Berlin 2022 Programme
Temporary exhibition
Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Auditorium
John-Foster-Dulles Allee 10, 10557 Berlin / Subway: lines S5, S7, S9, S75, station: Hauptbahnhof
Free admission
"Moving Spaces"
Joëlle Tuerlinckx : The Single Screen - Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 135:32 | Belgium, USA | 2021
Joëlle Tuerlinckx
The Single Screen
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 135:32 | Belgium, USA | 2021
The key work, The Single Screen, provides an insight into the series of performances that Joëlle Tuerlinckx and her ‘That's it!’-team brought to the world-renowned museum Dia Beacon (US) between 2015 and 2018 invited by Jessica Morgan (Nathalie de Gunsberg Director, Dia Art Foundation). As such, the artist confronts, in a conceptual and humorous way, the experience of time and space at a museum with that of a cinema. On a projection screen, the space expands, overflows, unfolds its topics, double and multiple. A co-production by Escautville, Dia Art Foundation, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) and S.M.A.K. (Ghent, BE).
Since the 1990s, and mainly after her participation in Documenta 11 in 2002, the artistic journey of the Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (°1958) has gained momentum, with solo and group exhibitions in major institutions around the world (including the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2009, the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2013, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in 2014 and her participation in Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017). Today Tuerlinckx is among the most internationally renowned Belgian artists of her generation.
Joe Moran : Materiality Will Be Rethought - Video | hdv | color | 29:26 | United Kingdom | 2020
Joe Moran
Materiality Will Be Rethought
Video | hdv | color | 29:26 | United Kingdom | 2020
Materiality Will Be Rethought by British-Irish artist and choreographer Joe Moran was developed as a site-specific live performance before being reimagined as a film work. The work navigates dance’s potential to animate and disrupt architectural space, the physicality of the dancer’s voice and the moving body as a site of political unrest and complex subjectivities. Materiality Will Be Rethought was commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, London, in dialogue with the exhibition Carlos Bunga: Something Necessary and Useful (on display at the gallery 21 Jan – 6 Sep 2020). It is performed by dancers Temi Ajose-Cutting, Thomas Heyes (Blackhaine), Sean Murray and Eve Stainton, and created in collaboration with editor Sue Giovanni and cinematographer Alana Mejía González.
Joe Moran is a British-Irish artist and choreographer based in London with a wide-ranging practice incorporating theatre and gallery performance works, critical writing, curatorial projects and drawing. His work centres the body and embodied presence as a site of complex subjectivities and political unrest, with queering frequently deployed as its principal critical strategy. His work is informed by a background in improvisation and experimentation, and a fascination with the problems and opportunities of formal choreographic composition and notions of expanded choreography. Joe is Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation through which his performance and curatorial work is produced and has worked internationally as a dancer with choreographers Deborah Hay (USA), Stina Nyberg (Sweden) and Siobhan Davies (UK) amongst others. Recent commissions and performances include Whitechapel Gallery (2020), Sadler’s Wells (2019), Nottingham Contemporary (NottDance, 2019), The Lowry Galleries (2019), London Contemporary Dance School (2019), Wysing Arts Centre (2018), Bluecoat (2018) coinciding with the Liverpool Biennial, Kettle’s Yard (2018), Sadler’s Wells (2017), Delfina Foundation (2016), ICA (Block Universe/ fig-2, 2015) in collaboration with Eva Rothschild and David Roberts Art Foundation (Frieze Art Fair, 2014). Notable collaborations include with composer Kaffe Matthews, editor Sue Giovanni, visual artists Eva Rothschild, Carlos Bunga and Magali Reus, and dancers Temitope Ajose-Cutting and Andrew Hardwidge. Joe contributed a chapter to the publication?Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum, wrote Materiality Will Be Rethought, an essay on dance and the exhibition space for the Whitechapel Gallery Carlos Bunga exhibition catalogue and Nothing About Us Without Us, a commissioned article on artist advocacy published by Siobhan Davies Dance in its inaugural Material journal.
Sebastian Betancur Montoya, Abi Green : Fata Morgana - Video | hdv | color | 12:18 | Colombia, United Kingdom | 2021
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.
Carlos Pereira : Vulkan - Experimental fiction | mov | color | 6:2 | Portugal, Germany | 2021
Carlos Pereira
Vulkan
Experimental fiction | mov | color | 6:2 | Portugal, Germany | 2021
Berlin, 2020. On that cloudy summer day by the lake, while observing something terrible, their bodies blocked with fear.
Carlos Pereira (1989, Lisbon) is a filmmaker and programmer. He is currently studying Film Directing at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb), having previously studied film in Lisbon, Barcelona and Stockholm. His films have been shown at festivals such as Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, IndieLisboa, Doclisboa and Vila do Conde, and screened at venues such as Cité Internationale des Arts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. He worked as a member of the selection committee for Sheffield DocFest and is a member of the advisory selection committee for Berlinale Generation.
Niklas Goldbach : 1550 San Remo Drive - Experimental video | mov | color | 18:0 | Germany | 2017
Niklas Goldbach
1550 San Remo Drive
Experimental video | mov | color | 18:0 | Germany | 2017
"1550 San Remo Drive" was filmed in February 2017 on the premises of the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, California, USA. The video features quotes from Thomas Manns diaries (1940-1943), architect JR Davidson and advertisements from the real estate companies which marketed the house, before it was bought by the German government in November 2016 for $13.25 million. The video features detailed shots of the uninhabited house before its recent renovation, quotes from Thomas Manns diaries (1940-1943) and advertisements from the real estate companies which marketed the house. "1550 San Remo Drive" reflects on personal, economical and representational desires and aspirations.
Niklas Goldbach, born in Witten, Germany, lives and works in Berlin. After studying Sociology at Bielefeld University and "Photography and Video" at the Unversity of Applied Sciences Bielefeld, he was awarded with the "Meisterschüler" degree at the University of the Arts Berlin in 2006. In 2005 he received the Fulbright Grant New York and majored in the MFA program of Hunter College, New York City. In his videos, photographies and installations Goldbach is involved in the relation between architecture and ethics within modernist traditions and postmodern cities. Established between reality and fiction, Goldbach's works use architectural concepts and elements to create ambiguous perceptions of man-made environments. In his recent videos and photographs, he appropriates urban environments as stages to examine the relationship between subjectivity and hierarchical societal structures within and beyond the nation state through the lens of a globally expanding interconnectivity of these sites. In his earlier film works, his often duplicated protagonists have colonized epic stages of modern architectural complexes, postmodern urban environments or alleged paradises defying civilisation, all finding their commonality as places oscillating between utopia and dystopia. Niklas Goldbach received several scholarships (among others Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn 2010, Arbeitsstipendium Bildende Kunst des Berliner Senats 2013, Projektförderung des Berliner Senats 2014, Dresdener Stipendium für Fotografie 2016, Villa Aurora Los Angeles 2017) and presented his works in numerous solo shows, group exhibitions, and festivals in venues such as the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Mori-Art Museum, Tokyo, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein n.b.k., documenta 14 public programs, Berlinische Galerie - Museum of Modern Art Berlin, Cornerhouse, Manchester, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Houston FotoFest Biennial 2016 and the Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx reinterprets the series of performances she and her team 'That's it!' made at the Dia:Beacon Museum in the United States between 2015 and 2018. The artist conceptually and humorously contrasts the experience of time and space in a museum with that of a cinema. On a projection screen, the space expands, overflows, and unfolds its double and multiple subjects. Joe Moran refers to the title of a book by Judith Butler, 'Bodies that Matter: Discursive Limits of Sex'. The body, the physicality of the voice and the presence of the dancers are seen as a place of subjectivity and political action which animate and disrupt the architectural space and explore the potential of dance. This asserts a non-fixity of body and gender, and the potential to rethink norms. Sebastian Betancur Montoya and Abi Green examine the notion of departure and return. Ebb and flow. Whether a place, a memory, a feeling or a word, it is always a reflection of oneself. Carlos Pereira films individuals in a state of suspense and fear, where life seems interrupted. Niklas Goldbach explores the house where Thomas Mann lived in the 1940s in Pacific Palisades, California, USA. The video features detailed plans of the uninhabited house before its recent renovation, quotes from the writer's diaries and advertisements from the real estate companies that marketed the house.
Screening
Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Auditorium
John-Foster-Dulles Allee 10, 10557 Berlin / Subway: lines S5, S7, S9, S75, station: Hauptbahnhof
Free admission
"The invisible part"
Maya Watanabe : Bullet - Video | 4k | color | 11:0 | Peru, Netherlands | 2021
Maya Watanabe
Bullet
Video | 4k | color | 11:0 | Peru, Netherlands | 2021
The surface of the skull is smooth as marble, except for the fractures surrounding a small, round bullet hole. The camera penetrates this opening, revealing the rock-like landscape within, of deep ravines, jagged-edged craters, and bony reefs. Here and there we see a web hanging, inhabited by a spider. Bullet records the skull of an unidentified body from the Peruvian violent period, which raged from 1980 to 2000 and took 70,000 lives. Since then, many remains have been found but cannot be identified and they still hover, as it were, under the status “NN” –“No Name.” The film tries to shed light on the forces that penetrate the lives of people: natural or social forces that overtake observation, the imagination and memory.Bullet constitutes an indictment of arbitrary executions and judicial vacuum in which they remain.
I am a visual artist and filmmaker who works with video installations. I have had recent exhibitions at, among other places: De Pont Museum (NL), MAXXI Museum (IT); MALI – Museo de Arte de Lima (PE); Rose Art Museum (US); La Casa Encendida (ES); Palais de Tokyo (FR); Kyoto Art Center (JP); Das Fridericianum (DE); and Matadero (ES). My work has been shown at various art biennials and internationally, including Videobrasil, the 13th Havana Biennial (CU), Asian Art Biennial (TW), the 2nd Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition (CN) and the Beijing Biennial (CN). I have also collaborated as audiovisual art director for stage productions in Peru, Spain, Austria and Italy. In 2018, I was granted the Han Nefkens Foundation Award. I live in Amsterdam, where I teach at the Rietveld Academie. I am currently a PhD research student at the Department of Visual Cultures - Goldsmiths, University of London.
Leighton Pierce : Everything S Gonna Be Ok - Video | 4k | color | 6:37 | USA | 2021
Leighton Pierce
Everything s gonna be OK
Video | 4k | color | 6:37 | USA | 2021
This is a part of a developing series titles UAP (Unidentified Arial Phenomena). Looking to the sky can reveal both threats and salvation. This was shot and edited on a phone and is intended eventually to be presented on the intimate format of a phone. Shot and edited in summer 2021.
Pierce has been making films, video, and installations for over 3 decades with screenings at Cinematheque francais, Pompidou Center, Sundance, NYFF, Rotterdam, EMAF ad many other venues. Among others, he is recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Creative Capital Fellowships. For the past 8 years he has been living in LA where he was dean and is now faculty at CalArts.
Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel Collective : I May Doze For Millions Of Years - Video | 4k | color | 13:54 | Taiwan, Mexico | 2021
Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel Collective
I May Doze for Millions of Years
Video | 4k | color | 13:54 | Taiwan, Mexico | 2021
A group of people from different backgrounds fall into a doze at a fairly masculine old Mexican bar: security guards transporting a naked man, a boy giving secret signals, women carrying long-barreled guns, and rocks. The lines narrated by the performer are taken from the notes of a serial killer, political materials, and the dying words of Takijiro Onishi, originator of the kamikaze tactics.
Director and visual artist Val Lee founded Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel(GMGS) with Hikky Chen in 2008. GMGS is active in visual and performing arts. GMGS uses ephemeral situations to lead the audience into a form of live art that comprises action scripts, installations, sound, hypnotic rhetoric, composite structures, and mise-en-scène. The collective has collaborated with non-performers to construct political fables with a dream-like method. GMGS’s works have been exhibited at the Vernacular Institute, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Forum des Images, Grand Palais, the Danish feminist initiative ARIEL, Taiwan Contemporary Cultural Lab, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Hong-Gah Museum; and joined the Taipei Arts Festival, the Gwangju Biennale, the Taiwan Biennial, the Urban Nomad Film Fest, and Month of Performance Art in Berlin.GMGS has been sponsored by the Hong Foundation (2021), the Liveworks Festival Lab artist residency program (2020), the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship (2019), Taishin Visual Arts Award (2017), and the National Culture and Arts Foundation.
Liryc Dela Cruz : Santelmo - Experimental fiction | hdcam | black and white | 52:28 | Philippines | 2021
Liryc Dela Cruz
Santelmo
Experimental fiction | hdcam | black and white | 52:28 | Philippines | 2021
Encyclopaedias describe St. Elmo's fire as a harmless meteorological phenomenon caused by a strong static discharge. In Philippine mythology, a "santelmo" is a wandering soul of a deceased person who has not found peace yet. Three young men wandering through countryside seeking in vain reconciliation with the world. Their aimless journey is accompanied by rustling of leaves and grass, chirping of insects, and singing of birds, conversations about people for whom they have suffered and whom they plan to take revenge on. Yet, they are prevented from freeing themselves by memories that cannot be killed.
Liryc Dela Cruz (1992) is an artist and filmmaker from Tupi, South Cotabato in Mindanao, Philippines and now based in Rome, Italy. His works were selected and screened in different international film festivals and art events. His debut short film “The Ebb of Forgetting” premiered at the prestigious 68th Locarno Film Festival. His films are thematically related to his origins, history, and personal psychology. His works outside cinema focuses on care, indegenous practices, decolonial practices, post-colonial Philippines, transpacific slave trade, hospitality and reconnecting the colonized and slave body to the soil. Dela Cruz was one of the key collaborators of Philippine independent master filmmaker Lav Diaz. He is also considered as one of the representatives of the slow cinema movement (Ji.hlava IDFF ‘18). In 2019, he represented Italy at the UK Young Artist in Nottingham, he was selected as one of the artists of AtWork Venice mentored by Simon Njami and was the Editor in Chief of the Where is South exhibition at the Palazzo Querini, Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi as part of the “Rothko in Lampedusa'' initiative during the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2020, he was selected as one of the young emerging filmmakers to represent Italy in Berlinale Talents during the 70th Berlin International Film Festival. Dela Cruz was also mentored by French Political Scientist and Activist, Françoise Vergès during the Mediterranean Ecofeminist Decolonial Union for Self-Education in Lecce, Italy. Recently, he debuted a performance in Teatro di Roma - Teatro Nazionale in Rome as part of his ongoing research project “Il Mio Filippino/a,” a project about “gestures of care and cleaning methods” of Filipino cleaning workers. The same project was also a recipient of Artissima - Torino Social Impact Art Award for the year 2020 and has been selected by Cité internationale des arts Paris for their residency program in 2022 and by Mattatoio di Roma for its Prender-si Cura residency programme. Currently, Dela Cruz is developing “Ocean as a Space of Perpetual Care '' a project based on indigenous care and hospitality of pre-colonial Filipinos and from the diary of Antonio Pigafetta.
Maya Watanabe achieves the impossible image of the inside of a skull's surface. Between 1980 and 2000, political violence in Peru claimed more than 70,000 victims, many of whom were found unidentified and given the status of "NN" - "No Name". Leighton Pierce alters aerial surveillance footage of fires, large and small. Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel Collective constructs a political fable, where the contours of human disaster are reflected in poetic interactions. In an old Mexican bar, people doze off, security guards carry a naked man, women carry guns and stones. Liryc Dela Cruz follows three young men who wander around the countryside and try, in vain, to reconcile themselves with the world. They recount their sufferings, stories of their lost friends. In Philippine mythology, a Santelmo is the wandering soul of a deceased person who has not found peace.
Screening
Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Auditorium
John-Foster-Dulles Allee 10, 10557 Berlin / Subway: lines S5, S7, S9, S75, station: Hauptbahnhof
Free admission
"I ran away"
Astrid De La Chapelle : Corps Samples - Experimental film | 16mm | color | 13:45 | France, Germany | 2021
Astrid De La Chapelle
Corps Samples
Experimental film | 16mm | color | 13:45 | France, Germany | 2021
In 1924, a marine crinoid fossil is unearthed near the summit of Mount Everest, a famous British mountaineer disappears and a Soviet leader dies. This simultaneity is the starting point of a narrative on the transformation of matter. In a vast movement, substances metamorphose, scales and temporalities overlap and human bodies nestle in the depths of great terrestrial processes.
Astrid de la Chapelle is a French filmmaker and artist. In her films she experiments with storytelling, particularly in relation to geology and the economic circuits of the Earth's resources, as well as science fiction. She also plays in the group Shrouded and the Dinner with four other artists since 2012. Astrid’s films were shown at Cinéma du Réel (FR), Oberhausen festival (DE), ECRA Experimental Festival (BR), FID Marseille (FR), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE), Museum of natural history (FR), Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (FR)…
Christian Barani : Je Me Suis Enfui - Experimental doc. | mov | color | 83:0 | France, Ethiopia | 2021
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.
Astrid de la Chapelle evokes the mineral and the organic, as well as their metamorphosis, in a story about the disappearance of a mountaineer, the preservation of an embalmed body and the discovery of a marine fossil near the summit of Mount Everest. Christian Barani films Harar, in Ethiopia, the city where Rimbaud lived during the last ten years of his life, after leaving the world of culture weary, disappointed and angry. He doesn't understand, he doesn't admit the conventions, the lack of courage, the lack of investment of the art world. So he leaves, he leaves for an elsewhere that is less a place than an anarchic tension. He looks for chance, the unknown, encounters and the unexpected. He now wants to perform poetry, since no one can understand his. He will live the last ten years of his life in Harar.
Special screening
Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Auditorium
John-Foster-Dulles Allee 10, 10557 Berlin / Subway: lines S5, S7, S9, S75, station: Hauptbahnhof
Free admission
"The double voice"
Shireen Seno : To Pick A Flower - Experimental doc. | hdv | color and b&w | 16:57 | Philippines | 2021
Shireen Seno
To Pick a Flower
Experimental doc. | hdv | color and b&w | 16:57 | Philippines | 2021
My mother used to tell me that our dining table was as old as I am. I wonder how old the tree was when it was cut down to be turned into our table. I am fascinated in this kind of transmutation from the natural world to the human one, and how a tree takes on new lives long after it has been cut down. This video essay incorporates archival photographs from the American Colonial Era in the Philippines (1898–1946), exploring the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire. Taking plants and trees as starting points, it aims to reflect on the intertwined roots of photography and capitalism in the Philippines.
Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker based in Manila whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she is known for her films which have won awards at Rotterdam, Shanghai, Olhar de Cinema, Vladivostok, Jogja-Netpac, and Lima Independiente and have screened at festivals including New Directors/New Films, Yebisu International Festival of Art & Alternative Visions, NYFF Currents, and institutions such as Tate Modern, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Portikus.
Akosua Adoma Owusu : King Of Sanwi - Video | 0 | color | 7:18 | USA, Ghana | 2020
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.
Matthias De Groof : Onder Het Witte Masker: De Film Die Haesaerts Had Kunnen Maken - Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 9:0 | Belgium | 2021
Matthias De Groof
Onder het witte masker: de film die Haesaerts had kunnen maken
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 9:0 | Belgium | 2021
"Under the White Mask: the film Haesaerts could have made" uses fragments of "Under the Black Mask", a 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts and qualified as colonial propaganda. This new film imagines what the masks, now subjects and not objects, would say. Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism" is spoken in Lingala for the first time. This speech is still a critical mirror for Europe. "Under the White Mask" is limited to elements already existing in 1958.
Matthias De Groof (1981) Belgium. Filmmaker and scholar. His award-winning films have been presented at venues like the IFFR, Cannes Pan-African Film Festival, Le FIFA and the Berlinale. His edited book “Lumumba in the Arts” is published with Leuven University Press, and reached the top-100 "books to escape the news" (LitHub). He has held appointments at the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence of the Bayreuth University; and the Waseda University in Tokyo. Throughout is artistic and academic career, he was granted fellowships by the Canon Foundation, the KONE Foundation, Fulbright and BAEF. His filmography, produced by Cobra Films, includes “Under the White Mask” (2021), “Palimpsest of the Africa Museum” (2019), “Lobi Kuna" (2018), “Diorama” (2018) and “Jerusalem, the Adulterous Wife” (2008) among others.
Anouk De Clercq, Helga Davis : Ok - Video | hdv | black and white | 5:0 | Belgium | 2021
Anouk De Clercq, Helga Davis
OK
Video | hdv | black and white | 5:0 | Belgium | 2021
In the Summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in her country, Helga Davis wrote a text that voices her pain, her despair and also her hopes for the future. After collaborating on Helga Humming (2019) and One (2020), the text became the starting point for a new film and a first work co-signed by Helga Davis and Anouk De Clercq. OK scrutinises the relations between Black and White while searching for the essence of collaboration and caring about the other.
Anouk De Clercq explores the potential of audiovisual language to create possible worlds. Her recent work is based on the utopian idea of ‘radical empathy’. Her work has been shown in Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MAXXI, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, BOZAR, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, Ars Electronica, among others. She has received several awards, including the Illy Prize at Art Brussels in 2005 and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in 2014. Anouk De Clercq is affiliated to the School of Arts University College Ghent as a visiting professor. She is a founding member of Auguste Orts and initiator of Monokino. Anouk De Clercq is the author of Where is Cinema, published by Archive Books. Helga Davis is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist who works as an actress, singer, writer and composer, as well as a radio and podcast host. Helga Davis performed as a principle actor in the 25th-anniversary international revival of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach. Davis' music career has included a stint in the rock band Women in Love, in the 1990s. More recently, Davis has starred in operas and theater pieces internationally, including Robert Wilson's The Temptation of St. Anthony, libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon; Octavia E. Butler's Parable Of The Sower, Milton by Katie Pearl and Lisa Damour; The Blue Planet, a multimedia theater piece, by Peter Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke; and Soho Rep's Jomama Jones, Radiate. Davis hosts the "Helga" podcast, live events for New Sounds and WQXR-FM's Q2 Music.
Effi & Amir : Places Of Articulation: Five Obstructions - Experimental doc. | mov | color | 22:0 | Belgium | 2020
Effi & Amir
Places of Articulation: Five Obstructions
Experimental doc. | mov | color | 22:0 | Belgium | 2020
Places of Articulation: Five Obstructions takes the spectator on a journey across borders, from Northern Ireland to Tibet, passing through Germany, Albania and Flanders. However, it explores a more deeply engraved border, the invisible border of our oral cavity, which marks and defines the sounds we can emit and the words we can pronounce. Since biblical times and up till nowadays asylum procedures, this border is exploited to discriminate and divide. Moving between territories – sonic, anatomical and political ones – this installation examines how voice and pronunciation are used as identifiers, eventually become mobile checkpoints, determining fates and sometimes costing lives. Employing different imaging methods and visualisations, it renders these checkpoints visible, while questioning the limits of identification and revealing blurred lines or zones of ambiguity that defy binary categorisation.
Effi & Amir, born and raised in Israel, are working as a duo since 1999 and have been living in Brussels since 2005. They studied fine arts at the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem and The Sandberg Institut, Amsterdam and taught themselves, much later, how to make films. Their work, which employs audiovisual media, performance and participatory strategies, is located on the blurry border between documentary and fiction, and is dealing with mechanisms of construction – of identity, group belonging, history and the artwork itself. Effi & Amir's work was recently awarded prizes in documentary film festivals (docAviv, IndieLisboa, En ville !, Jean rouch festival) and they are laureates of the Scam's 2022 Prix de parcours for audiovisual documentary work.
Wendelien Van Oldenborgh : Hier. - Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 27:34 | Netherlands | 2021
Wendelien Van Oldenborgh
Hier.
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 27:34 | Netherlands | 2021
Hier.(2021) moves seamlessly between politically charged reflections and personal memories through a constellation of voices and lyrical material. In Museum Arnhem (NL) during its renovation - a place of conservation in transition - we meet a cast of young women who express themselves through music, poetry and dialogue. Together they sensitively explore themes such as hybridity, trans-nationality and diasporic sensitivities in the midst of persistent reverberations of colonial history in contemporary society. Alongside the cast, the location Museum Arnhem, is also a meaningful “voice”. Originally built in the late 19th century as an ‘outdoors club’ by people with a colonial past, we see the building stripped down to its foundation, with worn concrete and elegant art nouveau features located next to each other. In this site of rubble and potential we follow three ‘sonic lines’: the band FRED, poet Pelumi Adejumo and historian Lara Nuberg. With music and poetry, we encounter not only socio-political urgencies, but also undercurrents of existentialist and vulnerable themes. Tenderly yet confident, we see the protagonists in friendship and cooperation, we hear about love, the sorrow that comes with it, life questions and certainties, by which they express the basis for a changing possible future.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. Recent solo presentations include: work, work, work (work) at Museum Sztuki in Lodz 2021; tono lengua boca at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona 2020 and CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh has exhibited widely including the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, bauhaus imaginista, HKW Berlin 2019, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2020 and Sonsbeek20->24, Arnhem 2021.
Shireen Seno examines archival photographs from the American colonial era in the Philippines. Using plants and trees as starting points, she questions the intricacy between photography and capitalism. Akosua Adoma Owusu re-examines the status of representations of Michael Jackson as a global pop icon. In a funky audiovisual collage, archival footage from a film by Senegalese director Mamadou Johnny Sekka is reworked into a re-examination of the Jackson Five's trip to Dakar in 1974. Matthias De Groof transforms colonial archives by means of a technique called 'sabotage', as a deliberate destruction of the master's machine. Fragments of a 1958 film on Congolese art, "Sous le masque noir", made by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts, are used, and the masks, now subjects rather than objects, declaim Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism", published in 1955, for the first time in Lingala. Anouk de Clerq and Helga Davis start from a text Davis wrote in the summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, about her pain and hopes. Wendelien Van Oldenborgh films a group of young women in the Arhem Museum who express themselves through music, poetry and dialogue. Together they explore themes of hybridity, transnationality and diasporic sensitivities amidst the lingering reverberations of colonial history in contemporary society. The Arnhem Museum, currently under construction, is also a significant 'voice' in the film. Built in the late 19th century as a club for people returning from the colonies, we see the place stripped to its foundations.
Screening
Haus der Kulturen der Welt | Auditorium
John-Foster-Dulles Allee 10, 10557 Berlin / Subway: lines S5, S7, S9, S75, station: Hauptbahnhof
Free admission
"Collective takeover"
Claudia Claremi : El Tiempo - Experimental doc. | mov | color and b&w | 18:36 | Cuba, Spain | 2020
Claudia Claremi
El Tiempo
Experimental doc. | mov | color and b&w | 18:36 | Cuba, Spain | 2020
El Tiempo is a collaboration with the volunteers of the Reina Sofía Museum, a group of pensioners that play an active role in the museum’s educational programmes. Through the creation of a collaborative experimental film, El Tiempo examines the intangible, explores personal and collective memories, and delves into the relationship between this group and the Museum, representing a symbiosis of bodies and artworks. The project started in 2019, with the idea of making a film set in a dystopian present, where the Museum is closed to the public as a result of the collapse of modern society. Western culture has therefore lost its hegemonic role, causing the abandonment of the institutions that sustained it. In this context, the volunteers appear to be the only people who inhabit the Museum. The framework of this fictional thread, facilitated the development of group and individual performative actions, and allowed a series of encounters of bodies, space and artworks. This work was shot just before the pandemic and the editing and post-production process took place during the confinement. This experience deeply redefined the project and those images that were created as a vision of an imagined present, began to represent a plausible reality.
Claudia Claremi (Madrid, 1986). Visual artist and filmmaker. Graduated in Documentary Film from the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba) and in Fine Arts from University of the Arts London (UK) and the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana (Cuba), and she has participated in alternative programmes of study and critical practice such as VISIO (Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Florence), P.O.P.S. (Colectivo Ayllu, Matadero, Madrid), Campus (Latitudes, Barcelona) and La Práctica (Beta Local, Puerto Rico). Her films Firefly, Bat and The woodland, among others, have been shown and awarded at international film festivals such as Raindance, Ann Arbor, Ji.hlava, FIC Guadalajara, Documentamadrid or Márgenes. Her work has been part of many exhibitions and she has also obtained the XXI Generación 2021 award, XXXI Circuitos award, the Matadero CREA grant. In 2020-21 she has completed El Tiempo, a film in collaboration with the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.
Dora GarcÍa : Si Pudiera Desear Algo - Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 68:0 | Spain, Belgium | 2021
Dora GarcÍa
Si Pudiera Desear Algo
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 68:0 | Spain, Belgium | 2021
If I could wish for something takes its title from a Friedrich Holländer's Weimar song. The lyrics of ‘Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte’ are sung from the perspective of a woman who seeks to be happy, but not too happy, because sadness has become a refuge for her. This feeling is typical of the fraught ‘love story’ between feminism and socialism, between love and revolution. ‘The woman question’ has been tiptoed around by every revolutionary movement since the nineteenth century. These decades of disillusionment are part and parcel of feminist history.
Dora García lives and works in Oslo. She currently teaches at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. She has represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and was present again in the Venice Biennale 2013. She took part in the 56th Venice International Art Exhibition, dOCUMENTA(13) and other international events such as Münster Sculpture Projects in 2007, Sydney Biennale 2008 and Sao Paulo Biennale 2010. Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions, paying homage to eccentric characters and antiheroes. These eccentric characters have often been the center of her film projects, such as The Deviant Majority (2010), The Joycean Society (2013) and Segunda Vez (2018).
In a dystopian present, Claudia Claremi films the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, closed to the public, following the collapse of modern society and Western culture, which has now lost its hegemonic role. She examines the intangible, explores the subjective level of collective experiences, in a symbiosis of bodies and works. Dora García takes as her starting point a song written in 1930 by the German composer Friedrich Holländer about the possibility of making a wish. The song poetically expresses complex ideas about women's disappointment, the unfulfilled promises of the revolution, and the vulnerability that comes with this feeling. But pain, overcome, can also be used as a means of acknowledging the suffering of others, opening up the possibility of an encounter with other struggles. Dora Garcia then recreates a contemporary equivalent of the song, which could serve as a soundtrack to the incredible feminist demonstrations that took place in Mexico City - modifying and appropriating public space and discourse. The film thus follows two paths: that of the collective memory of images and sounds of these feminist marches, and that of the composition, recording and final performance of the film's theme song by transgender artist La Bruja de Texcoco.