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Mélissa Epaminondi, Esteban Ulrich
Deconstructing Niemeyer
Experimental doc. | mp4 | color | 1:9 | France | 2020
Sur une succession d'images documentant le chantier de remise en état de la coupole du siège du Parti Communiste Français, la voix de l'architecte brésilien Oscar Niemeyer traverse le temps pour nous dévoiler le cœur de son œuvre et de sa pensée.
Mélissa Epaminondi est née en 1977. Elle vit et travaille entre Paris (France) et Oletta (Corse, France). Elle est DPLG diplômée de l’École d’Architecture de Luminy Marseille (France). Architecte et artiste, son travail reflète une vision sensible en même temps qu’une réflexion étayée sur les questions environnementales. Elle poursuit sa pratique initiale et réalise des films, vidéos et installations. Esteban Ulrich est né à Buenos Aires, Argentine, en 1975 il étudie dans des écoles françaises avant de commencer sa carrière professionnelle chez Los Inrockuptibles, la version argentine du magazine français. Depuis, il se partage entre le journalisme, le cinéma, la photographie et l'expérimentation avec les nouvelles technologies appliquées à l'art et aux médias. Il vit à Paris (France) depuis 2015.
Zachary Epcar
The Canyon
Experimental fiction | 16mm | color | 15:43 | USA | 2020
A portrait of the urban residential complex as it slips into oblivion. No more beautiful babies, no more hand wrapped rattan chairs.
Zachary Epcar (b. San Francisco) is a filmmaker whose work has screened at the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pacific Film Archive, and elsewhere.
Deniz Eroglu
Blut und Boden
Experimental film | 4k | color | 10:3 | Denmark, Germany | 2019
The title of the work refers to the nationalist slogan of “blood and soil”; a racist ideal of a national identity that stands in mythical relation to a settlement area. This term was later adopted by the Nazis to propagate the bogus ideal of the Aryan farmer and his divine right to Lebensraum. In this work it assumes a new meaning referring instead to the coming-of-age story of a second generation immigrant in Germany. At first the contemporarenous landscapes that accompany the narration are recognisable as such; cars passing over a bridge, two men walking a German shepherd dog. As the narrator recounts his story and the difficulties that he faced, the landscapes become increasingly empty and devoid of human traces, reminiscent of a rural, quieter Germany of past centuries. As the story builds towards a denouement, the twilight landscapes begin to exude an ominous and threatening character in tandem with the violence that is about to erupt. The footage was recorded in the area where these events took place. This region has experienced a surge in support for extreme-right political party AFD and has provided an arena for large Neo-Nazi uprisings in recent years.
Deniz Eroglu (b.1981) is a Danish/Turkish artist who is currently based in the Netherlands. He graduated from the art academy Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2014. He took part in the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten residency in Amsterdam from 2016-17. He works across many media and genres - film, video, sculpture, performance and text-based works. Thematically his work centres around cultural identity, human relations, immigration, Utopias, “enlightened“ individuals, loneliness, power vs powerlessness, the individual vs the group and in recent years examinations of societal institutions.
Tirtza Even, Nadav Assor
Chronicle of a Fall
Experimental doc. | mov | color | 60:0 | USA | 2020
An experimental documentary consisting of an immersive multi channel installation. The project depicts the fragmented experience of 6 immigrants to the US, by using body-worn cameras and volumetric capture.
Tirtza Even is documentary maker and video artist for over twenty years, Even has produced both linear and interactive video work representing the less overt manifestations of complex and sometimes extreme social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others). Even’s work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many other galleries, museums and festivals in the United States, Israel and Europe, including Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, The New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Awards, Chicago (winner of top award); Golden Gate Awards Certificate of Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival; Best Experimental Film, Syracuse Film Festival; Media Arts Award, The Jerome Foundation; First Prize, L’immagine Leggera Festival, Italy; Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. She has been an invited guest and featured speaker at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, SXSW Interactive Conference, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia, the Performance Studies International conference (PSI), the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference (SLSA) and others. Even’s work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France, Video Data Bank (VDB), USA, and Groupe Intervention Video (GIV), Canada. Even is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department. Nadav Assor: Nadav Assor (b. 1979, US / Israel) lives and works in Providence, RI. Assor’s work takes on systems of technological mediation that are frequently military-industrial in origin, from eye-tracking cameras to drones, telepresence-robots and mixed-reality environments. Low-fi versions of these are critically repurposed in his work to function as a means for creating communities, connections, intimate human dialog and visceral audio-visual-tactile experiences. Assor’s videos, installations and performances have been featured in film festivals, museums, galleries, and live venues across North America, Europe, and Asia. Recent venues include Arsenal Berlin, the Oberhausen Film Festival, Video Vortex XI at Kochi-Muziris, India, Hong-Gah Museum Taipei, La Casa Encendida Madrid, Edith-Russ Haus Oldenburg, Transmediale Festival Berlin, the Soundwave Biennial San Francisco, Residency Unlimited NYC, Julie M Gallery Toronto + Tel Aviv, Fridman Gallery NYC and more. Assor's work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Vice Motherboard, Art Monthly UK and Haaretz, and recently featured in “Rêvolution Digitale”, an overview of international digital art by CANAL’s Museum TV channel. His single channel video work is distributed through Video Data Bank, Chicago. He is an Associate Professor of Expanded Media at Connecticut College’s Studio Art department and is the Director of the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology there. He is currently a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT.
Charles Fairbanks, Kak, Saúl
( ( ( ( ( /*\ ) ) ) ) )
Experimental doc. | dcp | color | 18:15 | USA, Mexico | 2019
This ethnographic excursion is a feast for the eyes paced by the quotidian chorus of sounds in a Chiapan village. Gradually, political themes arise. As it relates the legacy of co-director Saúl Kak's refugeed forebears, (((((/*\))))) (AKA echoes of the volcano) gives voice to the Zoque struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, against the neoliberal state.
Saúl Kak is an internationally acclaimed painter and native speaker of Zoque whose art practice is dedicated to the "cosmovisión" and rights of his people. The son of campesinos who fled the eruption of Chichonal volcano in 1982, Saúl directs the art residency program at Galería MUY, a contemporary art center for Indigenous art and artists. Charles Fairbanks is a filmmaker, writer, and Guggenheim fellow whose films have screened on POV and at Anthology Film Archives, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, and over 100 other festivals on six continents. Together, Fairbanks and Kak strive to document the Zoque people’s modern challenges and unique worldview: this cosmovision. Their previous film THE MODERN JUNGLE was picked by multiple critics as one of the best Latino films of 2016; it was awarded Best Documentary at Présence Autochtone: The First Nations Festival of Montreal, and jury awards at Slamdance and Athens.
Mounir Fatmi
The Human Factor
Experimental video | mov | color | 15:57 | Morocco, France | 2018
« The Human Factor » is an experimental video work that explores the idea surrounding Art Deco and Exoticism. Exhibits concerning the native people of the colonies at the Paris Colonial Exposition which took place in 1931 during the interwar period, as presented within pavilions reminiscent of the architecture of the Black Africa, North Africa, and Indochina regions, had illustrated ties to the leading colonial rule and authority of the times. « The Human Factor » is a deconstruction of Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’inhumaine (1923). To this day, this film is considered as a manifesto of the Art Deco movement. This masterpiece in silent film that was filmed against the backdrop of modern and ornate set design, serves to vividly depict the various influences artists of the time had gained from the creations of distant foreign lands, as well as the very spirit that had permeated the era. L’inhumaine reconfigures the innovative methods of artists, decorators, costumers, and architects such as Robert Mallet-Stevens, Fernand Léger, Alberto Cavalcanti, Claude Autant-Lara, Pierre Chareau, Michel Dufet, Joseph Csaky, and Paul Poiret. This video work attempts to present another aspect of Art Deco that lay beneath the powers of colonialist ideology and its universal ambition. It should be noted that the influence of colonial art was not something that had emerged during the two wars of the twentieth century. Such had in fact existed since 1907 in the form of the “The Colonial Society of French Artists,” which was aimed at expanding colonial territory through art that would serve as beneficial to France. Awards and provisions of expenses to travel to the colonies were provided by the society, aiding artists such as Van Dongen, Matisse, and Paul Klee to sojourn in North Africa. By 1919, the Les Arts à Paris magazine had already introduced Art Nègre (African Art) as a “new aesthetic” that could have a great influence on European art. For example, African masks and sculptures became a subject of interest and source of inspiration for artists such as Picasso, as well as Fernand Léger who derived the ideas for his costume designs and stage sets for the Swedish ballet troupe “La création du Monde” through referencing “Aboriginal and African Art.” Furthermore in 1930, the “Exhibition of African Art and Oceanic Art” was held, organized by Tristan Tzara, Pierre Loeb and Charles Ratton. This exhibition served as an important step in the history surrounding primitive art in the West. Here, the Paris public was able to view a selection of primitive sculptures presented along with the works of Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Georges Braque, Joan Miró, Paul Guillaume and Félix Fénéon. Finally, at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition that served to present colonial ideologies in an explicit way, the distinct characteristics of respective ethnic groups in the colonies were only introduced under conditions of conveying France’s blessings to the colonies, in addition to solely the positive aspects of colonial development. With the exception of several masks, statuettes, and archaeological items, very few, if any, works made by the native people of the regions were exhibited. As opposed to such works, people in general had preferred the spectacle of pageantry created within the realms of dance, folk arts, and art, which in itself was a convenient perspective for the French and Western audience as a whole. It must also be known that these perspectives had not necessarily been shared among French artists. A group of surrealists including figures such as Louis Aragon, Georges Sadoul and André Breton, with the support of French Communist Party, had opposed the colonial exposition through distributing fliers featuring slogans that discouraged people from visiting. The Human Factor is a video work that approaches the issue surrounding the Paris Colonial exhibition, which had publically presented the relationship between what one might refer to as Avant-garde Primitivism, and the Exoticism of the Art Deco as inspired by the colonies. Studio Fatmi, September 2018.
mounir fatmi was born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1970. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Rome, at the Casablanca Art School, and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He spent most of his childhood at the flea market of Casabarata, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tangiers, where his mother sold children’s clothes. Such an environment produces vast amounts of waste and worn-out common use objects. The artist now considers this childhood to have been his first form of artistic education, and compares the flea market to a museum in ruin. This vision also serves as a metaphor and expresses the essential aspects of his work. Influenced by the idea of defunct media and the collapse of the industrial and consumerist society, he develops a conception of the status of the work of art located somewhere between Archive and Archeology. By using materials such as antenna cable, typewriters and VHS tapes, mounir fatmi elaborates an experimental archeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis. He twists its codes and precepts through the prism of a trinity comprising Architecture, Language and Machine. Thus, he questions the limits of memory, language and communication while reflecting upon these obsolescent materials and their uncertain future. mounir fatmi’s artistic research consists in a reflection upon the history of technology and its influence on popular culture. Consequently, one can also view mounir fatmi’s current works as future archives in the making. Though they represent key moments in our contemporary history, these technical materials also call into question the transmission of knowledge and the suggestive power of images and criticize the illusory mechanisms that bind us to technology and ideologies. Since 2000, Mounir fatmi’s installations were selected in several biennials, the 52nd and 57th Venice Biennales, the 8th Sharjah Biennale, the 5th and 7th Dakar Biennales, the 2nd Seville Biennale, the 5th Gwangju Biennale, the 10th Lyon Biennale, the 5th Auckland Triennial, the 10th and 11th Bamako Biennales, the 7th Shenzhen Architecture Biennale, the Setouchi Triennial and the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial in Japan. His work has been presented in numerous personal exhibits, at the Migros Museum, Zurich. MAMCO, Geneva. Picasso Museum La Guerre et la Paix, Vallauris. AK Bank Foundation, Istanbul. Museum Kunst Palast, Du?sseldorf and at the Gothenburg Konsthall. He also participated in several collective exhibits at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Brooklyn Museum, New York. Palais de Tokyo, Paris. MAXXI, Rome. Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. MMOMA, Moscow. Mathaf, Doha, Hayward Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, at Nasher Museum of Art, Durham and Louvre Abu Dhabi. He has received several prizes, including the Uriöt prize, Amsterdam, the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at the 7th Dakar Biennale in 2006, the Cairo Biennale Prize in 2010, as well as the Silver Plane Prize, Altai Biennale, Moscow in 2020.
Javier Fernández Vázquez
Anunciaron tormenta
Experimental doc. | mov | color | 87:50 | Spain | 2020
In 1904, Ësáasi Eweera, the last native Bubi leader who opposed the Spanish rule at the current island of Bioko (Equatorial Guinea) was detained by colonial guards and forcefully taken to Santa Isabel, the colony's capital. Imprisoned and fatally wounded, Ësáasi Eweera died three days later. His home village was burned down and most of its inhabitants disappeared. An incomplete record of those events is classified in Spain's General Administration Archive. File by file, handwritten reports and letters show several accounts of what allegedly happened and expose the progressive operations of concealment carried out by colonial institutions. Meanwhile, some native oral accounts have survived and opposed Spanish official version, confronted the permanent risk of oblivion and attempted to contribute to a sort of emancipated collective memory. By reenacting written texts through voiceovers, taping and studying native Bubi oral accounts and identifying historically charged sites, A storm was coming tries to reflect on the gaps, silences, contradictions and falsehoods that colonial history is usually built upon.
Javier Fernández Vázquez is a filmmaker, anthropologist and visual culture researcher. In 2007 he directed his first short film Señales de Indiferencia / Marks of Indifference, which received the award to the best international short film in the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile). In 2008, he founded with Luis López Carrasco and Natalia Marín Sancho the experimental and documentary film collective, Los Hijos. Their first feature-length film, Los materiales / The Materials (2010), won the Jean Vigo award to the best direction in Punto de Vista Pamplona International Film Festival 2010 and a special mention in FID Marseille 2010. Their next feature-length films as well as several shorts and video installations were selected by international film festivals and exhibited in contemporary art centres. Their work has also received special retrospective sections in Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Argentina) or Distrital (Mexico). In 2015, Javier Fernández Vázquez began an academic career in Film Studies and Visual Culture that has led him to research on issues related to history, memory, colonialism, visual culture and object theory. Anunciaron tormenta / A storm was coming (2020) is his first solo feature-length film. It was premiered at Berlinale Forum 2020.
Luca Ferri
si
Experimental doc. | dcp | color | 19:0 | Italy | 2020
A middle-aged man in his living room is watching the creation of the cosmos through a gallery of encyclopedic images where the human being is never present, except for some of his works, ruins or activities. He falls asleep, lulled by the vision of an advertisement that features a woman, and finds himself in an awful nightmare where he witnesses the hunting of some polar bears by arctic hunters. All the while, two pieces of contemporary music by the composer Dario Agazzi and a text inspired by a childhood memory of the director related to a suicidal event, suggest us to “write once, erase twice”.
Luca Ferri (Italy, 1976), self-taught, since 2011 has been dedicating to the writing, photography and direction of films presented to italian and international festivals, such as Atlanta Film festival, Biografilm festival, Documenta madrid, Didocs, Gent film festival, indielisboa, punto de vista, pesaro film festival, poff, queer lisboa, taipei film festival, thessaloniki documentary festival, vilnius short film festival, and in museums and art galleries, such as spazio forma meravigli (Milan), mambo (Bologna), Macro (Rome) and schusev state museum of architecture (Moscow). In 2013 the national film library of Rome organized a retrospective of his works. His first feature film abacuc, released in 2015, was presented at the Torino film festival and Mar del Plata. The film Colombi was presented at the 73rd Venice festival in the Orizzonti section. In 2018 his work dulcinea was selected at 71st locarno film festival in competition in the section signs of life while pierino was presented at 61st dok leipzig. In 2020 the house of love is presented at 70th berlinale in the section forum, selected to take part in the competition berlinale documentary award and receives the mention to 34th teddy awards; his last work sì is presented at 77th Venice international Film Festival
Nina Fischer, Maroan el Sani
Appropriation takes you on a weird ride
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 20:39 | Germany | 2020
‚Appropriation takes you on a weird ride‘ investigates the strange German enthusiasm for Native Americans in relation to contemporary racism and its deep colonial roots. This fascination, especially with regard to the construction of a german identity, has a rather frightening than impressive chronology: it begins with the first-century Germanic Cherusci chieftan Arminius and stretches to the adventure novels of Karl May and the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows in the 1800s, through the ethnographic exhibitions (Völkerschauen) in zoos and circuses and founding of “Indian clubs" at the turn of the twentieth century, onward to the appropriation of Indigenous identities by Nazi ideologists, up until the present day, when new rightwing groups have developed an unsettling identification with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.
Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani are visual artists and filmmakers, based in Berlin. They have been working together since 1995. From 2007 until 2010 they have been Associate Professors for Film and Media Art at Sapporo City University, Japan. Since 2015 Nina Fischer is Professor for Experimental Film and Media Art at University of the Arts, Berlin. International art exhibitions and film festivals they have participated in include Berlinale - International Filmfestival Berlin, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Istanbul Film Festival, Sydney Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art,Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, Media City Seoul Biennale, Aichi Triennale, and solo exhibitions e.g. at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art Hiroshima, K21 - Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Maxxi Museum, Rome.
Judy Fiskin, Peter Kirby
So Long For Awhile
Experimental doc. | mov | color | 43:44 | USA | 2020
So Long For Awhile, a documentation over two years of the process of de-installation of the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in preparation for the demolishing of some the existing buildings and the construction of a new building. It celebrates the skill and care of the preparators and registrars as they confront unique challenges with each art work. There is no music, no narration. In these challenging times for cultural institutions, we salute the staff of this museum, and the staff of all cultural institutions who dedicate themselves to preserving culture of all kinds.
Judy Fiskin (b. Chicago, IL), lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Fiskin received her Bachelor of Arts from Pomona College (1966), did graduate study work in art history at University of California, Berkeley (1966-67), and received her Master of Arts from University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. She established her reputation in the 1970s with distinctive, small-format photographs of California architecture, and in recent years she has gained international acclaim for her playful yet incisive video works. Peter Kirby (b. Ottuma, IA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He has been producing video work since 1970. He studied in the Film and Video School at Cal Arts. His early work ranges from early music videos with Toni Basil and David Byrne, to videos produced for Allan Kaprow and Allen Ruppersburg, and documentaries on The Case Study House Program, Chris Burden, John Baldessari and Louis I. Kahn. For the past 35 years the majority of his work has been with artists, galleries, and museums, creating documentaries, media for museum installations, and producing and editing for artists.
Anna Fo
Sealed Faithful Halls
Experimental video | hdcam | color | 3:0 | Cyprus | 2020
“Sealed Faithful Halls” —a poem turned to an experimental film— refers to a series of videos that have been recorded in different locations, through a period of years, either as part of art projects (but were never used) or as a record of situations, feelings and moments in time, in order to be used for future art projects. This archival material, became the motivation of a video art piece, made during the pandemic of 2020, when movement was restricted and confinement was imposed; therefore no video was able to be recorded. Drawing inspiration from the rectangular forms of expressionist painter Mark Rothko, a juxtaposition of moving images and sounds was created, an illusion of situations, where real spaces are transformed into imaginary ones. Sealed Faithful Halls becomes a record of thoughts, feelings and ways in which an artist 'sees' everything that passes in front of her and the cause for the allegorical relationship of form-space, reality-illusion, language-text.
Anna Fo (Fotiadou) is a Cypriot multidisciplinary artist and educator with specialisation in video art and direction. She holds a Bachelor degree in Graphic Design and Fine Arts and a Master degree in Performance Design and Practice. Anna is a freelance graphic designer and awarded illustrator and has been working as a video artist, art director and director for various theatre plays, performances and dance shows, in Cyprus and in Europe. She is the co-writer of the awarded film “Pause” (Cyprus, Greece, 2017). Anna directed her first short film entitled “Drained” (Cyprus, USA, 2020) which will be released in 2021 and explores issues of femininity, abandonment and revenge through a contemporary re-tell of the myth of Clytemnestra. Anna has presented her artwork —both in solo and group exhibitions— in galleries, venues, festivals and biennials in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, UK, Netherlands, Austria and Mexico. She works in collective art projects and collaborates with artists of different practices and disciplines. Her artistic research focuses on the subject matter of reality and illusion by exploring conceptual frameworks of the duality juxtaposition between text and image, within an examination of performance, digital media and art placement in space.
Sarah Francis
Kama fissamaa', Kathalika alal ard
Experimental film | mov | color and b&w | 70:0 | Lebanon | 2020
A group of people roams in a bare landscape around a set of swings as their only settlement, as if mapping, exploring, reorganizing the open territory they are in. As they move, changes in soundscapes make them virtually cross geographies. In the sky, a moon-like satellite roves above their heads, following them like an omen. The moon, once symbolizing cyclical times, myths and new beginnings, is now the satellite waiting to be conquered and colonized. Reality and fantasy intertwine in an existential quest. Is a new beginning really possible? As below, so above.
Sarah grew up and studied in Beirut. In 2005 her graduation short movie: 'Interferences' won the students film competition at the European Film Festival 2005. In this very first project, the theme of Beirut city was already present. She participated in several international workshops. Since 2006, she has been working as a freelance director for several production companies. Her first feature film and documentary Birds of September (2013), which she directed and produced, premiered in the CPH:DOX main competition then screened in over 30 international festivals and museums (Art of the real, Lincoln Center (NYC), Stedelijk Museum (NL), DOXA (ca.) etc... ) and won several awards. ‘As Above so below’ is her second feature film and premiered at the Berlinale Forum 2020. She is currently developing her first narrative project.
Mauricio Freyre
Interspecies Architecture
Experimental fiction | mov | | 11:0 | Peru, Spain | 2020
How to reestablish the future of our relationship with other species? A journey in the forest near Taipei with an uncertain destination. A nomadic speculation on relationships and processes that occur among species and dimensions beyond the human.
Mauricio Freyre (Lima, 1976) researcher, audiovisual artist and filmmaker with a background on architecture. His projects revolve around structures and systems of ideas in the margins of the constructed and the projected, focusing the attention on blind spots, dark areas, accidents, distortions and forms of consciousness that are excluded. Currently he is working on the audiovisual project ‘Estados Generales’, focused on the role of botanics and its agency within the colonial sciences, exploring the political and subversive dimension of the plant world in relation to a western epistemology. He has obtained the National Prize for Experimental Films awarded by the Ministry of Culture in Peru and the Matadero Production Grant in Madrid. His films and installations have been part of different programs and exhibitions including Festival Internacional de Cine Valdivia, Strangloscope, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, l’Alternativa, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, TENT Rotterdam, Nederlands Film Festival and Fundación Telefonica Lima.
Sarah Friedland
Drills
Experimental video | mov | color | 16:45 | USA | 2020
Drills is a film about the choreography of preparing for the future. A hybrid documentary and experimental dance film reimagining the form of the Cold War-era, US government-produced social guidance film, Drills asks what futures we are preparing for through the exercises embodying present anxieties. Weaving in between multiple forms of choreography and documentation, Drills restages lockdown and active shooter drills, frames corporate and tech start-up office meditation, and reperforms Boy Scout drills from the 1917 Boy Scout manual.
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has screened and been presented in numerous festivals and film spaces including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, BAMcinématek, and Anthology Film Archives, in art spaces such as Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, MoMA, Sharjah Art Foundation, MAM Rio, Nasher Museum, Wassaic Project, and Manifattura delle Arti (Bologna), and in dance spaces including the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place, among others. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Dance Films Association, Art Factory International, NYSCA/Wave Farm, Rhode Island State Council of the Arts/NEA, Berlinale Talents, where she was one of 10 selected screenwriter/directors for the 2017 Script Station/Project Lab, and most recently by the Bronx Museum, where she was an AIM Emerging Artist Fellow in 2020. Sarah graduated from Brown University's department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen, Mike S. Ryan, and Kelly Reichardt. Sarah has worked on collaborative research and writing projects with media theorists Wendy Chun on slut-shaming and new media leaks, with Erin Brannigan on the dancing body on film, and has an ongoing collaboration with writer, scholar, and programmer Tess Takahashi on masses and embodiment. She has taught workshops on dance film and been a guest artist at Brown, Yale, Skidmore, NYU Florence, Reed, University of Utah, and UnionDocs, among others.
Albert García-alzórriz
EYES / EYES / EYES / EYES
Experimental doc. | 4k | color and b&w | 37:7 | Spain | 2020
An archive holds fragments of toppled statues. In a corner, a fan stirs the atmosphere. The air caresses the archivists’ measured movements. The hum of the motor and the drawn-out wait induce sleep: In a dream, soldiers and civilians smile, motionless. (Faraway shots, bullets whistling and explosions). In another dream, there are just stones, indifference and oblivion. (None of the above is real or true).
Albert García-Alzórriz (Barcelona, 1992). Master’s and bachelor’s graduate in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and bachelor’s graduate in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. He is currently undertaking the Master’s course in Contemporary Film and Audiovisual Studies at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His work as an artist and filmmaker has recently been exhibited at international events and festivals, including the 58th Biennale Arte in Venice, the 7th Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition in Taipei, the 31st FID Marseille, the 8th FID Buenos Aires and the 17th Documenta Madrid, as well as at public institutions such as the IVAM (Valencia) and the ECCO (Cádiz).
Jakob Gautel
Souffle
Experimental video | mp4 | color | 28:34 | Germany, France | 2020
Livestream performance, Paris, March 22, 2020, during the first coronavirus quarantine. Sitting at a table, very close to a candle, just a few centimeters away. Staying immobile, breathing in and out. With every breath the flame flickers.
Jakob Gautel Born in 1965 in Karlsruhe, Germany, lives and works in Paris, but not exclusively. Studied at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His multiform work (photo, video, installation, performance, drawings, books ...) deals with the image and explores the frontiers between essence and appearance, reality and fiction. Production of sens rather than of objects ...
Riccardo Giacconi
Ekphrasis
Experimental doc. | mov | black and white | 19:0 | Italy, Austria | 2019
The film takes its cues from the events between 1939 and 1943, when the native German-speaking people of South Tyrol were given the option of either emigrating to neighbouring Nazi Austria (and other Third Reich territories) or remaining in Fascist Italy and being forcibly integrated into the mainstream Italian culture, thereby losing their language and cultural heritage. This system, enforced after an agreement between Mussolini and Hitler, was called the “Option Agreement”. The film also evokes the aftermath of the Option Agreement, including episodes of tension, conflict and terrorism between ethnic communities. As in a session of hypnosis, a voice describes a series of situations in second person. Devoid of any references to dates, names or locations, the voice describes a set of images connected to pivotal moments in the conflictual genealogy of the South Tyrolean territory. An exploration of a series of photographs from different archives, the film composes a visual study on the history and landscape of a territory in-between.
Riccardo Giacconi has studied fine arts at the IUAV University of Venezia. His work has been exhibited in various institutions, such as Grazer Kunstverein (Graz), ar/ge kunst (Bolzano), MAC (Belfast), WUK Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), tranzitdisplay (Prague), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin) and the 6. Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. He was artist-in-residence at the Centre international d'art et du paysage (Vassivière, France), lugar a dudas (Cali, Colombia), MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, La Box (Bourges, France) and Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, Austria). He presented his films at several festivals, including the New York Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015. He co-founded the collective listening festival ‘Helicotrema’ and the audio storytelling studio ‘Botafuego’.
Giovanni Giaretta, Giovanni GIARETTA
Words Words Words Are Decorative Sounds
Experimental video | hdv | color | 7:0 | Italy, Netherlands | 2020
The video investigates the complex relationship between language and cultural identity in our contemporary times. Instead of considering languages as simple communication tools, here they become viruses able to contaminate each other shaping new identities and geographies. The starting point of the video is a fragmented narration of an anecdotic story: an intimate adolescent memory of learning English. This memory is playfully filtered through references to the mainstream visual culture of the late 80s and 90s. The video work describes the process of shaping new forms of the self through the use of language. Words, memories and images merge with artificial landscapes, created and filmed in a marine engineering studio, and flow in vague yet coherent sequences that feel as natural and unsettling as a dream.
Giovanni Giaretta (Padua 1983) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. After graduating in Design and Production of Visual Arts at the University IUAV of Venice, he took part in a number of residency programs including: Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, De Ateliers in Amsterdam and Deltaworkers in New Orleans. Giaretta’s work has been featured in exhibitions in Italy and abroad at diverse institutions and galleries such as: Palazzo Fortuny (Venice, IT); MAMbo (Bologna, IT); Galleria Tiziana Di Caro (Naples, IT); La Criée (Rennes, FR); Foundation Botin (Santander, SP); De Appel (Amsterdam, NL); MACRO (Rome, IT); Musée Départemental d’Art Contemporain de Rochechouart, (Rochechouart, FR); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, (Turin, IT). His films have been shown at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (Rotterdam, NL) IDFA (Amsterdam, NL) and at the New Horizons International Film Festival (Wroclaw, PL), among other festivals and screening. Between 2016-17 His research was focusing on the relationship between perception and alteration during the night time. To carry on such research Giaretta has been working as night porter in an hotel in Amsterdam. He is lecturer at AKI in Enschede, NL. He is represented by Galleria Tiziana Di Caro.
Gabriela Golder
Instancias de lucha
Video installation | mov | color | 18:0 | Argentina | 2019
Rehearsals to raise the fist. The creation of a gesture, its birth and memory. Instancias de Lucha was carried out together with workers from recovered factories from Buenos Aires and actors from community theater groups whom I invited to rehearse a gesture of struggle. The choice of the sequence shot, fixed frame and slowed down time allows observing the deconstruction of each movement, its gestation, its development and its end. This work belongs to the series "Scenes of work". It takes as its starting point the themes, concerns and visual representations of the group "The artists of the People" (active between 1915 and 1930 in Argentina) and proposes a contemporary rereading in video format.
Gabriela Golder was born in 1971 in Buenos Aires, where she lives and works. Visual artist, curator and professor she is the director of the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (BIM) and curator of El Cine es otra cosa, the Experimental Video and Film Program of the Modern Art Museum in Buenos Aires. She essentially works with “moving image”, and her artistic practice mainly raises issues of memory, identity and the world of labour. Her videos, films and installations, for which she has won several awards and grants, have been presented at numerous exhibition venues and festivals around the world. Among others she received the following awards: Estado da Arte, en la 21a Bienal de Arte Contemporánea Sesc_Videobrasil, Brasil; the "Sigwart Blum Award“ of the Argentinean Arts Critics Association, Argentina; the Media Art Award from the ZKM, Germany, the first prize at Festival Videoformes, France and the Tokyo Video Award.
Tamar Guimaraes, in collaboration with Luisa Cavanagh and Rusi Milán Pastori
Soap
Fiction | 4k | color | 53:50 | Brazil, Germany | 2020
SOAP is a film in four episodes in which a group of isolated, left-winger urbanites imagine how to create a telenovela, or soap, to infiltrate the conspiratorial far right in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Can a coalition of activists, artists and writers avoid tripping over their own assumptions and privileges to form something persuasive? Can they join forces to beat a populist system at their own game? SOAP is a collaboration between Tamar Guimarães, Luisa Cavanagh and Rusi Millán Pastori and was filmed in Berlin and São Paulo during the first covid19 lockdown in 2020.
TAMAR GUIMARÃES (b. Belo Horizonte 1967, BR, lives and works in Berlin) is a visual artist working with film and other forms of time based media. She often works with actors alongside non-actors in semi-fictional films exploring socio-political dynamics both residual and contemporary, and situations within art, architecture and the institutions that present them. Her work has been included at the 33rd, 31st and the 29th São Paulo Biennial; the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial; the 55th Venice Biennial; the LACMA (USA); the Guggenheim Museum, NY (USA); the SculptureCenter (NY/USA); The Renaissance Society (Chicago); the 7th Gwangju Biennial (SK); Frac/Le Plateau, Paris (FR); CAC Synagogue de Delme (FR). Solo exhibitions include Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Jeu de Paume Satellite, Paris. LUISA CAVANAGH (1979, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist, colourist, and cinematographer. She studied Cinematography at National Film School. Focused on collaborative work, she joined 'Grupo Mexa' to develop the film/performance 'Cancionero Terminal 10Mg'. She is a co-founder of 'Eterno work in progress', an artist-run cine-club that explores the limits of cinema exhibition, live music and moving images. RUSI MILLÁN PASTORI (1976, Argentina) is a writer, film director and director of photography. Actual political scenarios are a common thread throughout his work, as chronicles that combine different situations and characters. He studied cinematography at the National School of Experimentation and Cinematographic Realization in Buenos Aires. He has directed short and medium-length films which were shown in festivals such as the BAFICI in Buenos Aires and at the 41st Mostra in São Paulo.
Michelle Handelman
These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves
Experimental video | 4k | color | 6:0 | USA | 2020
Michelle Handelman’s new video piece, THESE UNRULY AND UNGOVERNABLE SELVES (The Lockdown), recontextualizes characters from her previous works into a hypnotic visual essay about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear. It takes as its starting point the coronavirus pandemic and filters it through theorist Jill Casid’s writings on the necrocene, and Walter Benjamin's writings from The Arcade’s Project, sliding between threshold and boundaries, considering how bioterrorism may not only be an intentional release of viruses, but it may also be what lives inside, our own fear that late stage capitalism uses to destroy us. Handelman's characters, who each have already struggled with existential questions of belonging and fear in her projects DORIAN, A CINEMATIC PERFUME (2009/11); IRMA VEP, THE LAST BREATH (2013/15); and HUSTLERS & EMPIRES (2018), are juxtaposed with found images and texts sourced during the pandemic to take on a new form that both denies and struggles with containment. Casid writes, “May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in.”
Michelle Handelman is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work pushes against the boundaries of gender, race and sexuality. Coming up through the years of the AIDS crisis and Culture Wars, Handelman has built a body of work that investigates the dark and uncomfortable spaces of queer identity. She is a Creative Capital awardee (2019); Guggenheim Fellow (2011); Art Matters Awardee (2011) and NYFA Fellow (2011). She has exhibited widely including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, PERFORMA Biennial, MIT List Visual Arts Center, PARTICIPANT, INC, The Henry Art Gallery; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Guangzhou 53 Art Museum; Film at Lincoln Center, The British Film Institute, and Centre Georges Pompidou. During the 1990s, Handelman was based in San Francisco where she collaborated with Monte Cazazza, a pioneer of the Industrial music scene; directed the feature film BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes and Sadomasochism (1995), and performed in several films by Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Her work has been written about in Bomb Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Filmmaker Magazine, and The New York Times, and is in many private collections including the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; di Rosa Foundation and Preserve; Zabludowicz Art Trust. She is based in Brooklyn and is a Professor in the Film, Media and Performing Arts department at Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC.