As our video selection for this week, what better than a mesmerizing work that is part of the Art Basel program? Hans Op de Beeck’s The Building (2007) — which is part of Monday evening’s 10 p.m. Art Film program at StadtKino Basel, curated by film scholar Marc Glöde — is a digital animation that takes the viewer, according to the artist, “on a virtual, nocturnal walking tour of a fictitious, megalomaniacal hospital complex.”
If the film represents something of a departure for Op de Beeck, who has worked with actual human actors in past videos, he believes that the new work still evokes everyday reality. “This [digital] hospital has the same mediocre, half-hearted, over-the-top architectural features as the hospitals, shopping malls, health clubs, and airports that have shot up like mushrooms all over the Western world,” he says. It is its blend of familiarity and haunting strangeness that gives The Building its power.
Op de Beeck will also appear in Basel himself, on the Art Lobby panel “How would contemporary art be without video?” at 2 p.m. on Friday, June 6.
The Building is a digital animation film on DVD. It comes to ARTINFO courtesy the artist and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; and Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam/Amsterdam.
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