in a musical monologue, inspired by outtakes from American reality TV pop competitions. (Premiere of the English version with German subtitles, provided by VIS Vienna Independent Shorts)
Tonight
Canada 2004, 3 min
Director: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
An excerpt from Nemerofsky Ramsay’s two-hour video-installation Lyric, in which he tells a story while he sings; a story made from scraps of sound from over a thousand love songs. Forever more begins tonight!
Heaven or Montreal
Canada 1997, 5 min
Directors: Dennis Day, Ian Middleton
While contemplating the untimely death of a young dancer and artist, Day and Middleton call unfinished ideas to our attention and show us the outlines of lost energy and the power of imagination. The final scene conjures up the full desperation and requires absolute peace to speak and quiet to dance.
Belly Dancer
France 2009, 4 min
Director: Pascal Lièvre
The sighs of a distant plane triggers the dancing of a figure veiled in a Niqab. Little by little the dance develops into an unexpectedly erotic performance, gradually disclosing various theses about Muslim bodies, sexes and gestures.
Patriotic
Canada/France 2005, 4 min
Directors: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Pascal Lièvre
In this seductive propaganda film, the language of anti-terrorism takes an unexpected turn.
Like, Like
Canada 2009, 7 min
Director: Aleesa Cohene
Originally an installation for two monitors, Like, Like is the portrait of two love-sick women whose characters are composed of various women’s numerous actions, reactions and dialogues.
The Same Problem
Canada 2009, 4 min
Directors: Aleesa Cohene, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Every time he got up, it was the same problem. An ambiguous call-and-response play, performed in between shots of stormy seascapes and of a lonely figure whose lament is enriched with oohs and aahs from the world of pop music.