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The artist duo Time Gates (Ben Gyula Fodor & Dorothee Frank) creates cross-media projects and novel performance formats incorporating installation elements, photography, video, literary texts (including their own), live drawing and painting, and original sounds by composers and improvisational musicians. Projects a.o. at Belvedere21 Vienna, Semperdepot of Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Marcello Farabegoli Projects @Foto Wien, Kai 10 Arthena Foundation Düsseldorf, Art Quarter Budapest, Organhaus Chongqing, Asiatopia Performance Festival Bangkok, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Walden Gallery Berlin, Central Garden Vienna, Sonic Narratives Festival Timisoara.
--- UNTITLED WALKS (2023-24) is an absurd filmic performance about the downside of human ambition and achievement: the experience of uselessness, of failure at oneself and the world. A lonely male figure wanders through various scenarios. The six episodes constitute a warning of false certainties when the gaze narrows and the only real certainty moves out of focus: disappearance. - Video: https://vimeo.com/978952037/bc80f485d0?share=copy
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--- THE LIGHT... (2021-ongoing) ) has been presented in Vienna in 2021 in underground stations, trams and busses, on a videowall in Vienna's main station and in café and store displays. In Budapest it has been shown inside Keleti station from March 22nd to April 5th 2022 on the large billboard at the central hall (8 x 3 m).
--- RIVERSCREEN CINEMA (2021-ongoing) is a novel media-artistic format: a 2-channel video (30 minutes) is being projected directly onto water surfaces; as from bridges onto rivers. Thus the water becomes a "screen" which, other than usual screens, is itself in permanent motion. Filmed water sequences especially from the Danube and Mekong area merge with the movement of the real water. There are live performance and live sound elements interlacing with the filmed sequences. E.g. a real boat with a musician or performers/objects swimming over the projection. Creatures and iconic objects ghostly appear and disappear as signs of political and cultural transformations, and how waterways have always been incorporated into human history of power, war, violence. An indoor museum version of the project in a large water basin has first been presented at the KAI 10 Arthena Foundation Düsseldorf (Germany) during the Düsseldorf Museum Night 2024 (with friendly support by the Austrian Federal Ministery of Arts and Culture).
--- The 15-minute performance HOMMAGE AN K. / THE DOORKEEPER (2020) takes place in a red light shop window. Yet the body on display (Dorothee Frank) remains inaccessible, which is further emphasized by gestures and live written messages. Visibility with complete lack of contact: this experience - also inherent in virtual space - became ubiquitous through the Covid pandemic. She then speaks a short key text of literary modernism that is completely unexpected here; it deals, among other things, with that threshold fear that prevents people from choosing a completely different, richer life. Ben G. Fodor plays the guardian of the mystery of what may lie behind the door in the background ...
--- The 15-minute performance SCIENCE FICTION VANITAS (2019/2023) refers to the iconography of baroque vanitas images. These are allegories of the futility of the striving for possession and power, the cult of the body and youth in the face of transience. In the performance, a vanitas still life is constructed with objects from a suitcase. The spoken text and the visual action magnify the littering of the planet by production output to excess. A science fiction scenario of imperial land grabbing into distant galaxies pulls the hybris of current world dominance efforts into the absurd as well as transhumanist fantasies of eternal life including the eradication of human faultiness.
--- DESCARTES' BRAIN (2022): A ready-to-cook young man (organic rooster!) in foil with the TIME GATES logo is presented in a refrigerated display case next to a delicately designed transport box. The work addresses the complex issue of the sacrifice of animals and humans; it points to a hypercapitalist economic form that tends to destroy or let rot what it cannot devour.