Catalogue > Search

?Welcome to MyStreet. It?s quite a normal Street, don?t you think?? MyStreet Your Street? Everybody?s Street? MyStreet is.. ..a travel to the past ..very personal ..about unnatural division of territory ..harald koelzer ..based on improvisation ..approx. 100 meters long ..a fostex fr-2le ..a collaborative piece ..based on memories ..projected on a wall ..about perception ..Lisa Hall ..based on intuition ..an experience ..16 years of my life ..a composition ..the moment ..a sony ex1 ..michael fisher ..your imagination ..11 hours of audio material ..a stereo piece ..a cliché ..based on digital technology ..reminding you of something? ..herwig steiner ..the truth ..your choise ..energetically unbalanced ..4 hours of video material ..based on knowledge.. an exploration ..a walk without walking ..a zoom h2 ..bernd martinschitz ..sound ..an experiment ..odd ..based on chance ..about people ..you listening with my ears and seeing with my eyes MyStreet. YourStreet.Everybody?sStreet.. ..the latest shortfilms that aram zarikian a.k.a. zitrone presents in the series MyStreet. He is working with sitespecific audio and video material as well as the tools of composition and recordings of prepared improvisation. The viewer is invited into the audio visual field through strangely familiar material, however exotic audio and visual stimuli lead the viewer into a secondary state of adjusted reality where the individual?s imagination is left to complete the journey. The process of production reflects the viewers experience, evolving from a collaborative soundscaping and site specific composition.

zitrone is born 1980 and currently lives in London. He studied Music in Austria and the United States and his strong interest in Sound, Recording and Video Arts began from an early age and developed into passion for Sound Arts and Sound Design.

This film is one part of a long-term engagement with Tanglin Halt, one of Singapore’s oldest social housing estates, which runs alongside a former railway track. The railway was owned by the Malaysian state until 2011, meaning that a ten-meter-wide zone of indeterminate-governance ran through the heart of Singapore for fifty years, playing host to a fecundity of more-than-human activities. Ornithologists have observed 105 species of birds in this patch. However, the land along the tracks is being repurposed as green corridor park through a new biotech and media hub. Once-famous modern housing blocks are being demolished and low-income residents relocated elsewhere. Unofficial tree shrines, community farms and gathering places have been cleared. Our repeated returns to this contested site aim to trace remaining fragments of calls, echoes, shadows memories and transformative encounters that still animate this zone, like shadows through leaves.

Lucy Davis (she/her) is a visual artist, art writer and founder, in 2009 of the collaborative, transdisciplinary Migrant Ecologies Projects.www.migrantecologies.org Davis/Migrant Ecologies work has been featured in numerous world festivals, biennales, museums and residency programmes, including: Oberhausen ISFF (2021); Reykjavik RIFF (2021); Singapore SGIFF (2021);The National Gallery of Singapore (2021); Singapore Art Museum (2020);Animistic Apparatus,Berwick BFMAF (2019);SeedCulturesSvalbard (2019); The Taipei Biennale (2018), Rockbund Shanghai/Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo (2018), NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2017); Taiwan International Video Art exhibition TIVA 5 (Oct 2016 – Jan 2017); M1 Singapore Fringe (Jan 2016); NUS Museum (June 2014 - Feb 2015); Singapore Art Museum (2014); National Museum of Singapore (2012-14); Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh Art/Science Festival (2013); International Symposium on Electronic Arts ISEA (USA, 2013); The Barbican (UK, 2013) and Prix COAL Awards (Paris, 2011).

An expansive landscape with mountains, a sea full of questions, a sky with helicopters hovering, and cars wrecked next to drifting ones. An apartment with white walls, covered bullet holes, and windows. A collection of family footage and recent film footage retraces a trail of a hunted memory by exploring the brutal history of the Karantina district near the port of Beirut in Lebanon, which lived through a massacre at the beginning of the Civil War. In this film, the past, present, and annual celebration of Lebanon's Independence Day are interwoven. It will remain a work in progress until further notice.

Siska born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1984, graduated from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut with a master degree in cinema studies and film directing. Based in Berlin, Siska’s practice is often centered on archiveology examining sociopolitical narratives in relation to personal and collective pasts. His use of film language and codes of cinematography, as strategic mediations to activate an archive, allows him to experiment with new forms of storytelling and his own biography. Siska's work has been internationally exhibited, including Martin Gropius Bau, Berlinale, Paris 104, Beirut exhibition center, Mosaic rooms, gallery Imago Mundy among others.

Investigating the relationship of the nationalism towards nature, the work explores the nuances between the political and the escapist. In the film, a central part of the installation, nature is understood as a space beyond: beyond language, culture, media, and as the protagonist realizes, the nature seems to be the very product of that which it is supposed to be an escape from. Through the contemplation of the narrator and the imagery of national and nature parks, film There Aren`T Words for What We Do or How We Feel so We Have to Make Them Up explores both the film medium and the notion of the ?national essence?. Images of nature become the impulse for rethinking of the relationship between representation and reality or rather the relationship of the image and the myth of the nation ? quintessentially connected with the given territory. Through various topographies, from open plains to mountain peaks, the relationship of the narration and the image is free association. The camera intentionally avoids canonical, recognizable natural motives, so they can be placed everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This is also the reason the narrator is not a native English speaker.

Fokus Grupa is an artist collective based in Rijeka and Zagreb, Croatia. Their practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary, and they work across art, design and curating. Their artistic strategies take political shape, without becoming a representational form of ?political art?. Fokus Grupa concentrate on the relations between art and its public manifestations, in terms of working culture, aesthetics, and social and economic exchange values. Their work investigates the inherent power structures of the (art)system. To this effect, they explore it?s economic, spatial and legal implementations. They also explore ways in which politics employs artistic or esthetic means to (mis)appropriate and instrumentalize emotions, reclaiming certain methods back into their art practice. The collective tries to expand the boundaries of the art work, using printed matter, films and installations, works on paper, discussions, workshops and texts. Shows at museums & galleries; Gitte Bohr Gallery (Berlin), NOVA Gallery (Zagreb), GMK Gallery (Zagreb), NCCA (Moscow), HVCCA (New York), MOCA (Rijeka), MOCA (Zagreb), MOCA (Ljubljana), ACCA (Melbourne), SKUC Gallery (Ljubljana), Calvert 22 Gallery (London), Furini Arte Contemporanea (Roma), O3one Gallery, (Belgrade), Jakopic Gallery (Ljubljana), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milano)

In the 16 minute movie entitled Novaciéries (LA)HORDE sets up a contemplative situation staging and reinterpreting Jumpstyle, a dance emerged from Mainstream Hardcore, to deliver a mysterious report on the development of a post-internet dance. The film is a global project mixing cinematographic images shot by a movie crew but also performance captations with the cast of the film and homemade videos made by the interpreters themselves shared on youtube and other platforms. The camera follows a singer and dancers wander in an abandoned steel mill. The dancers respond to the lost beat of machinery by executing Hard Jump and Hakken figures while the singer turns a Hardcore anthem "Hardcore to the bone" into a lyrical lament. We are invited to follow the wander of the interpreters until they get together to deliver a show without an audience. All along we waver between the idealized vision of their representation and the reality of its visibility. "Novacieries is a combination of cinema, performance, and home video that transcends dance films and presents a choreographed and metaphysical portrait of the post-industrial world by reinterpreting post-internet dance."

(LA)HORDE is a collective of three artists: Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel. Their body of work is developed through film direction, video installation, performance, stage direction and choreographic creation. (LA)HORDE creates unstable universes and mesmerizing fictions that challenge the viewer into his way of experiencing and apprehending the artwork. Their leitmotiv is to question and swap the codes of different artistic scenes as contemporary art and living art.

Ghosts is the last short film by (LA)HORDE with the Ballet national de Marseille, soundtracked by Rone and scripted by Spike Jonze, filmed in the Palais Longchamp in Marseille. When the Fine Arts Museum closes, figures take over the deserted place, embrace and tear each other, as if to recover their body, until their encounter with the night guard.

(LA)HORDE is a collective founded in 2013 by the three artists Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel. Together they question codes of various artistic disciplines, especially contemporary live art and performing arts. At the head of the Ballet National de Marseille since September 2019, they have created choreographic works, films, video installations and performances, that always evolve around the body in movement. From the interaction and the juxtaposition of these different media, they develop scenarios and actions that take up radically contemporary themes and questions.

Extraits d?une émission TV de CBS : The Sound of Jazz, live à New-York le 8 décembre 1957

Iradia Digital film, specially made for the Cronica 021-2005 DVD: "Can I have 2 minutes of your time?". All Images and audio by Meta

Meta is an american artist working with the digital manipulation & synthesis of audio, visual data.

Radio_int.14/37 is an audiovisual piece commissioned for the "Essays on Radio: Can I Have Two Minutes of Your Time?" CD+DVD compilation from the Crónica media label. As in previous video work from Lia, the music track is created by @c and the video track is built over it using reactive software. The shorter length of this track was predetermined by the structure of the DVD, but it is already a look into the future collaboration piece by Lia and @c built on juxtaposed shorter audiovisual units.

Lia has been working on digital art since 1995, after graduating from the High-school for Students of Music in Graz, Austria. Living in Vienna since then she splits her time between visual design, web art, video and realtime visual performances, apparently different activities that she however manages to bind together trough her unique approach to creativity and production. Over the last years she has also been teaching as an invited teacher at the Fachhochschule Joanneum in Graz, Austria, the École Cantonalle d`Art de Lausanne, Switzerland and the Fine Arts University in Oslo, Norway.

Video byAntmanuv ? Silent HAARP DVD V/A, Essays on Radio: Can I have two minutes of your time? Produced at antmanuvMICRO, Canada 2004 RF.interferenceson the electromagnetic wave by a different electromagnetic entity, outputting different stages/delays

Born in Coimbra Portugal, Tomane Vinagreiro aka antmanuv is a solitary audiovisual experimentalist artist with an interest in expressing feelings with audio and visuals following an order using architecture and facts related with our lives as inspiration. in, out and field recordings are very important strategy to a pre designed input. I sometimes find myself concentrated with sounds from situations that we cannot really notice; they are around us but we don`t really notice their existence. Everything depends on where I`m at and how I feel when I`m there.

With Untitled, Seoungho Cho continues to refine and heighten the issues he has long pursued in his quietly beautiful work. The source material for this video was filmed in a Korean factory and at Information Technology College in Pusan, Korea, with extensive use of macro-focus and close-up. This intense examination of the behavior of industrial machinery is well suited to the precise, exacting quality of Cho`s digital editing, in which "real" images are multiplied, re-sized, and rhythmically sequenced. The soundtrack, composed by the artist, alternates between stretches of silence and periods of eerie noise, complimenting the elegance of this composition. Electronic Arts Intermix

The video works of Korean artist Seoungho Cho are distinguished by a lyrical confluence of complex image processing and sound collage. His works are formalist, almost painterly explorations of subjectivity and the subconscious. These poetic meditations often focus on isolation and estrangement in relation to culture and landscape. Electronic Arts Intermix

-sf 0905-04 Digital film, specially made for the Cronica 021-2005 DVD: "Can I have 2 minutes of your time?". All Images and audio by Ok.suitcase

André Gonçalves started improvising and manipulating sound in 1999 having as main instruments a guitar and a computer. In 2001 he starts the "ok.suitcase" project in which he has focused his major attention and developed his major works in sound art and max/msp programming. It`s by the hand of Nuno Moita and "Stapletape" that he presented his sound work live for the first time, and since then he has been playing live with them. At the same time he`s the author of the electronic rhythms, synthesis and sound manipulation in the project "In Her Space" and he is playing live with the improv project "Last Time This Happened We Had a Street Party". Keeping the improvisation concept in mind and always working in real-time he has worked in sound design for theatre with the "Inestética Theatre Company". In video art he has been developing works for record labels, musical projects and for it?s own project ?ok.suitcase?.

"Card 4" provides a four position view of a group of friends playing cards. Each is seen from above one of the four players giving only the back of the head and the hands at play. During the work, the different views are woven together mimicking the circular activity of card playing. As a result of the capturing method used the imagery itself is fractured. This gives an additional layer to the visuals of the piece. The soundtrack that accompanies "Card 4" originates from the video recordings of the game at play. In the first half of the work, it is taken directly from the source material at an accelerated speed. The audio of the second half of work is obtained through a degenerative process from the original sound recording. Both sections of the audio were edited in the same weave pattern as the visuals making it difficult for the viewer to establish any familiar sound, it provides the key for interpreting the editing sequence of the overall piece. Its shift in rhythm and tone indicates the subtle changes in the visuals.

sue.k. is a West Australian artist that has been living in London for the past two years. Over the years she has exhibited extensively using a variety of mediums in the areas of experimental video, drawing, sculpture and painting. Her video work has been screened throughout Australia and in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, and France.

At a time before time, a Big Bang in Babel sat the uni-logos into a perpetual process of language breeding. Depleted and stripped of its initial inertia, language can no longer keep up, and slowly crumbles to phonetic fragments of ghostly meaning. Dialect-ic-s coalesce, and separates overlap. Accidentally excavated, scraps of mental images that outlived history are crunched into an associative mash. No-longer-indigenous tongues exercise “language games” of syntactic deconstruction, morphing seemingly heterogeneous linguistic signs until foreign words resettle in newly-found ears. Persistent utterances in Bal-balah (befuddlement/ clutter/ Babelising) show no mercy for hesitation or stuttering; in this framework there is no place for affective becoming, yet at the same time, the loss of the power fossilized in words opens up a space of flexibility to ascribe new and elusive meanings.

Mohamed A. Gawad is an editor and a filmmaker based in Cairo. He holds an MFA in scriptwriting and editing from RSICA. His works were screened in several festivals and spaces including Berlinale, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Shnit Film Festival, Contemporary Image Collective - Cairo, and Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et poétiques. He is also a co-founder of Cimatheque – Alternative Film Center.

In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the country. The film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.

Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Throughout her career, we can trace the ways that her experimentation dares to confront social and political issues by embracing both familiar and intimate processes. Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception. Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at MoMI (Museum of the Moving Image), Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, among others. In 2021, both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center gave her awards for her lifetime achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet. Over the last three decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of documentary, performance, and collage. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences, often from a personal, self-reflexive point of view. With each project, Sachs investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Sachs’ early works on celluloid offer a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her vision ever since. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty. Retrospectives of Sachs’ work have been presented at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, Cork, and China Women’s Film Festival. Lynne lives in Brooklyn. Her work is represented by internationally by Kino Rebelde and is part of the Light Cone Catalogue in France.

Jacques Derrida’s staring cat Logos, a bowing deer, domestic servants, a headstrong mare and the director’s 19 years younger boyfriend are some of the characters we meet in the essayfilm Dear Deer. The distanced and slightly voyeuristic documentary footage, mainly shot in Argentina and Japan, is accompanied by a voiceover in which asymmetrical relations, trans-species empathy, embarrassment and shame are discussed in a both investigative, descriptive and confessive manner.

Endre Aalrust (b. 1973) is a Norwegian artist and film maker who is based in Berlin. He studied at the University in Oslo and National Academy of fine Arts in Bergen.  Aalrust has shown films in film and video festivals such as Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2019), Norwegians Short Film Festival, Grimstad (2019), HOMOGRAFÍA Film Festival, Mexico City (2018), Nordic Filmfest, Rome, (2018),International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), (2016), Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife, Brazil (2016), Athens International Short Film Festival Psarokokalo (2016), Xposed International Film Festival, Berlin, (2016), Rencontres, Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2003/2011), Viper film and Videofestival, Kunsthalle Basel (2004) and European Media Festival, Osnabrück (2002).  Solo exhibitions include: Hund om Det, Bruksrommet, Stavanger, (2018) Freedom of Impression, Bærum Kunsthall, Oslo, (2018), Urc de Triomphe, Kunstbanken, Hamar, (2015), The Rise and Fall of Rise and Shine, Gallery Erik Steen, Oslo (2011), Free Lunch, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York (2010), Sofa So Good, Galerie Sandy Brown, Berlin (2009). 

Carnal Incontinence is an experimental documentary, a poetic and non-narrative reflection on men, masculinity and art. Visitors in Gemäldegalerie Berlin are observed as their interact with art, space, time and eachother - focus on their corporeality, slow motion and mannered gestures.

Endre Aalrust is Norwegian artist born 1973, lives in Berlin and was educated at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions : The Rise and Fall of Rise and Shine, Gallery Erik Steen, Oslo (2011), Free Lunch, Daniel Reich Gallery, New York (2010), Sofa So Good, Galerie Sandy Brown, Berlin (2009). Endre Aalrust has shown videos in film and video festivals such as Viper film and videofestival, Kunsthalle Basel, Rencountres, Paris/Berlin (2003), European Madia Festival, Osnabrück and video screenings in Caracas, Moscow, Prague, Stockholm, Berlin, Leipzig, Bergen and Oslo.

This film draws from conversations with Amazon Mturk workers and their relationship with the politics of the Mechanical Turk platform – the varying forms of transparencies and opacities that make the platform what it is. Focusing on the backend of AI and machine learning processes, the film investigates the relationships between the analogic, the digital and the terrestrial. What kind of work is required for smooth functioning of automation? Who does this backend work, where does it take place, and what does it entail? Using the very processes that workers help train on online platforms as material, recursions of different scales takes place, where we see language, the ability to define and speak clear English as central. A second focus is an exploration of the subjective nature of data gathering, processing and annotating, and the material infrastructures it is dependent on. In the absence of any fixed constants, context or averages, abstraction emerges as an important and forced tool.

Aarti Sunder’s research and practice lies at the crossroads of the digital humanities and contemporary art. She is interested in the fictions arising from investigating situated experiences and asking if these help us re-think the ways in which we understand technology and our relationship with it. So far she has focused on contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth and digital-terrestrial play. Aarti’s interest is to problematize the determined linearity of ‘progress’ inscribed within the promise of the algorithm, technological prowess and a quantifiable future. Looking at globalised framework of precarious labour, non-human exhaustion and storytelling that lies at the strategic intersection of power, knowledge and aesthetics. Relooking at these intersections, she believes, can help us tell better stories, of fictions past, present and future. Among other places, Aarti will exhibit her work at the forthcoming 67th BFI London Film Festival and in collaboration with Doreen Mende at Albertinum of the State Collections of Art in Dresden. She has previously shown at Akademie der Kunst, Singapore Biennale 22, Hayy Jameel, MIT, Warehouse421, the Goethe Institute in Chicago, Kunstverein Leipzig, Bauhaus Imaginista, Alserkal Avenue, Ashkal Alwan, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of many grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Harvard FSC Film Center, Art Dubai and Ashkal Alwan and the Sharjah Art Foundation. Aarti Sunder works with video, drawing and text and sculpture.

This video is a part of a longer research into Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, and is an exploration of the ghostly, undead, half-eaten and slowly decomposing stories sourced from the platform that forms a metaphoric link with online/offline technocultures. Here the the Mturk platform is introduced as specter where turkers, farmers and bots signal towards magic that complicates the almost transcendental belief in technocratic and algorithmic management. The three ghost stories. Relying on heavy abstraction, the film considers obfuscation, concealment, and pretense as the premise of the platform. The title comes from the now famous 2018 claim that ‘bots’ had taken over Mturk. However, numerous studies since has shown that it was farmers (digital workers who use server farms as a way to camouflage identity and location), bots (digital workers have poor English language, or, who use scripts to filter jobs) in non-english speaking countries who were being flagged as ‘bad actors’. Simultaneously ghost stories in Indian languages sourced from Mturk via high-paying jobs speak of three hauntings – an individual encounter, a communal haunting, and a humorous re-telling of a mythological story where a ghost gets trapped in a riddle. On screen we view three stages of life/death: decay and consumption, composting of the dead (the promise of life again), and the few minutes before death.

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India. She works with moving images, writing and drawing. Her interest lies within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics. Sunder has exhibited her work at the Singapore Biennale 22, Shanti Road Studio Gallery, HKW Berlin, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Institut, Kunstverein Leipzig, bauhaus imaginista, ISCP New York and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has received grants and fellowships from ArtEZ University of the Arts, MIT, Sommer Akademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Sarai and Khoj.

Paper Puppet Testimony By Houzan Mahmoud The Kurdish uprising of 1991 against venomous dictator Saddam Hussein continues to be an important historical event for all Kurdish people. It was the day that marked the defeat of the Ba’ath regime in Kurdistan’s cities. Each year, video footage from that particular moment when people broke into the notorious prison in Sulaymaniyah is shown in commemoration programmes on Kurdish TV channels. The Red Prison (or Security Prison) was a dreadful building in the middle of the city. It stood out as a symbol of terror and oppression, for many years; hundreds of Kurdish men and women were tortured and killed there by the dictator. The video footage is part of an old archive taken by a former Peshmerga fighter and filmmaker Abbas Abdulrazaq. He was in the ranks of the Peshmerga forces from the 1980s onwards. He was one of the five photographers who took photos of the Halabja chemical bombardment by Saddam’ regime. While his video footage is used from the archive to show the brutalities committed by the former regime, Abdulrazaq’s son Sherko, an artist and scholar, noticed something was missing. He has a vague memory from the day of the uprising in front of the Red Prison. He remembers seeing a caravan full of colourful women’s clothes, anti-pregnancy tablets, and other materials. Sherko’s memory stayed with him through the years. At the time, he was almost 11 years old when he saw the caravan. This left its mark on him, and years later he decided to probe further into this story. Since 2008, Sherko has been searching for clues to help him get to the bottom of this mystery. The caravan could be seen for only a few days during the uprising in the courtyard of the prison. It has disappeared without a trace, however; hardly a memory of it remains. The Red Prison has now been turned into a museum, and its torture chambers and tools, along with prisoners’ writings on the walls, have been preserved so that subsequent generations could see the brutality of Saddam’s fascist regime. However, the parties behind this transformation were biased and only focused on the memories of those political prisoners who belonged to their own parties. They erased the entire history of female prisoners. The plight of those women and the mystery of the caravan were ignored and were neither included in the memory of the building nor on TV programmes because these women might have been raped, and the political establishment does not seem to be willing to confront that history. This issue has become a concern for Sherko, and he raises many important questions as to why rape of political prisoners should be treated with shame. Why are their sacrifices belittled and erased? The name of his documentary is “Paper Puppet Testimony,” which recounts the stories of Kurdish women in the Red Prison through experimental documentary. In his documentary, Sherko tries to bring their stories back into the realm of politics, art, and culture. He is interested in stories that are easily forgotten, and he wants to give them a platform to be narrated and incorporated into official memory.

SHERKO ABBAS Sherko Abbas (b. 1978) is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist. Born in Iran, where his family lived as refugees, Abbas returned to Iraq when he was two years old. He studied Fine Art in Sulaymaniyah-Iraq and graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015.  Employing video, performance, sculpture, text and sound, Abbas’ practice is dedicated to the sonic and visual memory and geopolitical situation of contemporary Iraq. He has participated in many exhibitions internationally, including “Theater of Operations“  at MoMa PS1, Speaking a cross mountain Middle East Institute Washington, US, ‘Archaic’, the Iraq Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale; Biennale ‘Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2019’ at the Louvre Auditorium, Paris, France and Haus der Kulturen der Welt/ Berlin ; ‘Bagdad mon amour’ at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, France; ‘Vernacularity’ at the Alternativa International Visual Arts Festival in Gdansk, Poland; and ‘Estrangement’ at the Showroom, London, UK