MANUEL SAIZ - A New Chance for Symbolic Dimension

A video-installation based on the projection of a fragment from Ingmar Bergman's 1958 film Ansiktet (The Magician). In an exercise of film appropriation, Manuel Saiz reconstructs the scene in which the viewer becomes actively involved in an argument between two scientists on the possibility of seeing visions, which one of the scientists claims to have experienced. Using plain religious connotations, the installation manages to "prove" the hypothesis of the argument, as viewers experience seeing a vision.

Manuel Saiz

Manuel Saiz is a visual artist and independent curator residing in London who has been exhibiting his sculptures, photographic reproductions and video works since the mid-1980s in art galleries and museums all over the world. From 1995 onwards, his work has been focused on videos and video-installations, which have been projected in numerous cinema and video festivals including Impakt (Utrecht), VideoLisboa (Lisbon), Videoex (Zurich), International Short Film Festival (Hamburg) and transmediale (Berlin). Recently, his video-installations have been seen in exhibitions such as Specialized Technicians Required (Galería Moriarty, Madrid), Nominal Politics (T1+2 Space, London), East End Academy (Whitechapel Gallery, London) and Save the Day (Kunstbüro, Vienna).

Manuel Saiz was a founder member of TheVideoArtFoundation in 2003. He directed the 25hrs Festival (www.25hrs.org) with a selection of 300 international video artists, generating a journey through the history of video since the 1990s. Other projects currently being developed include videoDictionary (www.videodictionary.org) and artDVDbook (www.artdvdbook.com).

www.saiz.co.uk