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Adel Abidin
Musical Manifest
Video | 4k | color | 10:0 | Finland | 2022
When I immigrated to Finland, I started facing a deep shock regarding the differences between the two cultures. Finding myself on the border between the two helped my practice but distracting for my selfdom, affecting my decisions and creating a fertile ground for confusion and turmoil. When the world slowed down during the pandemic, I decided to turn my lens and start investigating my identity and perspective. I exposed myself to all the possible ways to understand what had indeed gone wrong in the process of figuring out a third self that came to be me. Music was the best path to pursue this exploration, and I made six music videos where I sang and acted as the protagonist. Intermixed from many different songs, where many viewers will recall, the lyrics resonate with the contemplation of my meanings in my life. I work with the themes of identity, power, fear, clichés, slippages, and uncertainties in language by manipulating well-known pop song lyrics once used to express love, hope, and dreams. The rearrangement of these lyrics illustrates a harsh yet honest tool that represents what we hide or are afraid of making known.
Adel Abidin was born in Baghdad (1973) and currently resides between Helsinki and Amman. He received a B.A. in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad (2000) and an M.F.A from the Academy of Fine Arts in Time and Space Art in Helsinki (2005). Since his representation of Finland at the Nordic Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), his work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide including: Van- haerents Art Collection, Brussels (2015), 56th Venice Biennale in the Iranian Pavilion (2015), The Glasstress-Goti- ka, 56th Venice Biennale, International Exhibition, Palazzo Franchetti (2015), 5th Guangzhou Triennial, The Guang- dong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2015), The Pera Museum, Istanbul (2015), Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada (2015), Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014), The Jerusa- lem Show VII, Jerusalem (2014), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2014), MACRO-Museum of Contempo- rary Art, Rome (2014), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2013-2012), 54th Venice Biennale, Iraq Pavilion (2011), 10th Sharjah Biennale, UAE (2011), MOCCA, Toronto (2011), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2010), 17th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2010), MAP, Mobile Art Production, Stockholm, Sweden (2009), 11th Cairo Bienni- al, Cairo (2008), Screening at MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008), Art Paris, Grand Palais, Paris (2008), Espace Galley of Contemporary Art, Louis Vuitton, Paris (2008), The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, USA (2008) and The 4th Gothenburg Biennale, Sweden (2007). He has been represented in galleries including: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, London (2013), with his well-recognized three channel video installation "Three Love Songs", Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai (2013), with his suspended light based installation "Al-Warqaa" (Chosen as the image of the rising Arab art scene in Dubai by the New York Times), Anne De Villepoix Gallery, Paris (2011), with his six channel video installation "Their Dreams" and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul (2011), with his well received video installation "Ping-Pong". Abidin's work continues to be well represented in both Private and public collections including those of the KIASMA- Musuem of Contemporary Art, The National Gal- lery, Helsinki: The National Gallery of Victoria, Mel- bourne, Australia: The Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE: Mathaf- Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar: EMMA- Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland: Nadour Private Collection: Kamel Lazaar Collection: The Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE: The Heino Art Foundation, Helsinki: Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman: HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, UAE: KOC foundation. Abidin has been selected for the Finland Prize for Arts in 2015, Received a Five Years Grant from The Art Council of Finland (2012-2017) and in 2011 He was a nominee for the Ars Fennica Prize in Finland. In (2015) the Artist has taught, gave talks and panel discus- sions, at various venues including the UNESCO- Improving Artistic Freedom In a Digital Age, Helsinki (2016), the Acade- my of Fine Arts in Helsinki: Lasalle- College of the Arts: TAIK- Alto University, Helsinki (2014), The Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (2013), The Mosaic Rooms, Global Futures Forum, London (2013), Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman (2011), OSU- Oregon State University, USA (2010). Location One Gallery, New York (2010), The Academy of Arts, Baghdad (2001). Abidin has been a Subject in Art documentary about his art Practice in many Tv channels including BBC- culture channel, England (2011) and ARTE- cultural channel, France (2008). also his work was mentioned in major newspapers and magazines around the world including (The NewYork Times- 2011 & 2013), Le Monde, Le Figaro, the National in Dubai, Helsingin Sanomat, the Wallpaper magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Canvas Art Magazine, Art Forum, Art in America, Avek Media Art Magazine, Taide Lehti, ArtAsiaPacific…Etc
Akosua Adoma Owusu
King of Sanwi
Video | 0 | color | 7:18 | USA, Ghana | 2020
Re-worked footage from an unfinished film by Senegalese director Mamadou Johnny Sekka forms a re-examination of The Jackson 5’s 1974 trip to Dakar.
Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and educator. Aiming to create a third cinematic space or consciousness, Owusu’s work explores the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms, ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. In her works, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,”, her work has been screened extensively at festivals and museums nationally and internationally and are available on streaming platforms including PBS, The Criterion Channel and MUBI. In 2013 her short film KWAKU ANANSE was well-received at the Berlinale Shorts and won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award. Her short film RELUCTANTLY QUEER was nominated for the Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the 2016 Berlinale Shorts. Owusu has received numerous fellowships and grants including the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists (2020). She has been invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani. She currently lectures at Harvard University.
Sandro Aguilar
The Detection Of Faint Companions
Experimental video | 0 | color | 14:0 | Portugal | 2021
Full Moon. Inside. Perhaps not alone.
Born in 1974 in Portugal, Sandro Aguilar studied film at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. In 1998, he founded the production company O Som e a Fúria. His films have won awards at festivals such as La Biennale di Venezia, Locarno FF, Gijón, Oberhausen,Vila do Conde, Indielisboa FF and have been shown in the most relevant film festivals worldwide. Two times nominated for the EFA – Best European Short Film Award. Retrospectives of his work have been programmed at Rotterdam IFF, BAFICI, New York Film Festival, Arsenal-Berlin and Oberhausen FF. In 2013, he was invited into the renowned DAAD Artist Residency, Berlin.
Lee Alex
the Fold
Experimental VR | mp4 | color | 0:0 | USA | 2019
"The Fold" is a non-linear film and virtual reality-based art game involving rooms with doors containing a concept folding into other rooms with doors. Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' short story The Garden of Forking Paths, each room consists of an idea inspired by structuralist & surrealist literature, mathematics, the readymade virtual object, and more. This project is a virtual 'escape the room' concept where some rooms are puzzle experiences and others are more experiential. All rooms follow a similar visual monochromatic motif. To date, the project involves five rooms: the Doors, the Fold, the Grid, the Meridies, and the Cave. Subsequent rooms will be released as this project is a long-term episodic series. Chapter one is debuted at Berlin Recontres International.
Alex M. Lee is an artist who utilizes 3D animation, video game engines, virtual/augmented/immersive reality platforms, and the potential of simulation technologies in order to visualize and complicate our perception of time, space, image and light - culling from concepts within science, science fiction, physics, philosophy, and modernity. He received his BFA (2005) and MFA (2009) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Lee was raised in the USA and is associate professor in the Digital Arts & Sciences Program at Clarkson University located in Potsdam, NY - a private science and engineering university located north of the Adirondack Mountains where he divides his time between Potsdam and New York City. Lee has exhibited internationally in North America and Asia. Selected exhibitions include: Mio Photo, Osaka, Japan; Daegu Art Factory, Daegu, Korea; The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, Illinois; Eyebeam: Center for Art & Technology, New York, NY; Gallery DOS, Seoul, Korea; Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, QC. His work has been published in articles covering art, science, and culture including: Metaverse Creativity, Canadian Art, and Routledge Press.
Amy Alexander
What the Robot Saw
Multimedia installation | 0 | color | 0:0 | USA | 2020
An invisible audience of software robots continually analyze content on the Internet. Political trolls and YouTube celebrities gain visibility because social media ranking algorithms promote addictive videos to the top of search and recommendation rankings. What the Robot Saw is a continuously-generated livestream film that uses contrarian algorithms to constantly curate some of the least attention-grabbing videos recently uploaded to YouTube. These videos, and their creators, are rendered largely invisible by social media algorithms. Their primary audience may be the robots that rank them. What the Robot Saw uses computer vision algorithms to curate videos and study their subjects. It focuses on first-person, camera facing narrators. The robot continually assembles its film and labels its “talking head” performers in a robo-fantastical cinematic style. The Robot titles its human subjects according to the demographically-focused feature set of Amazon Rekognition, a popular facial analysis system. In a robot-centric world, attributes like presumed age, gender, and emotion might better identify us than our names. The title is a reference to early 1900s What the Butler Saw “peep show” films. Both the butlers and the Robot got a superficial glimpse of a seductive “show;” they could not really understand the objects of their obsession.
Amy Alexander is a professor and hackernaut who has been making computationally-based art projects since the 1990s. Amy is a Professor of Computing in the Arts in the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego. She is an algorithmic filmmaker and performer who has focused throughout her career on the fuzzy borders between media and the world. Amy’s work has frequently addressed algorithmic subjectivity in digital culture by creating transparently biased, sometimes funny alternatives. Her latest project returns to this theme — this time taking on the attention economy and social influence of algorithms used for social media rankings and facial classification. Using computer vision and machine learning-based methods of curation and production, What the Robot Saw, is a perpetual live stream that depicts the cinematic fantasy of the surveillant AI robots who “see” the social media content few humans get to experience. Amy’s art practice has spanned net art, software art, computationally-based installation, audiovisual performance, and film. Her research and practice over the years has focused on how contemporary media – from performative cinema to social media – changes along with cultural and technological shifts. Amy’s projects have been presented on the Internet, in clubs and on the street as well as in festivals and museums. She has written and lectured on software art, software as culture, and historical and contemporary audiovisual performance. She has served as a reviewer for festivals and commissions for new media art and computer music.Her recent lectures span topics including algorithmic bias and subjectivity, cultural anthropologies of gender roles in 20th and 21st century computing, and systems and disruption in 20th and 21st century media.
Josefin Arnell
Wild Filly Story
Experimental fiction | mp4 | color | 22:0 | Sweden, Netherlands | 2020
Wild Filly Story is starring a pack of adolescent girls on a therapy horse stable in the outskirts of Amsterdam. The casts are regular visitors, who are simply there to ride, who are there for occupational therapy, or there as a temporary replacement from school. Playing out a fictional, yet custom-fit script that prompts questions of friendship, misfit, normativity, fetishization, and female empowerment. The young girls method-act through stages of agitation, thriving on the artist’s own rural childhood trauma in Sweden, a horsegirl´s obsessions, and her recent short-lived career as a porn film director: teens pulling hair, grand stallions being objectified, food fights, horse healing, and in the backyard of the barn a kissing scene is being made. A red thread through the film: a young girl’s horse is taken away to be slaughtered that the horse community later feast on. A ghost—an EMO teen, white-painted, unfitted, potentially dead—grimes her way through a hardcore song from the London underground “Drop Dead” with the gang of horse girls as her backing choir. Meanwhile, a cowgirl talking about a stallion having its balls cut off, giggling through her characterization of its masculine rage being tamed.
Josefin Arnell (1984) has recently presented exhibitions, screenings, and performances at Athens Biennale; Wiels, Brussels; UKS, Oslo; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; Auto Italia, London; Kunsthalle Münster; Beursschouwburg, Brussel. In 2018 she won the Theodora Niemeijer Prijs; a national art prize for emerging female artists living or working in the Netherlands. Arnell lives and works in Amsterdam Through combining modes of autobiographical and fictional storytelling, she explores representations of femininity, the aesthetics and politics of violence, and the way expressions of power and control manifest in group dynamics. The Teenage Girl, The Horse, and The Mother are recurring characters placed beside clumsy allegories of conflicted human conditions or environmental catastrophe. These characters have endless monologues rather than conversations while navigating contemporary infrastructures with impossible demands. She uses humor and absurdity as political devices, but also as important tools to access moments of emotional catharsis. Trashy performativity, camp aesthetics, the grotesque, and soap opera affects are set in combination of documentary, scripted, and improvisation methods. Additionally to her solo work she is involved in multiple collaborations and self initiatives. Most noticeably the artist duo: HellFun aka Josefin Arnell & Max Göran. HellFun prefers to be brave and pathetic rather than drowning in shame.
Graeme Arnfield
Pervading Animal
Experimental doc. | 0 | color | 30:0 | United Kingdom | 2021
Equal parts systems literacy and kaleidoscopic ecological fantasia, “Pervading Animal” is a film about butterflies, computer viruses and all the things they touch. Tracing the creation, spread and destructive legacy of the first ransomware computer virus the film finds in its wake surprising connections between the US invasion of Panama, the aesthetics of pioneering computational art and the construction of a butterfly conservatory in New York.
Graeme Arnfield (b. 1991, UK) is an artist filmmaker and composer living in London, raised in Cheshire, UK. Producing sensory essay films from networked imagery his films use methods of investigative storytelling to explore issues of circulation, spectatorship and history. Research topics have included: the politics of digital networks, the distribution of ecological matter such as peat and asbestos and the adaptive circulation of global and local histories. His work has been presented worldwide including Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Transmediale, IMPAKT Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Plastik Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, LUX, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Berlinische Gallerie, Signal Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and on e-flux & Vdrome. He graduated with a Masters in Experimental Cinema at Kingston University.
Jessica Arseneau
Aubes
Video | mov | color | 40:0 | Canada, Germany | 2021
Dawns takes us to a time when sleep is disrupted and insomnia becomes a collective condition. Captured before sunrise, with non-actors in a variety of outdoor environments, the multi-channel work consists of a series of continuous shots and long takes. The slow cinematographic images are reminiscent of tableau vivants where people, in groups or alone, find themselves in an urban environment or the transformed wasteland of a former industrial area. Exhaustion is conveyed by the bodies’ postures and their near immobility, composing at the same time an atmospheric landscape of fragility and endurance at the limit of the perceptible. While the videos look still images, they allow us to see the slow, luminous transition of night into day.
Jessica Arseneau (originally from Tilley Road, Canada) obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Université de Moncton in 2011 and a Master’s Degree in New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in 2020, both completed with distinction. She received a grant from the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2017 and a scholarship from Saas-Fee Summer Institute of the Arts in 2021.?? Her solo exhibitions include Surrounding Uncaring Skies as part of the Festival International du Cinéma Francophone en Acadie, Moncton, Dawns, a storefront exhibition organized by Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, Mülheim an der Ruhr, The Screen Under My Eyelids at Helmut, Leipzig, Nothing but a Constant Glow at Spinnerei Archiv Massiv, Leipzig, and Lost Idyll, at Galerie d’art Louise-and-Reuben-Cohen, Moncton. ??Other public presentations of her work occurred at Galerie Sans Nom, Moncton, Struts Gallery, Sackville, Darling Foundry, Montreal, Maison de la Culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montreal, BronxArtSpace, New York, Agora Collective, Berlin, Traverse Vidéo, Toulouse, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, D21 Kunstraum, Leipzig, and a&o Kunsthalle, Leipzig.
Mali Arun
MUTATIS
VR 360 video | mp4 | color | 12:0 | France | 2019
The VR film “Mutatis” by French artist Mali Arun explores a diffuse frontier between scientific and mythological pictures of organic and human landscapes. At night, strange men in white suits enter a botanical garden. Nature is abundant and fascinating. The site guard takes this group to the water lily pond. A young woman’s inanimate body is found there. The garden hides other bodies, buried, sunk in the deep flora. Then a strange light appears from the women’s bodies.
Christine Ayo
Ikoce Volume I
Experimental doc. | mp4 | color | 10:48 | Uganda | 2020
An uncanny narrator searches for the meaning and form of a mysterious cultural performance speculated to have started after the second world war, in Northern Uganda. As the search unfolds, the film sonically and anecdotally questions notions of cultural legacy, kinship, individual and collective memory.
Ayo is a Ugandan born visual artist and filmmaker currently based in The Netherlands. Her practice is based on a desire to seek out counter narratives, and to explore both pleasurable as well as uncomfortable ways of re-telling histories. Recent projects investigate intangible forms of cultural heritage and informal knowledge production held by unofficial bodies. Ayo holds an MA in Fine Art (cum laude) from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.
Christian Barani
je me suis enfui
Experimental doc. | mov | color | 83:0 | France, Ethiopia | 2021
One day Arthur Rimbaud left the world of culture, tired, disappointed and angry. He does not understand, he does not admit the conventions, the lack of courage, the lack of investment of the art world. "Real life is absent," said Arthur Rimbaud. So he leaves, he leaves for an elsewhere that is less a place than an anarchic tension. He looks for chance, the unknown, the encounter, the unexpected. He now wants to practice poetry since nobody can understand his poetry. Arthur Rimbaud lived the last ten years of his life in Harar, a holy city in Ethiopia (1880-1891). In 2005, I left for Harar. Every day I walk, I get lost. I don't look for anything because there is nothing to look for. I film a contemporary Harar. In 2020, I decided to make a film out of these sequences.
Christian Barani's work takes the form of a committed realist poetry. Engaged in an improvised otherness, never sought after. His body, often lost in space, allows him to show a certain state of the world. He walks, crosses, observes, feels, analyses, meets, films. He loses himself, he drifts to find, to provoke and to create a necessary and essential link to the production of an image. He walks for long hours until he is exhausted, until he reaches the end of himself. Drifting puts him in danger. A physical and mental danger that allows, that authorises the filming of the other in his difficulty of life, in his quest for survival, in his struggle. Only at this price is it possible to welcome them. The image comes as a consequence. The forms that emerge from these experiences have no a priori. They are often diverse and take the form of film, film installation, reading projection, photographic notes and texts. They are created from the material captured and are often conceived according to the spaces in which they are exhibited.
Rosa Barba
Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage
Experimental film | 35mm | color | 0:0 | Italy, Cyprus | 2021
Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage is a project by artist and filmmaker Rosa Barba following an invitation by Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia and curator Mirjam Varadinis to propose and realize a project in Cyprus. The work proposed by the artist in 2013, started in 2014 and consists of two parts: a film and a long-term open-air cinema installation. The project was then presented to the Italian Council and received the first prize at the international competition (Third Edition) in 2018, and was awarded a grant from DGAAP (Directorate General for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Urban Peripheries), Italy. Barba’s film is exclusively shot in Cyprus, including underwater shots of the Mazotos shipwreck, as well as aerial shots from archaeological sites. It is an investigation into the loaded, transforming topography that is already palpable in the landscape, before we actually understand what language it creates for our society. In that, the film follows Barba’s artistic approach to examine liminal states which manifest in between contested spaces, both mentally and geographically, in order to allow for a new perspective. The inaugural screening took place in Autumn 2021 at the open-air cinema installation in the Buffer Zone.
Rosa Barba (b. 1972 in Italy) lives and works in Berlin. Rosa Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Barba’s work is represented in numerous international collections such as Collezione MAXXI Arte, Rome, Italy; Collezione FRAC Piemonte, Vercelli, Italy; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Lemaître Collection, London; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto; Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Kunsthaus Zürich, MACBA Barcelona, Mambo Bologna, Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Germany and Jumex, Mexico City. She has participated in group shows amongst others at MASS MoCA, USA; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; La Cinémathèque Française, Paris; WIELS, Brussels; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Swiss Institute, New York; 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art International Triennial of New Media Art 2014, Beijing, China; 19th Biennale of Sydney; International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; 2010 Liverpool Biennial; 52nd and 53rd Venice Biennale; 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art; Biennial of Moving Images, Geneva.
Sebastian Betancur Montoya, Abi Green
Fata Morgana
Video | hdv | color | 12:18 | Colombia, United Kingdom | 2021
Us, humans, the one species present in every latitude of the earth have never really settled, from hunters and gatherers to refugees and expats. Throughout human history reasons for exploration vary; trade, fear, ambition, or curiosity. Still nomads, our quest to chart every reachable corner has been fundamental to the dissemination of symbolic structures growing from wealth and power into different forms around the globe. Fata Morgana balances between that primal urge to explore the unknown and the instinctive need to make a home and belong... Pulling or being pulled? Coming, going or returning? The physicality of struggle, disappearance and emergence within this piece becomes a metaphor reflecting on Poetics and Politics, Geography and Geometry, Dreams and Death, as well as memories of Future and Past. With the uncertainty and hope of new beginnings across the ocean, the transient figures glimmer and nearly blend into their surroundings, flirting with symbolisms of ritual: the platonic geometry, immersion/ascension, and their perpetual journey. These travellers move oblivious of any limits but their own, challenging the very notion of borders; which are, anyway, invisible and futile drawings of power onto an ever-shifting landscape defiant of any divisions. Inspired by the artists own attempts of somehow always carrying home with them, the piece is a video loop meditating on the emotional ebb and flow of the many departures and the inevitability of a return. A return home, that whether it be a place, memory, feeling, or a word it is always a reflection of oneself.
SEBASTIAN BETANCUR MONTOYA: A common conceptual thread legible in his artwork is the constant preoccupation for the body[ies] and its relation with[in] the surrounding space and its limits/conditions; the themes of home, language, migration, belonging and uprooting have become unavoidable for someone as him, who has lived on the move, away from his birth place half of his life. Sebastián´s work has been part of exhibitions, publications, art residencies, and art fairs in Colombia, The Bahamas, Qatar, Russia, and Germany and participated in other events such as The 2015 Oslo Architecture Triennial, the 2015 Kuwait pavilion for the Venice Biennale, NYT art for tomorrow 2016, and the 2018 Istanbul design Biennial. ABI GREEN: Born and raised in London, she was educated at Fine Arts College, Chelsea College of Arts and went on to graduate with a BA (Hons) in Photography from Middlesex University London. Abi’s work has been featured on Vogue and Vogue Italia online, Le Book and It’s Nice That. Nominated to exhibit at the D&AD, New Blood Awards, London, in 2009 and Mother London’s, Open Book in 2015, she has also been published both in the UK and the Middle East, including magazines such as Notion, Crack, Elle and Twenty-six. Driven by interests in colour, light art, and sculptural objects, she is often influenced by surrealism, modern and industrial design, which enhances her contemporary visual style. Her projects carefully balance a minimalist approach with a graphic, colourful aesthetic resulting in a distinctive eye-popping quality. A key part of her image-making is the humorous twist that underpins her creative concepts, with this unique approach she hopes to leave her audience with a taste of her playful nature.
Dara Birnbaum
Canon: Taking to the Streets (Part One: Princeton University – Take Back the Night)
Documentary | 0 | color | 10:0 | USA | 1990
In Canon: Taking to the Streets, Birnbaum breaks with traditional documentary format. Using tools from the low-end and high-end of technology, she episodically views recent events of student activism in the United States. This is a study of the 1987 Take Back the Night march on the Princeton University campus. Birnbaum's treatment of the original student-recorded VHS footage reveals this march as having the potential to develop political awareness through personalized experience. The students attempt to "put across a historical message" that was started in San Francisco in 1978: the protest of any form of violence against women. Take Back the Night now represents men and women, in solidarity with one another, marching against sexual violence of any kind. Here the activity remains specific to violence as perpetrated against persons in the Princeton community.
For four decades, Dara Birnbaum's pioneering works in video, media and installation have questioned the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery, and are considered fundamental to our understanding of the history of media practices and contemporary art. Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City in 1946 where she continues to live and work. Dara Birnbaum received a B.A. in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a certificate in video and electronic editing from the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research in New York. Dara Birnbaum was one of the first artists to develop complex and innovative installations that juxtapose images from multiple sources while incorporating three-dimensional elements - large-scale photographs, sculptural or architectural elements - into the work. She is known for her innovative strategies and use of manipulated television footage. Birnbaum's work has been exhibited widely at MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); South London Gallery, UK (2011); major retrospectives at Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S. M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2009); Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and The Jewish Museum, New York (2003). His work has been exhibited at Documenta 7, 8 and 9. Birnbaum has won several prestigious awards including: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011); and the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship (2010). In 2016, she was recognized and honored for her work by The Kitchen, New York, at their annual gala. She was the first woman in video to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987. In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art established the Birnbaum Award in her honour.
Dara Birnbaum
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
Video | 0 | color | 5:50 | USA | 1979
Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum's stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the comic-book narrative — Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her bracelets, "cuts" her throat in a hall of mirrors — distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge. In a further textual deconstruction, she spells out the words to the song Wonder Woman in Discoland on the screen. The lyrics' double entendres ("Get us out from under... Wonder Woman") reveal the sexual source of the superwoman's supposed empowerment: "Shake thy Wonder Maker." Writing about the "stutter-step progression of 'extended moments' of transformation from Wonder Woman," Birnbaum states, "The abbreviated narrative — running, spinning, saving a man — allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to "do good" (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society."
For four decades, Dara Birnbaum's pioneering works in video, media and installation have questioned the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery, and are considered fundamental to our understanding of the history of media practices and contemporary art. Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City in 1946 where she continues to live and work. Dara Birnbaum received a B.A. in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a certificate in video and electronic editing from the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research in New York. Dara Birnbaum was one of the first artists to develop complex and innovative installations that juxtapose images from multiple sources while incorporating three-dimensional elements - large-scale photographs, sculptural or architectural elements - into the work. She is known for her innovative strategies and use of manipulated television footage. Birnbaum's work has been exhibited widely at MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); South London Gallery, UK (2011); major retrospectives at Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S. M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2009); Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and The Jewish Museum, New York (2003). His work has been exhibited at Documenta 7, 8 and 9. Birnbaum has won several prestigious awards including: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011); and the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship (2010). In 2016, she was recognized and honored for her work by The Kitchen, New York, at their annual gala. She was the first woman in video to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987. In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art established the Birnbaum Award in her honour.
Dara Birnbaum
Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry
Video | 0 | color | 6:26 | USA | 1979
Birnbaum manipulates off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares in Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry, a bold deconstruction of the gestures of sexual representation in pop cultural imagery and music. Minor celebrities (who Birnbaum terms "iconic women and receding men") confined in a flashing tic-tac-toe board greet millions of TV viewers, animating themselves as they say "hello." Birnbaum isolates and repeats these banal and at times bizarre gestures of male and female presentation — "repetitive baroque neck-snapping triple takes, guffaws, and paranoid eye darts" — wrenching them from their television context to expose stereotyped gestures of power and submission. Linking TV and Top 40, Birnbaum spells out the lyrics to disco songs ("Georgie Porgie puddin' and pie/kissed the girls and made them cry") with on-screen text, as the sound provides originally scored jazz interpolation and a harsh new wave coda. The result is a powerful, layered analysis of the meaning of the gestures of mass cultural idioms.
For four decades, Dara Birnbaum's pioneering works in video, media and installation have questioned the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery, and are considered fundamental to our understanding of the history of media practices and contemporary art. Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City in 1946 where she continues to live and work. Dara Birnbaum received a B.A. in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a certificate in video and electronic editing from the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research in New York. Dara Birnbaum was one of the first artists to develop complex and innovative installations that juxtapose images from multiple sources while incorporating three-dimensional elements - large-scale photographs, sculptural or architectural elements - into the work. She is known for her innovative strategies and use of manipulated television footage. Birnbaum's work has been exhibited widely at MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); South London Gallery, UK (2011); major retrospectives at Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S. M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2009); Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and The Jewish Museum, New York (2003). His work has been exhibited at Documenta 7, 8 and 9. Birnbaum has won several prestigious awards including: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011); and the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship (2010). In 2016, she was recognized and honored for her work by The Kitchen, New York, at their annual gala. She was the first woman in video to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987. In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art established the Birnbaum Award in her honour.
Dara Birnbaum
Fire!/Hendrix
Video | 0 | color | 3:13 | USA | 1982
Commissioned by VideoGram International, Ltd., for a videodisc of music by Jimi Hendrix, Fire! uses the stylized visuals and pacing of a music video to critique the representational economies of sexuality and consumerism. Translating the psychedelic fervor of the Hendrix song into a contemporary visual vernacular, Birnbaum similarly recasts the lyrics' meaning. A young woman is the "protagonist" of a fragmented narrative in which Birnbaum re-frames images of American consumerism and commodities — fast food, cars, the exchange of money. Birnbaum calls attention to the woman's relation to the advertising image: she is consumed as she is consuming.
For four decades, Dara Birnbaum's pioneering works in video, media and installation have questioned the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery, and are considered fundamental to our understanding of the history of media practices and contemporary art. Dara Birnbaum was born in New York City in 1946 where she continues to live and work. Dara Birnbaum received a B.A. in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a B.F.A. in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a certificate in video and electronic editing from the Video Study Center at the New School for Social Research in New York. Dara Birnbaum was one of the first artists to develop complex and innovative installations that juxtapose images from multiple sources while incorporating three-dimensional elements - large-scale photographs, sculptural or architectural elements - into the work. She is known for her innovative strategies and use of manipulated television footage. Birnbaum's work has been exhibited widely at MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018); South London Gallery, UK (2011); major retrospectives at Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S. M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2009); Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and The Jewish Museum, New York (2003). His work has been exhibited at Documenta 7, 8 and 9. Birnbaum has won several prestigious awards including: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011); and the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship (2010). In 2016, she was recognized and honored for her work by The Kitchen, New York, at their annual gala. She was the first woman in video to receive the prestigious Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987. In February 2017, Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art established the Birnbaum Award in her honour.
Peter Bogers
Glued Eye
Multimedia installation | mov | color and b&w | 25:0 | Netherlands | 2021
The installation consists of two black and white video images, one video projector and two thin (2 mm) illuminated fibre lines. A large projection shows images of moving objects or people that are fixed in one place on the wall by means of a sophisticated tracking technique. This technique continuously shifts the frame of the video image in a way that the chosen object stays in one place. Thus, all movements are neutralized. Directly behind the projector a very small 4,7 inch screen shows a close-up of a moving eyeball, of which the pupil is fixed in the middle of the screen. A luminous wire is stretched across the exhibition room, between the fixed point of the projected image and the centre of the small eye pupil. The wire is a physical and stationary element in the exhibition room.
Peter Bogers’ (Netherlands, 1956) work engages the interplay of sound and image to create installation works dealing with questions around the understanding and perception of sound. Working with the themes of music, speech and sound Bogers questions the boundaries of these fields and their limits and access to communication. Through his constant interaction with sound, Bogers also examines the visual, spatial and conceptual understanding of the human body and its place within the moving image and experiential installation. Bogers was one of the first artists in the Netherlands to integrate moving image into his work. He began working with video in the 1980’s as a methodology to accompany and assist his performance work and has since developed a keen approach to the medium that functions as a tool to illuminate the otherwise imperceptible. Peter Bogers studied at the sculpture department at St. Joost Academy, Breda. He has exhibited widely and had solo exhibitions both in The Netherlands (at the Netherlands Media Art Institute and the Central Museum Utrecht, among other places) and internationally (including solo shows in Bremen, Marseille, Osnabrück, Pittsburgh and Stuttgart).
Ghyzlène Boukaila
#31# (Unknown call)
Experimental fiction | hdv | color | 16:16 | Algeria, France | 2021
Off the coast of a world in reconstruction, a voice whose source is unknown overhangs the city and sounds like an injunction. In resistance to this authoritarian diction, a new voice emerges. Cheikh Morad Djadja makes his way through this universe, he must go to the Taxiphone and leave his own encrypted message. "Appel masqué" is a song composed by Cheb Abdou in 1993, during the period of the black decade in Algeria. Like many of his songs, Cheb Abdou wrote and performed them under constant threat. Through his music, he opened a field of identity expression and gender affirmation, the etymology of the word Raï takes all its meaning. By returning to the traces of the birth of raï, Oran, I met Cheikh Morad Djadja a personality of this environment and successor of Cheb Abdou, it was a real immersion in the community of singers and musicians raï.The film was built around the taxi-phone representing this non-place of anonymous telecommunication and the impossibility of maintaining a message, an opinion within a contemporary society. Echoing the lyrics of the song ''Appel masqué'' by Cheb Abdou, "#31# (Unknown call)" is an approach somewhere between documentary, fiction and performance, where Cheikh Morad Djadja leads us on an existential quest, in a world in perpetual reconstruction, where this non-place allows him to leave a masked vocal message about his trans-identity.
Ghyzlène Boukaïla is a multimedia artist and director born in 1993 in Algiers. She lives and works between Algiers and Lille. Her artistic approach and sensitivity crystallizes in the breasts of a family of Algerian revolutionaries. Exploring certain issues related to post-colonialism, her approach explores new narratives related to socio-political and digital (re)evolutions by situating her practice at the interface of documentary/performance and post-human digital narratives.
Igor Bošnjak
Future Repeats Itslef More Than History Used To
Experimental fiction | 4k | black and white | 13:49 | Bosnia & Herzegovina | 2020
An attempt on aesthetic-technological-ideological objectivity in non-objective reality. How can we see today, the monuments of the NOB (National Liberation War), what they represent to us in the context of the new division of fashion as well as changes in paradigm and ideology in the former Yugoslavia. Is a new reading possible without a nostalgic undertone? How to think about architectural and concrete structures in the 2000s? What is the relationship between monument and human, what is the relationship between monument and unbridled nature. What is the relationship between monuments and contemporary technology and contemporary art today? How much contemporary and how much tech addiction? How to reinterpret the artifacts of the anti-fascist struggle, but so that the monument of the NOB remains at the denotative level of meaning of the monument, that new meanings do not endanger the given basic meaning, the one that is. Creating narratives as a new reading and a new "seeing" and seeing of monuments and creating new visual realities.
Igor Bošnjak (b. 1981 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia) lives and works in Trebinje (Bosnia & Herzegovina). He is mainly working within the fields of contemporary art: moving images, video, installation, objects, drawing & photography. From 2009 works as a professor at Academy of Visual Arts in Trebinje, University of East Sarajevo on courses Intermedia art, Video art, Digital art. From 2019 works as visiting lecturer on Faculty of Fine Arts, Cetinje, University of Montenegro.
Karolina Bregula
Dust
Experimental fiction | mov | color | 21:45 | Poland, Taiwan | 2021
Dust is a story about two women living in an old district earmarked for demolition. Since their building is due to be demolished soon, all the neighbours have already left. Yet, the women decide to stay in their flat. The protagonists spend time in the abandoned multi-storey building and observe through the window bulldozers working around. Four out of five films were made in collaboration with Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang from Daguan in Taipei. When the project was in production, their houses in Daguan were bound for demolition while Ms. Zou, Ms. Huang together with their neighbours kept fighting against the evictions in the district. The first two films are a fictive story staged with Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang in an empty building awaiting demolition in central Taipei. I entered the building, cleaned up and furnished one chosen flat to turn it into a friendly liveable space and used it as a film location. Another two films are a conversation between Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang, Ms. Huang singing a sad song which reminds her of home and an image of a Daguan streets. The last film is a documentation of the demolition of the house where the first two films were made. One month after the films were done, Ms. Zou and Ms. Huang were forced to move away and Daguan was demolished.
Karolina Bregu?a (b. 1979) is a visual artist, a graduate of the National Film School in ?ód?. She creates films, photographs, installations and performance. Her work explores the problems of the status of the artwork and the materiality of art objects. She critically scrutinises contemporary art and its reception. She creates stories about art and architecture, which are a field of her anthropological and sociological observations. She is interested in the connection between art and reality – the favourable and detrimental effect of artists’ work, the remedial and destructive force of artistic activity, rituals connected to art and art’s social role. Many of her works are co-created with their protagonists and participants, blurring the border lines between professional and amateur artistic activity. Her works have been exhibited at institutions such as National Museum in Warsaw, Jewish Museum in New York and MOCA Taipei and at international events such as Venice Art Biennale and Singapore Biennale. She is the winner of the second prize in the Views 2013 Deutsche Bank Foundation Award, the third Samsung Art Master 2007 award and the 2016 Golden Claw at the Gdynia Film Festival. Her works are included in collections such as Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Zach?ta National Gallery of Art, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum and ING Polish Art Foundation. She is an associate professor at Academy of Art in Szczecin, she collaborates with lokal_30 Gallery. She lives in Warsaw.