Emile Zile

Memory Machine II – A series of exhibitions, debates, performances & publications on cultural memory & identity, initiated by Castrum Peregrini Amsterdam.

Exhibition & public program

Things to Remember
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27 February – 25 March

With works by Mehraneh Atashi, Dayna Casey, Amie Dicke, Nickel van Duijvenboden, DNK Ensemble, Maria Guggenbichler with Margit de Sad, Romy A. More, Egbert Alejandro Martina and others, Jonas Lund, Antoine Viviani, Emile Zile. Curated by Radna Rumping

How are digital media, endless storage space and new ways of communicating shaping the way we capture, share and retrieve our personal memories? The things we want to remember, do they still fit in a shoebox or are they floating around somewhere in ‘the cloud’ amongst the thousands of e-mails and images that our external memory can contain nowadays?

Saturday 27 February 2016, 16.00 – 17.30

Free entrance. A conversation with Amie Dicke, Simultaneous/Synchronous (Song) Performance DNK Ensemble (Koen Nutters & Seamus Cater), Performance Emile Zile

Interval Projects
Mining the Cloud
A series of desktop documentaries
Thursday May 26, 7pm
Schoolhouse Studios
81 Rupert St. Collingwood
$15

Interval presents Mining the Cloud: a series of desktop documentaries by local and international artists.

Charting the multitude of the Internet through the desktop interface, these films and performances record the virtual as real, traversing landscapes that fall outside our visual circuits. From abandoned virtual realities to electronic dumping grounds of Ghana, this is the detritus of late capitalism in a time of rapid technological change.

The desktop documentary is an emerging practice drawing from the disciplines of ethnography, archaeology and contemporary art. Using desktop browsers as both lens and edit suite, these films and performances excavate artefacts from under the “cloud”. These artists respond to the human impulse to navigate, archive, interpret and ultimately control the world around us.

Lettres du Voyant by Louis Henderson (UK)
Lettres du Voyant is a documentary-fiction about spiritism and technology in contemporary Ghana that attempts to uncover some truths about a mysterious practice called “Sakawa” – internet scams mixed with voodoo magic. Tracing back the scammers’ stories to the times of Ghanaian independence, the film proposes Sakawa as a form of anti-neocolonial resistance.

All that is Solid by Louis Henderson (UK)
A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology – thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.

Utopia 1.0: Post ­Neo ­Futurist ­Capitalism in 3D! by Annie Berman (US)
A first­-person expedition to Second Life, the once thriving virtual 3D online world, in search of what remains. Given the invitation to come build anything imaginable, what is it that we chose to create?

A performance by Emile Zile (AU)
Emile Zile’s performances use new-age healing apps, YouTube monologues and algorithmic portraiture to create audio-visual meditations on augmented spirituality and networked representations of the self.

Emile Zile solo show Desktops at Fort Delta Melbourne 5 November – 21 November 2015
Performance 21 November

For his exhibition Desktops at Fort Delta, Zile further explores our attraction to communications technology and their ability to translate and encode our lived experience through a series of assemblages, constructed from office furnishings and other objects related to white-collar labour, self-help eBooks and online gaming communities. Zile has created desktop assemblages – each desktop signifying the absence of an occupant. The desktops themselves appear isolated from domestic or workplace environments and exude their own atmospheric qualities. They simultaneously suspend and assume narratives intrinsic to their inhabitants for us to ponder in the same way we might suppose the identity of someone we communicate with online, where they are, and what it looks like.

Accompanying these 3D assemblages is a suite of digital prints Zile has produced for the exhibition. These works appear as computer screen captures, search term collages and algorithmic portraiture. They build narratives within and between disparate collections of images selected and composed by Zile. By making his source material visible to us on the immediate and live platform of his computer desktop, Zile also reveals the performative framework for online viewing and consumption as a highly selective and editable one, where image-poetics emerge through the creative transparency of the screen.

Zile’s interest in activating site-specific performativity is also explored in Desktops through his request to insert the Gallery’s office desk into his allocated exhibition space. By revealing a commonly private and ancillary zone to us as a juxtaposed physical situation, ZIle allows for gallery administration and commerce to activate and inform his exhibition in real time – enabling a playing-out of site-specific performance politics to coalesce as real and represented exhibition content.

‘onscreen explorer goes irl voyeur in emile zile’s ‘desktops” I-D Magazine

Mildura Biennale listening project 2-5 October 2015

Linked by a pair of ear bud headphones, a couple sit before the camera. I ask them to each select a piece of music, that they are emotionally linked to. They then listen to the music together, one ear each, linked via the extended earbud. I begin the camera rolling and leave the room, telling them to listen to both songs and be seated in front of the camera. The amount of body language they express to the camera is up to them.

Portraits of ‘love and music’ from Mildura ABC News

James Cameron’s Avatar feature length performance September 19 2015

In the Epoch of the Near and Far invites contemporary audiences to reframe discussions on digital media. Flipping the much talked-about suggestion that emerging technological forms distort reality on it’s head, the exhibition proposes a relationship which sees our physical and digital lives mutually support and influence each other. Comprising the work of six Australian and international digital and performance artists, In the Epoch of the Near and Far is running as part of the Channels Festival for Australian video art.

The exhibition opens September 19 with a performance from Emile Zile, the Australian born Netherlands based artist whose work is informed by his own navigation of a technologically mediated reality. Featured artist Keith Deverell will also run an Artist in Conversation session on September 24 alongside art historian Dr. Grace McQuilten and exhibition curator Amelia Winata.

In the Epoch of the Near and Far runs from the 18-27 of September at Grey Gardens Projects in Fitzroy and features work from:

Petra Cortright (USA)
Heath Franco (AUS)
Marian Tubbs (AUS)
Emile Zile (AUS/NL)
Keith Deverell (UK/AUS)
Aaron Christopher Rees (AUS)

Artist talk and screening of Western Digital for Sydney Contemporary Art fair

Curated by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Video Contemporary presented by Samsung, showcases an exciting and diverse selection of video works by artists at the forefront of their field. Curated into six themes (Duality, Constructed Worlds, On Time, Forbearance & Fortitude, Role Play and Material Beings) by Ulanda Blair and Jess Bram, (see full bio here) Sydney Contemporary is delighted to be collaborating with such an innovative and dynamic arts institution on the delivery of this exciting exhibition sector.

Talk Contemporary
Thursday, 10th September 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm
Speakers: Director Carroll/Fletcher, London JONATHON CARROLL, Artist SHAUN GLADWELL, Fair Director BARRY KELDOULIS and Artist EMILE ZILE. Moderated By Senior Curator and ACMI, SARAH TUTTON
Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Video Contemporary Lounge

Unpacking Sound, Text & Speech

This talk and presentation will look at the staging of sound based works in gallery and non-gallery contexts, and the relationship between sound, language and visual representation. Featuring Emile Zile, Speak Percussion’s Eugene Ughetti and their Artist-in-Residence, Kaylie Melville, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Philip Samartzis (facilitator).

http://www.c3artspace.com.au/talk-3-july-1st/
http://abbotsfordconvent.com.au/whats-on/events-exhibitions/c3-talks-unpacking-sound-text-speech

My 140-character tweet review of the Ryan Trecartin show at NGV, re-presented by NGV social mediators.

Emile Zile witfully uses the ‘truth’ of video in constant movements of distanciation that reaffirms our position as spectators—in the gallery and in the world—to draw us back with the question: where is the individuality of our self-expression, in a banal act of connectedness?
– Anabelle Lacroix, Curator

Opening reception and artist in Q+A: Saturday 30 May, 3pm
Dates: Friday 29 May – Saturday 13 June 2015
Venue: MARS Gallery, Black Box, 7 James Street, Windsor VIC 3181

As part of the ‘Put Up a Signal’ Australia-Indonesia program I will be hosted at MES56 from 11-22 November to create new work and exhibit.

http://putupasignal.info/artist

Nayla, Wok the Rock and me practising our wrestling press-kit team pose, 2011.

Thanks to Bus Gallery Melbourne, Mes 56 and Asialink Arts.