RES Features: RES 10

David d'Heilly

Words: Holly Willis

Have you noticed? Museums and galleries are paying much more attention to spaces and the physicality of environments. And that's where curator David d'Heilly is making his presence felt. Six years ago, d'Heilly, who had already worked in media art and architecture, founded 2dk Co., Ltd. to produce a documentary about the indie media scene in war-torn Yugoslavia. Forget the minor detail that he had never set foot in an editing suite; within a year, he'd churned out nine 90-minute docs, and was ready to try something new. Next up: a stint as "composition assistant" on filmmaker Nobuhiro Suwa's award-winning feature, M/other, followed by his work as "direction collaborator" on Suwa's next film, H Story, an adaptation of Alain Resnais' 1959 classic avant-garde film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

"Initially it was kind of schizophrenic," d'Heilly says of his shifts between disparate artistic endeavors and curating. "I was -- and am -- heart and soul, blood and bones, interested in working in cinema. But at the same time, I'm not a curator by accident." D'Heilly explains that filmmaking added the third strand to his trio of talents (media art, architecture and now cinema), and this has affected his subsequent exhibitions. He now thinks about each show not as a static space that viewers enter, but instead, as a dynamic, sensory, time-based experience. Thus, while his earlier curatorial efforts included pulling together an exhibit of work by Rem Koolhaas, co-curating Buzz Club: News From Japan at PS 1/MoMA, and selecting projects for Rotterdam's Exploding Cinema program, d'Heilly has more recently turned his focus to the spaces in which work -- including film and video -- is displayed.

Exhibitions and architecture, both of which are 'sequenced experience constructs,' can be seen as very powerful, time-based media," he says.

D'Heilly's latest show, URBANLENZ, a Canon Art Project, which took place in Tokyo's Harajuku district last December, is a good example. "We were on the top floor," explains d'Heilly, "and it was December, snowing outside. We carpeted the space in live Kentucky bluegrass, and then set up a 5.1 audio system using ME-Geithain monitors with Martin subwoofers fine-tuned for the room. Absolutely sparkling audio. Then in the center, we had a white cube projection space with brilliant projectors." While d'Heilly had plenty of suitable artwork, he wanted to do something unusual for the show's cinematic component. "For years I've been making my own director's cuts of other people's films," he says. "So I decided to commission artists to make their own cuts of a popular film, namely Takashi Miike's Ichi, the Killer. The result? A space embodying the much-vaunted convergence of design, film and architecture -- with green grass! -- and a sensibility of appropriation and revision. "I realize that this is a big taboo," says d'Heilly of the remakes, "but maybe that's where the "art" part comes in. Art should be a field where you can try things like this."