SEA OF TRANQUILLITY

Sea of Tranquillity

Bélgica. 2010. Color. 30 min. Experimental. Vídeo.

Film Director: Hans Op de Beeck.
Music: Hans Op de Beeck; Sam Vloemans.

It's a combination of live video recordings of actors and digitally-generated 3D environments in which the viewer makes a night-time visit to a mysterious, mythical cruise liner, the 'Sea of Tranquillity'. This fictitious cruise liner has been designed by Hans Op de Beeck, following a short residence at Saint-Nazaire in France in 2008, during which the artist became intrigued by the remarkable Second World War story and postwar reconstruction of this harbour town, whose shipyards produce the worlds largest cruise liners. It seemed to the artist that the Queen Mary 2, then just completed, was, like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (the highest building in the world), a suitable metaphor for our belief in spurious values and in such concepts as work, leisure time and luxury consumerism. We nowadays use such categories as the highest, the first and the biggest, but what do these terms say about the actual quality of things?

Hans Op de Beeck

Multi-disciplinary artist Hans creates interworlds. Suspended between past and future, fiction and reality, his works sound out a mirage-like contemporary universe and a sensory vertigo where the familiar rubs shoulders with the strange. Recent exhibitions include the Singapore Biennale (2008), Galleria Borghese (2009), the Aichi Triennale (2010), the Hirshhorn Museum, the Venice Biennale and Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos CAB (2011).

"Extensions" (2009) / "Celebration" (2008) / "Drifting"(2004+2007) / "The Building"(2007) / "The Stewarts have a party" (2006) / "All together now…" (2005) / "Loss" (2004) / "Places (Gardening 2)" (2004) / "My brother’s gardens" (2003) / "Blender" (2003) / "Gardening" (2001) Border (2001) Situation (1) (2000) Coffee (1999) Communication (1999) Insert Coin – for Love (1999) Insert Coin – Highway Car (1999) Determination (4) (1998) Sub- (1998) Determination (1) (1996)