In Johanna Billings Magical World, images of desolate street scenes outside a rundown 1980s cultural centre in Dubrava, a suburb

of Zagreb, Croatia, lead inside the building where a group of children are rehearsing the song Magical World, 1 a melancholic depiction of hope and change: Why do you want to wake me from such a beautiful dream? ... Cant you see that Im sleeping? ... We live in a magical world. While performing the song in what for them is a foreign language, hypnotizing closeups and long shots of the children alternate with the urban wasteland outside, slowly drawing us into the childrens fragile, private world. The mixture of timidity and pride, insecurity and confidence in their poses and expressions, reveals their struggle to grasp the meaning of the words they sing, but at the same time fills the room with an unmistakable and intense inner hope. Jan Schuijren Amsterdam, January 2007
Notes 1 Magical World was written by the African-American singer Sidney Barnes and first performed by Rotary Connection in 1968.

About the Artists Victor Alimpiev combines elements of diverse artistic genres like painting, theatre, dance, and music within the moving image. In Alimpievs works, the human presence seldom performs individually, usually appearing as a group of people that becomes a malleable mass: a living sculpture that reacts to its surrounding space. Movements, often isolated from their context, are defined by the repetition of monotonous gestures that seem familiar but subordinate to the dramaturgy of the moving image. According to Alimpiev: What is important is that the immobility of a sculpture is a tense immobility, the eternal moment of the sculpture something slightly stretched, like trembling. For example lyrical trembling, trembling before discomfort. Victor Alimpiev received his degree in Art and Art Education in Moscow, where he was born in 1973. He continued his studies at the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) in Moscow and the Valand High School of Arts in Gothenburg, Sweden. He participated in the 50th Venice Biennial, Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, and the 4th Berlin Biennial, and recently exhibited his work at the Vienna Secession, the MUKHA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, and at SMAK Museum for Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium, among others. Victor Alimpiev lives and works in Moscow. Mircea Cantors work is as poetic as it is political and examines mental, virtual and psychic shifts, near and far. In his videos and installations, as well as in his objects, photography and graphic work, Cantor deploys visual feints to address displacements on a wider scale. In The Second Step (2005), he recreated the lunar landscape, complete with Neil Armstrongs footprint from his one small step in 1969. By excavating the journeys political relevance from the vantage point of the post-Cold War climate, Cantor highlights the absurdity of its propagandistic function. Similarly, Cantor examines the potential for political and revolutionary uprisings in The Landscape Is Changing (2003), a video that shows protesters in Albania holding up mirrors instead of placards. Born in Oradea, Romania in 1977, Cantor currently lives and works in both Paris and Cluj Napoca Romania. His work has been exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennial; the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Busan Biennial in Busan, South Korea and the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Berlin, among others. Cantor is co-editor of VERSION, an artist-run magazine: www.versionmagazine.com Johanna Billing works mainly with video, music, and performance. Together with her brother Anders, she also runs the record label Make it Happen. Billings video works in most cases looped dwell on routines, rehearsals, and rituals. Her films portray people in staged, concentrated situations, emotionally charged by internal tensions between the individual and the backdrop of society. The participants play themselves and, at the same time, play a part in a multilayered interpretation of a place and situation, in which Billing carefully balances staged documentary and authentic fiction. Born in 1973, Jnkping, Sweden, Johanna Billing graduated from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1999. In 2003, she participated in the 50th Venice Biennial and the 1st Prague Biennial. In recent years, her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions such as the 9th Istanbul Biennial and the 1st Moscow Biennial in 2005, Marabouparken (Sundbyberg, Sweden), Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam), P .S.1 (New York), the Singapore Biennial 2006, and the Momentum Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art 2006 in Moss, Norway. Johanna Billing lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. www.makeithappen.org/johannabilling.html

Johanna Billing; Magical World 2005 (production still)

Confined Innocence
Apart from its typical reference to a childs or animals virtue, innocence as a purely positive term that connotes an open and optimistic view of the world seems to be relegated to the realm of the irrelevant. Authenticity has become relative and reality is increasingly fictionalized, making it hard to connect with our inner essence at this moment in time. Confined Innocence brings together three works that question the biased perceptions we adopt and allows for a revalidation of our core emotions and genuine experience the simple and pure, heartfelt understanding and interpretation of what we see, hear, and feel. In Victor Alimpievs Summer Lightnings, the dark and roaring thunder outside interacts with the controlled, choreographed gestures of a group of young girls sitting in a brightly lit classroom. As if driven by an invisible force, they intermittently drum their painted fingernails on the table. The collective tapping instills what feels like a serene tension in the room. The abrupt cuts of images of the girls hands lying open on the table, and close-ups of their expressions anticipatory, excited, nervous, curious, amused engender disquiet in the absolute silence. The sequenced play is fiercely interrupted by images of distant thunder and lightning throbbing against a black sky. With no further clues on offer, the emotional charge increases, endlessly suspending the climax, intensifying the complexity of the moment. Deeparture by Mircea Cantor shows a gallery space in which a wolf and a deer tensely inhabit the room together. Their distinct yet restful awareness of each other is eerie in its disturbing silence, with the perceived anxiety projected by the viewers mind and returned again, bouncing back from the screen. The wolf is latently stalking the deer, though no thought of attack can be read in his mind. The enticing play of their instinctual explorations throws the viewer back and forth between a sense of bewildering wonder and fearful awe in a silent, time-distorting loop.

About the Curator Jan Schuijren was born in 1964 in Amstenrade, the Netherlands. He worked with the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, Amsterdam from 1991 to 2001. Since 2002, he has worked as an independent curator, developing and presenting exhibitions and media art projects with a variety of international artists and organizations. Recent projects include: Drawn by Reality Encapsulated in Life, Woodstreet Galleries + SPACE, Pittsburgh, (www.drawnbyreality.info); Sex and Sadness, commissioned by the International Film Festival of Rotterdam and Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, also presented at Platform Garanti, Istanbul; and Happy Believers, the 7th Werkleitz Biennial, Halle, Germany (www.werkleitz.de/ biennale). Currently he is developing the program for a 40 m2 Urban Screen, presenting a daily changing program of film and video art in public space in the newly developed district South-axis in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Mircea Cantor; Deeparture 2005 (video still)

Confined Innocence
Victor Alimpiev, Johanna Billing, Mircea Cantor
January 26 March 11, 2007 Art Gallery of Windsor February 14 March 9, 2007 Artcite, Inc., Windsor, Ontario Thursday, February 15, 3 pm: Curator-led tour of the installations Organized and presented at the Art Gallery of Windsor and Artcite Inc., Windsor, as part of the 13th annual Media City Festival, February 1317 , 2007 . Media City is an Artcite Inc./House of Toast presentation. www.houseoftoast.ca/mediacity

Guest curator ................... Jan Schuijren Exhibition coordinators .... Jeremy Rigsby and Oona Mosna, Media City James Patten, Art Gallery of Windsor
2007 Art Gallery of Windsor, the artists, and the author

List of Works Victor Alimpiev (b.1973, Moscow, Russia) Summer Lightnings Russia 2005 DVD, 2 minutes, 12 seconds, loop
Courtesy of the artist Installed at the Art Gallery of Windsor

Johanna Billing (b.1973, Jnkping, Sweden) Magical World Croatia/Sweden 2005 DVD, 6 minutes, 12 seconds, loop
Courtesy of the artist Installed at Artcite, Inc.

Mircea Cantor (b.1977 , Oradea, Romania) Deeparture Romania/France 2005 16mm film transferred to DVD, 2 minutes 43 seconds, loop
Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris and New York Installed at the Art Gallery of Windsor

Confined Innocence
Victor Alimpiev Johanna Billing Mircea Cantor

AGW
Victor Alimpiev; Summer Lightnings 2005 (video stills)

Art Gallery of Windsor

401 Riverside Drive West Windsor, Ontario N9A 7J1 Canada Phone 519 977 0013 Fax 519 977 0776 www.agw.ca
The Art Gallery of Windsor is supported by its members, donors, sponsors, the AGW Foundation, the City of Windsor, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Department of Communications and Heritage, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ministry of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation. Cover Mircea Cantor; Deeparture 2005 (video still)
City of Windsor