28–31rd March, 12-8 PM

The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius presents a film programme of three films by Daniel Steegmann Magrané. The programme offers a wider survey of the artist’s practice and coincides with the finissage weekend of Steegmann Magrané’s first solo exhibition Phantom at the CAC.

The programme starts with the film 16mm (2008–2011), which is thematically connected to the exhibition presented in the South Hall of the CAC and the only film with sound. Building on the artist’s interest in the Brazilian Malta Atlantica rainforest, it is presented here in its true colours. Following strategies of structural filmmaking, 16mm plays with the spool of footage and was filmed on a specially built camera. Slowly moving through the dense rainforest the distance covered by the camera corresponds with the length of physical film used to create the shot, while revealing the beauty of the rainforest.

Spiral Forest (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) (2013–2015) is the second film in the programme and further the artist’s observation of nature as a creative resource. The film was shot with a custom made gimbal, which is a primitive mechanism, composed of three hinged rings, to allow the camera to rotate on three axes. The mechanism has been used since antiquity in gyroscopes and armillary spheres, as well as a model of the universe and the structure of an atom.

Like the two previous films, the last film in the programme continues to invoke nature, but here natural environments are mixed with the artificial one of the artist’s own studio. Phasmides (2012) follows a family of stick insects camouflaged in different sceneries. Over the course of the film, geometric forms become organic and organic forms reveal their geometry; the living seem inanimate and the inanimate relates to life. As in the essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia by Roger Caillois, the film touches on the possibility that contrary to popular belief; animals blend into their surroundings not to protect themselves, but rather out of a mythological desire to dissolve into the world.

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané was born in 1977 in Barcelona and lives and works in Rio de Janerio, Brazil. He has had solo exhibitions at Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal (2017), Museum of Modern Art Medellín in Antioquia, Columbia (2016), project space the Green Parrot in Barcelona (2016), the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (2015), Casa Modernista in São Paulo (2015), Contemporary Art Centre CRAC Alsace, France (2014), the Casa França-Brasil in Rio de Janeiro (2013). His works have been shown in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2017), Biennale de Lyon (2017), NMNM New National Museum of Monaco (2017), the CAC in Vilnius (2017), the Arario Museum in Seoul (2016), the 9th Berlin Biennale in Berlin (2016), the New Museum Triennial in New York (2015), the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2015), contemporary art centre of Barcelona MACBA (2015), the 9th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2013) and 30th Biennale of São Paulo, São Paulo (2012) among others.

Image: Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Spiral Forest