LOOP Festival 2025
11–21 November
Suburbia Contemporary participates in LOOP Festival 2025 with a presentation of three video works by Giovanni Ozzola, Mohau Modisakeng, and Thomas Taube.
The project is realised in collaboration with Fundação Leal Rios and REITER Gallery, highlighting a shared commitment to exploring video as a medium that reflects on perception, ritual, and human experience.
Threshold of Passage delves deeply into human experience, examining it through the lens of ritual, transition, and liminality. The project highlights the intricate relationships between body, memory, time, and perception, revealing how our physical presence, inner histories, and the passage of moments continuously intersect and shape one another. Each work engages with the tension between the private and the collective, inviting viewers to inhabit a space where personal memories, cultural narratives, and temporal shifts coexist. Through gestures, light, and movement, the series traces cycles of transformation, loss, and renewal, emphasizing the ways in which human experience is both fleeting and enduring, intimate and shared.
During LOOP Festival, Suburbia Contemporary will expand its presentation across the gallery spaces. Giovanni Ozzola’s ongoing exhibition, La vida y la muerte me están desgastando, including the video Temporary Structure, will remain on view throughout the gallery, alongside the videos Dark Matters by Thomas Taube and Inzilo by Mohau Modisakeng.
Giovanni Ozzola
A Visual Monument to the Things That Will No Longer Be
Temporary structure, 2025
Single channel video, loop, stereo sound
Duration 7′
3+2AP
Private events intertwine with moments of historical significance. Moments of change, both social and personal, where individual history is never separate from collective history. A tribute to last times, to the last time I saw this, to the last time that happened. Within the work, one moves between a dream, a childhood memory, a morning in the Middle East when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began, and a morning in Kyiv when the war with Russia was already underway. Times and places overlap, without hierarchy. It is the meeting of one light projected by the observer and another received by the subject. The light that lingers for a few seconds when darkness has already taken over. It is the latent image, the dust settling in our unconscious.
The soundtrack guides us, like the image itself, through a continuous flow of stories that emerge, dissolve, and return—just like a temporary structure. Temporary as our bodies, temporary as everything in this universe, in a perpetual cycle, always evolving. What remains of me in you and what remains of you in me forms a new I and a new you.
Lecture by Thomas Taube
18.11.2024 – 20.00 h
Dark Matters – A Global Night Shift
From Tokyo to Kabul and beyond. One Night, Eight Cities.
Suburbia Contemporary
Calle Valencia 345. Barcelona
Thomas Taube
Dark Matters, 2015
4K
Duration 19′ 30”
Single-Channel Video
In Dark Matters (2015), Taube approaches the remote state of a distant night, by investigating and collecting various evening experiences and their atmospheric perspectives. He conducted a series of interviews with night watchmen from around the world who shared their observations and personal experiences. It resulted in a series of stories about the night as a state, a shelter, a danger zone and a place of darkness. Taube succeeds in distilling the individual responses and feelings and translates them into simple and strange pictures played by a single protagonist. The character developed from this hybrid personality is one that cannot be fully grasped. The sense of darkness and loneliness places everything under the spell of self-observation and elevation.
The film plays the aftermath that lies beyond the conventional or mystical encounters that one may experience in the shadow world. The night becomes the state of the figure; the darkness has penetrated their existence and now both have formed the nature of the isolated protagonist.
Mohau Modisakeng
Inzilo, 2015
Single-channel video
Duration 4” 57′
Edition of 10
The South African Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015
Inzilo is an isiZulu word meaning ‘mourning’ or ‘fasting’. As in many of his films and images, Modisakeng’s body occupies centre stage in this work. He enacts a mourning ritual by sitting, standing, and rotating slightly, all the while throwing a burnt, ashy substance into the air. Extreme close-ups of his body begin to suggest the shedding of a skin, as though the ash is falling from his limbs as the ritual proceeds. He performs an elaborate rite of passage in which the initiate seems to draw the material for his transition from within his own body. In the absolute purity and focus of the moment, Modisakeng is turned inwards but gesturing outward, undergoing a mysterious transformation that is at once a private ceremony and a public declaration.