Film / video package 1
Christian Marclay
La Centrale, from Saturday August 30 to Sunday September 7, 2025 / 1:00-6:00 PM
For three months, a program of films and videos offers a journey through half a century of moving images, exploring some of the possible articulations between sound, music and image. Through a series of themed "bouquets" or ones centered on the figure of a filmmaker or video artist, the program offers a glimpse of the work of emblematic or little-known artists, pioneers of video art or thurifers of film.
In a dialogue between projected works (room 1) and works on cathode-ray monitors (room 2), between formal, ethnographic and political approaches to sound, the program focuses in particular on highlighting the uses and practices of the musician's portrait, performance and soundscapes.
Each week, the films and videos disseminate discreet touches, apparitions and motifs, connections between bouquets and nods to the Biennale program: Paganini, a Sony Walkman, Jean-Luc Godard revisited by John Zorn, salt deserts, the Bachmann / Ceresole couple, brass bands, and more.
A proposal by Maxime Guitton.
Room 1
Looking for Love
2017, 32', video, color, sound
Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery
The needle of a vinyl turntable is raised and lowered again and again, in search of the moment when the word love can be heard within different songs. Christian Marclay filmed his performance with a tiny surgical camera, precisely capturing his attempts to "search for love" in the grooves of a vinyl record.
room 2
Record Players
1984, 3'50'', video, color, stereo
Collection du Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC)
A pile of vinyl records lies on the floor. One person grabs a record, unwraps it and scratches it. Gradually, other people enter the field, scratching, beating and rubbing the vinyls against each other. The camera films in close-ups, faces never appearing, it's a frenzy of sound and visual effects. Then someone breaks a record, and this dry sound multiplies, as vinyl records are smashed, thrown to the ground and trampled on. When this shared composition is over, everyone leaves the space, and we hear the noise of the city.
Ghost (I don't live today)
1985, 4', video, color, stereo
Collection du Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC)
Christian Marclay takes to the stage with his Phonoguitar, an instrument consisting of a vinyl turntable and distortion attached to a guitar strap. Sometimes filmed in close-up, sometimes appearing on a monitor, he scratches a Jimi Hendrix vinyl while manipulating the distortion to produce a sound close to that of an electric guitar. He imitates the gestures and facial expressions typical of rock music. In front of him, a monitor plays a Jimi Hendrix concert - same gestures and facial expressions. The sound of the guitar is superimposed on that of the turntable. Sometimes, the monitors appear simultaneously on the screen, paralleling the two characters. "I Don't Live Today" is a Jimi Hendrix song from 1967.
Telephones
1995, 7'30'', video, color, stereo
Collection du Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC)
This is the first video in which Christian Marclay collages film extracts. The characters call, pick up, exchange and hang up, following the process of a telephone conversation, but all the elements come from different films, different situations, which clash in this apparent continuity. Ringing sequences, echoes of voices and interjections form a composition in which the musical ambiences of the films used appear ghostly.
Christian Marclay
Born 1955 (USA)
Based in London and New York
In the 1980s, Christian Marclay, a musician without an instrument, created his first performances in New York using vinyl records, which he manipulated and assembled like sound collages. Vinyl records were to become the material for many of his works. The artist's taste for collage continues through the moving image, as in The Clock (Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale), a 24-hour video installation composed of thousands of film extracts representing real time. Other works produce their own sounds in silence, such as his paintings, engravings, video installations and other scores conceived from onomatopoeia collected from comic strips.
Photo: Christian Marclay, Looking for Love (2017)
