Catalogue > At random

Two Islands is a film about two enormous waste dumps in Staten Island and Hart Island, NYC. One is a now closed landfill, which at one point was the largest in the world, the other is a cemetary of unidentified people, still in use. Two Islands bluntly asks: what does the existence of these two huge mountains of economic and social waste tell about our civilization, and what kind of legacy will the archaeologists see in them when they are studying these a few centuries from now?

Filmmaker and media-artist Jan Ijäs (b. 1975) is a artist of lens-based art, both still and moving. The films of Ijäs tend to break the traditional boundaries of fictive and documentary films. Ijäs?s work is often displayed as gallery installations rather than in traditional movie venues incorporated with still images and text works. Ijäs?s, sometimes even humorous works, deal with serious and difficult social themes, like migration into foreign and hostile societies. Ijäs?s films have been shown very widely abroad by movie festivals (over hundred) and art museums.