In the Presence of Awe: The Transvangarde (2009)

In the Presence of Awe The Transvangarde is a film about the international movement of artists, The Transvangarde, founded by John Polka Allen, the American Renaissance man and designer of the Biosphere 2. It adopts the movements watershed exhibition of 2000, at the October Gallery, London, as its basis. In 1979, John Allen made a dumbfounding discovery that the whole art world had missed since 1863. While touring Nigeria with the Theatre of All Possibilities, he realised that Avant Garde art actually operated in parallel cultural universes, in all nations on earth, and beyond the European view of the concept. He discovered a tendency of artists in all cultures, schooled or unschooled, to adapt a language to help make sense of their ever-changing economic environments and their altering effects of these on their states of being. Hence the Transvangarde. And so he banishes the idea of primitivism. WRITER/PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Ishmael Annobil; CINEMATOGRAPHY: William Olivier George; LIGHTING: Ori Batut ; EDITOR(S): William Olivier George, Merethe Rosvold and Francesco Caradonna ; MOTION GRAPHICS: Murat Kuscu ; SOUND POST: Tony Sheng; MUSIC: Ishmael Annobil and William Olivier George; PRODUCTION MANAGER: Sharon Tang.