"THREE WINDOWS - A HOMAGE TO ROBERT LAX"
2000-02-18 until 2000-04-09
Kiasma, Musuem of Contemporary Art
Helsinski, , FI Finland

German Nicolas Humbert (1958) and Werner Penzel (1950) founded together the film production company Ciné Nomad in 1987. Films together: Step across the Border (1990) and Middle of the Moment (1995). Videoinstallation, Germany 1999. Nicolas Humbert & Werner Penzel 18.2. to 2.4.2000 Kontti. Curated by: Perttu Rastas. In co-opertion with the Goethe Institut.

Nicolas Humbert has studied painting and filmmaking and has worked since as a freelance writer and film director. Films: Wolfsgrub (1986), Vagabonding Images (1998) in collaboration with Simone Fürbringer.

Werner Penzel played music before he began to study at film school. He has worked with a Brazilian theatre company and travelled through South America, North Africa, India and Japan. Films: Vagabunden Karawane (1980) and Adios Al Odio (1986).

This year, the American poet Robert Lax - one of the last grand old men of the generation of classical modern poets - celebrates his 84th birthday. His name is associated with the group of New York artists that included the Minimal painter Ad Reinhardt and the religious philosopher Thomas Merton, a group that exerted a strong influence on the poets of the beat generation centred around Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

At the beginning of the 1960s, after leading a nomadic life for decades, moving between America and Europe, working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, as a film critic in New York and as a clown in an Italian itinerant circus, Robert Lax found the place where he belongs - on the Greek island of Patmos. He has lived there for more than 25 years now, withdrawn, but at the same time conducting a lively exchange with the world. In his poetry, Robert Lax pursues a maximum compression of language - to the point where only individual words and syllables remain which represent the essence of language. His artistic concept of reduction, in which a pause becomes as important as the things said, makes Lax a kindred spirit of the American composer John Cage. It is no coincidence, therefore, that they shared a strong affinity to Oriental art and philosophy.

The video installation Three Windows is the outcome of a longstanding friendship and collaboration between the two filmmakers Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel and the poet Robert Lax. Following the films Step across the Border and Middle of the Moment, which were made for the cinema, Three Windows represents the two artists' first video project, a work that combines the narrative forms of film with the characteristics of a spatial installation.

Related Links:

Nicolas Humbert / Werner Penzel STEP ACROSS THE BORDER

Indepth Arts Resources for Finland

Other Important Exhibitions in Finland