Johan Grimonprez

An award-winning filmmaker, this exhibition is the New York gallery debut of his films, Kobarweng or Where is your Helicopter? and It Will be All Right If You Come Again, Only Next Time Don’t Bring Any Gear, Except A Tea Kettle…, works which preceded his film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. As a graduate student in cultural anthropology, Grimonprez, visited Irian Jaya, the western part of Papau New Guinea, and his resulting video project Kobarweng… traces the historical moment of a collision between two different cultures: a remote New Guinean village, Pepera, only dimly aware of the larger beyond is radically disrupted by an encounter with the outside world — a group of Western scientists exploring unmapped territory that is only approachable by helicopter. Kobarweng became New Guinean Sibil tongue for “the sound of the airplane”; the first airplanes caused a shock that threw their worldview upside down, forcing them to redefine their known existence according to the outside world's encapsulation of it. The shock is still visible everywhere. Even upon his arrival three decades later, Grimonprez was first asked “Where is your helicopter?”. Grimonprez was able to track down the original visitors to Pepera and the film juxtaposes their 45 years old documentary footage with oral accounts of the indigenous people, critically restaging the history of this first encounter. In It Will Be All Right… Grimonprez again explores the effect of Western cultural imperialism, specifically the way that people identify with the new mythologies and the subsequent merging of known and fantastical realities. A missionary had screened the Sound of Music for the people of Irian Jaya and many of them recognized the landscape of alpine Austria as resembling the one around them, yet simultaneously as the place from which the visiting foreigners came. In this film Grimonprez has taken the archival footage of New Guinea, and quilted it together with images from the Sound of Music and Brussels’ Palais des Beaux Arts’ “Exploration du Monde” theatre, a movie house known for films of adventure and discovery, creating a literal collapsing of spaces. The film’s installation was developed specifically for this show and is made up of six different projections that connect with and overlap one another, making for a continuous landscape on the gallery’s walls. Pressetext

Johan Grimonprez
We never tell everything, we always keep something for the next anthropologist