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Secrets for Sale
CH 2003 64'
Director: Elodie Pong
Script: Elodie Pong
Production: Thierry Spicher
Camera: Elodie Pong, Frederico Brinca
Sound: Luc Yersin
Editing: Orsola Valenti
Music: Velma
Secrets part 1
CH 2005 158'
Secrets part 2
CH 2005 152'
Secrets part 3
CH 2005 117'
Secrets part 4
CH 2005 120'
Secrets for Sale
Elodie Pong
What is a secret? What would you rather keep to yourself? How much are you willing to negotiate for what you have kept hidden? How do you resolve to share it?
In the space of a 1-hour film and 9 hours of images shown back-to-back, 300 secrets of a most intimate or amusing, dramatic or childish nature are recalled and told by subjects who have willingly been drawn into the game of selling secrets. Collected and traded in an installation realised in Switzerland and France, they show us a snapshot of our own doubts, shames, mistakes and passing fancies.
Wandering into a gallery, people suddenly find themselves the subject of the installation. They must sign release forms. They must decide whether to go into the next room. They must decide whether to mask and disguise themselves. Then, they are asked to tell a personal secret directly to a video camera. Something no one else knows. After all this, they meet back up with artist Elodie Pong, who offers them a bit of money for their secret.
SECRETS FOR SALE is odd, disorienting, sometimes touching, and often funny - as when someone who just admitted having a venereal disease tries to pick up Ms. Pong. Clearly an amateur work, it nonetheless is brilliantly conceived and startlingly original.
From a statement by the director: "Starting off with what was an artistic experience, I found myself confronted with material which was baffling, often anguished, a troubling x-ray of an era where everything is for sale.”
"Pong’s work provides the spectator with that kind of open structure, which Eco describes, where you are free to find your own way through the work. It’s not a question of multiple ways of interpretation, but rather the endless structural possibilities that exist within the work and the fact that the spectator/interpreter have to complete the work her-/himself by engaging with the work." (Majken Kramer Overgaard in Tokyo Art Beat)
"Secrets for Sale thus presents a series of testimonies
witnessed by means of this installation. The extracts chosen
show the diversity of reactions. Refusal, about-turn or total
acceptance, each visitor finds himself sole judge at the moment
of avowal. Some people take advantage of this profane process
to liberate themselves from the burden of a terrible secret,
others reveal themselves as grasping negotiators as soon as
money is mentioned. At a time when television channels
currently practice this invasion of intimacy, Elodie Pong opts for
transparency and reveals the mechanics of this strange
commerce of the self."
Visions du Réel Nyon
Elodie Pong
*1966. US born Swiss video artist Elodie Pong is known for her subtle, analytic works often built as cycles or in series, and which focus on human relationships, cultural codes and their impacts on contemporary society. Her visual language is cinematic, precise and acute, and unfolds through metaphors rather than linear narration. Pong’s work investigates the sociological and structural characteristics of her generation, relating personal experience and that of her close environment to broader circles by creating specific conditions for individuals to perform and react to her setting. While her works until 2004 focused mainly on immediate visualisation of sociological structures such as intimacy, friendship, issues of gender and communication, Pong’s more recent films can be read as multilayered analysis and deconstructions of those very themes. Indeed, Pong has concentrated more and more on exploring the precise settings of her fictions and their characteristics. The issue of the set, the character and the dialog/soundtrack have become central, the viewer becoming a part of the constellation by being offered different readings according to which works are brought together. From the visualisation of certain aspects of social relationships to the exploration of their basic structures, Pong has moved one step further in her latest installations: she portrays the reality of a generation that has lost the belief in fixed structures and identities. In thus appears the reality of people that emerged from the experience of a post- punk/post- feminist/post- everything era. While in her earlier works the individualism and the freedom to chose in any aspect of culture, politics, gender and sexuality, seemed to be a celebrated achievement, her newer series of videos ask: What are the guidelines in such a complex, personalised view of the world, society, art and the individual? Are there still any at all? And what are the consequences of such for the individual? Her work will be presented in various group shows in 2007 at: Mother’s Tankstation-Dublin, Kunsthaus Baselland, Galeria Vermelho-Sao Paolo, Musée d’Art Contemporain-Lyon and Kunsthalle Wien among others. This year, Pong has published three books: SAMPLES edited by Edition Fink, a CHIER D'ARTISTE in the Pro Helvetia collection edited by Periferia, and a text entitled WE ARE KNIGHTS ON THE TRAJECTORIES OF A POST-EVERYTHING ERA published by JRP|Ringier.
2009 CONTEMPORARY
2006 JE SUIS UNE BOMBE
2003-2005 SECRETS FOR SALE
2003 ADN/ARN (ANY DEAL NOW / ANY REALITY NOW
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