"Cinema, Sounds, Synergy: Arno Coenen and Sven Påhlsson"
2002-10-05 until 2002-10-27
De Appel
Amsterdam, , NL

This month De Appel's Cinema, Sounds, Synergy program presents Arno Coenen (1972), ‘It’s time to bone’ - nine one-minute digital animations that you can watch one at a time after inserting 20 cent. The animations are a variation on the overwhelming selection of porno films that can be downloaded on the Internet. Also showing is Sven Påhlsson (1965) ‘Sprawlville’ or Life at the Highway Exit Ramp’ ‘Sprawlville’ examines the core of American Society and Culture how the American Dream is manifested in today's suburban space with its three components: the Suburban Home Developments, the Interstate Highway System and the Mega Shopping Malls.

Coenen previously made an hallucinogenic ‘road movie’, inspired by his experience of a car trip through the West Coast of the United States. In ‘The Last Roadtrip’, all stereotypes of the American way of Life are exaggerated, creating a virtual world in which pigs fly through the air like helicopters and naked porn stars run for their lives while great quantities of blood spill over the tarmac.

Arno Coenen lives and works in Amsterdam. Coenen works mainly with computers, makes 3d animations, radio programmes, videoclips and performs as vj. For De Appel Coenen also presents ‘Demolition Man’ a serie posters referring in style to the constructivistic /social-realistic public artwork of the soviet era.

Påhlsson: “The American Dream to own your own house with a lawn, a pool and a three car garage is fueling the expansion of the suburban housing developments. Because of the ever sprawling suburbs, the highways connecting them with the city, have become congested and dangerous. There are no traditional or common spaces in suburbia for people to meet and interact. The nearest definition of a common meeting space would be the shopping mall. The experience of the suburban world is almost unreal, and the diminishing difference between the virtual world as constructed in the computer and the actual spreading suburbia is both uncanny and frightening. The shopping mall world is very synthetic and artificial. This is an actual virtual reality model world that we can experience and live in.”

Sven Påhlsson lives and works in New York and Oslo. His work was recently presented in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA . Påhlsson’s work was amongst others featured in the 48th Venice Biennale and Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Netherlands

Other Important Exhibitions in Netherlands