Performing the Landscape, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Contemporary Calgary, Glenbow, Stride and Truck, Calgary, September 22 to November 12, 2016

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Courtesy of Bill Viola Studio and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

Bill Viola, "Walking on the Edge," 2012

single-channel video in HD on plasma, sound, 12:33 min. Performers: Kwesi Dei and Darrow Igus.

When I attended screenings of the 1929 Bunuel/Dali epic Un Chien Andalou at the Whitechapel 25 years ago, followed a couple years later by Bill Viola’s video vista the Nantes Triptych, I witnessed notions of art house film and video art on a continuum of medium and art history. The analog film and surrealist narrative of doubled characters midst cityscape and landscape was both vexing and bucolic. Similarly, Viola’s isolated yet connected portraits of human life in suspended animation, although far removed from any landscape, afford a universal allegory. We are all bound, at once, to wrestle with what it means to be in the world, and to confront the perplexing beauty of nature and mortality. This, I suggest, is the paradigmatic value that Lorenzo Fusi, the new visiting academic curator at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art and Design, is mining with the citywide group video exhibition Performing the Landscape.

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Janine Antoni, "Touch," 2002

single-channel video, sound, 9:37 min. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo by Jeremy Pavka.

Immediately noticeable is the slate of exhibitors, including the renowned Janine Antoni, Ragnar Kjartansson and Bill Viola, alongside Canadian duo Miruna Dragan and Jason de Haan, and a raft of international players perhaps less familiar as they are not widely shown here: Zackary Drucker, Cyprien Gaillard, Mikhail Karikis, Hans Op de Beeck, Taus Makhacheva, Sara Ramo, Julian Rosefeldt and Ming Wong.

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Julian Rosefeldt, "Clown," 2005

three-channel video installation in HD, originally shot on Super-16mm, sound, 10:30 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Many of the works are not just video but more installations: a key in the evolution of video art. Rosefeldt’s dark-space trio of nine-foot high vertiginous towers depict a clown, gingerly navigating a creek and riparian zone in the lush, chroma-choked Amazon. It’s hard not be sucked in, waiting for a fall that never quite comes, even though in reality much of the jungle is crashing down. Tension and balance is rife in other works, although invariably slowly paced. Antoni traverses a tightrope, life-size, appearing at times to walk on water, and Makhacheva depicts a tightrope walker over a Caucasus canyon using Dagestani art works as balancing aids.

Hans Op de Beeck, "Celebration," 2008

Mikhail Karikis, "Children of the Unquiet," 2013-2014

It’s often difficult to objectively assert critical value in art, but in this instance one of my enduring arbiters for quality comes to the fore. Art that can slow the compression of the space-time continuum is often hard to find: yet it allows mindful and bodily engagement. In Performing the Landscape this quality is as enduring as it is pervasive. And just as we all perform in the landscape as part of our variegated personal and social everyday, this is an exhibition that can touch many, whether young or old, formally educated or not.

For those able to see the works in Calgary, it’s worth the commitment, and for those who are unable, there’s a roster of artists and video art worth noting for the future. In a city where the tenure of contemporary art curators can be precarious, the Alberta College of Art and Design seems fortunate to have attracted Fusi as a replacement for the gallery’s former principal, Wayne Baerwaldt. Let’s hope there is more in store: perhaps this visiting curator will become part of the Alberta landscape, as enduring and artful as the work in this exhibition.