Programme Paris 2022

Sub Rosa est une installation audiovisuelle autour d’un film d’une durée de 12h en multi-channels, et d’un système sonore génératif. Le film montre des adolescents filmés au ralenti lorsque la lumière du jour décline et que le ciel se teinte des cou- leurs du coucher de soleil. Le film est tourné dans un seul endroit, l’Arco de la Victoria, sur une période de 3 ans. L’Arco de la Victoria est un arc de triomphe situé dans la partie nord-ouest de Madrid. Il a été construit dans les années 1950 à la demande de Francisco Franco pour commémorer sa victoire sur les troupes républicaines pendant la guerre civile espagnole. Cet arc de plus de 40 mètres de haut est encore aujourd’hui un symbole du fascisme espagnol. Situé en dehors des zones touristiques habituelles, au milieu d’un rond-point à plusieurs voies sur l’autoroute A6, il fait depuis longtemps partie des monuments oubliés de la ville, et est aujourd’hui plus une ruine qu’une marque historique. Et comme beaucoup de places publiques de la ville, c’est un point de rencontre pour les adolescents. L’œuvre est centrée sur les jeunes mais le territoire est visible, par fragments et flux. Le lieu est comme une île de béton, habitée par ces adolescents qui semblent en attente.

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques (1983) est diplômé de l’École supérieure des beaux-arts de Marseille (2010) et de l’École nationale supérieure de la photographie d’Arles (2012). Son travail a été présenté lors d’expositions personnelles à Aperture Foundation à New York (2015) ou encore à C/O Berlin (2019). En 2012, il a reçu le prix Jeune Talent du BAL, puis entre 2015 et 2016 il été résident du Centre photographique d’Île-de- France et de la Cité internationale des arts à Paris. En 2015, il est lauréat du prix Immersion : une commande photographique franco-américaine, décerné par la Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, en alliance avec Aperture Foundation. Son premier livre Eden (1 000 pages de numérisations à la main d’une maison de la crise des subprimes dans une ville nommée Eden aux Etats-Unis) a été publié par Aperture en 2016. Entre 2017 et 2018, il est reçu com- me artiste membre de l’Académie de France à Madrid - Casa de Velázquez. En 2019 il est sélectionné pour l’exposition Foam Talents décerné par le Fotomuseum d’Amsterdam et il reçoit le prix C/O Berlin Talent Award qui a donné lieu à une exposition personnelle à C/O Berlin et à son second livre publié par Spector Books. Les enjeux globaux de la circulation immatérielle de données, de la propriété privée et de l’appropriation collective sont à la base d’une exploration visuelle et sculpturale dans son oeuvre qui emprunte des formes renou- velées à chacun de ses projets. A travers une une réflexion à mi-chemin entre le genre documentaire pour sa résonance avec le présent et les arts visuels, ses oeuvres toujours contextuelles et participatives racontent les crises de notre monde et les stratégies collectives de son ré-enchantement.

Games are generally defined through agreements—rules, within the framework of which, a certain degree of freedom reigns, but also compelling constraints. Many of these conventions are not explicitly identified as such, for example, how earnest one should be, or how much inner distance to keep. And a game does not at all define the more precise (individual, social, etc.) characteristics that participants should display in order to be among the players. For that reason, it is incredibly perplexing to see the adults in Borjana Ventzislavova’s Gesellschaftsspiele / Real Games in relations of play that we generally dismiss as puerile. In clever montages with players who appear deliberately misplaced or “miscast,” the film expands five of these contexts; or rather, interlocks them in such a way that we are rendered witnesses to an uncanny alienation. The nursery rhymes recited with a wink of the eye at the start are merely gentle harbingers of the dead serious shooting game with blowpipe arrows played by a group of sophisticated ladies and gentlemen in the concrete column foundation of a massive building shell. No less ambiguous is the cops and robber game that adult, suit-wearing players engage in around a monumental memorial in Sofia. And another game that’s not so bad is the acrobatic Chinese jump rope enjoyed by three smartly dressed women in a closed school yard. Entirely enigmatic, on the contrary, is a group wearing only underwear who pursue an odd ritual around a quartz lamp sculpture in the film’s sole interior space—until it turns out that what they’re doing is nothing other (or perhaps entirely different) than a simple Ring-Around-The-Rosey. The film’s transfiguration and simultaneous unmasking, has a double effect: on the one hand, as recognition that even the most casual activities are controlled by some type of role playing; and on the other—which is perhaps even more sobering—that their symbolic contexts withstand even the cleverest infiltrations. Whereby freedom and compulsion can even boil down to one and the same thing at times. And that is, no least, what the “real” aims at; uncatchable, as it were, these revealing and at the same time enigmatic games. (Christian Höller)

Born 1976, Sofia, BG, currently based in Vienna and Sofia; graduated visual media art / digital art at the University for applied arts Vienna. She works in the fields of film/ video, photography, installation and new media. Her works have been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows as well at film and media art festivals.

Den of Wolves is a seamlessly-looping video installation drawing on a range of references to weave a new multi-layered mythology. The work follows three bizarre wolves through a series of increasingly surreal retail stores as they search for the regalia of a monarch. Composed of one continuous camera shot, the work is an immersive, dreamlike journey drawing connections between popular culture, institutional authority and technological over-dependence.

Jonathan Monaghan is an award-winning visual artist who works across a range of media, such as prints, sculpture, and animation, to produce otherworldly objects and narratives. Drawing on wide-ranging sources, such as historical artworks and science fiction, his fantastical pieces uncover subconscious anxieties associated with technology and consumerism. Monaghan’s work has been exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among other major venues. He has been featured in several media outlets, including The New York Times, Vogue Italia, and The Washington Post. His work has also been acquired by numerous public and private art collections, including The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Washington, D.C., Art Bank Collection.

When the day has declined, the night overwhelms us. An unusual bestiality envelops us, it does not belong to us but attracts us to itself. Ciacco develops from a reinterpretation of the sixth canto of the Inferno of the Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgilio enter the third circle. In the Tartarean circle gluttonous sinners are scourged by a violent rain and tormented by the gigantic and frightening dog Cerberus, feral triad. Ciacco is the gaze through which we are spectators and actors, as well as dogs: the eyes of a damned incessantly hit by a cyclical storm of images, instincts, rain. A damned who lies beneath the beastly torment inflicted by Cerberus, a gigantic, frightening three-headed dog. Three, the number is repeated: triple is the beast, triple the setting in which it navigates. As if we were in the amphitheatre of Dante’s hell, sitting on Ciacco’s lap, we observe the spectacle from the third tier of benches. On stage, the torture of the damned is revealed by the staging itself and by the epic character of the natural environment. The sequences in the film become the viewer’s exploration in “this long night of the world” that we are experiencing.

Valentina Furian (b. 1989, IT) is an Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy. She is working mainly with moving images. She studied Visual Arts at University Iuav of Venice. Her research investigates the relationship between human and nature. She is particularly interested in exploring animal domestication as a form of human domination as well as human domestication in relation to social rules. Her films have been exhibited in institutional and indipendent spaces such as: Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai, CN; VISIO - European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images; Collezione FARNESINA, Mattatoio, MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; MUSE - Science Museum of Trento; UNA galleria, Piacenza; Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Treviso; MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; The Blank Contemporary Art, Bergamo; Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa; Case chiuse, Careof and ViaFarini, Milan; Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa and Microclima, Venice, IT; Sunaparanta Center for Contemporary Art, Goa; Italian Cultural Institute in Mumbai, IND; Goyki3 Art Incubator, Sopot, PL.

“Postcard From a Nonexisting City” is a video work that explores the Soviet imaginary and its relation to the future. The work features a virtual rendering of an architectural landscape that contrasts physical and temporal scales and stamps function as graphic messengers of a political and cultural transition. Constructed between the frameworks of speculative architecture, philately and the politics of time, “Postcard From a Nonexisting City” is a work that reflects on temporal arrangements and geopolitical effects produced by space communication technologies.

Lesia Vasylchenko is a Kyiv-born artist based in Oslo. Her practice spans between installation, moving image and photography. Vasylchenko is a co-curator of the artist-run gallery space Podium and a founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown among others at Louvre Museum, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Haugar Art Museum, Tønsberg; Tenthaus Gallery, Oslo; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale.

The film Rift Finfinnee takes the viewer on a journey through the periphery of Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. In strictly composed landscapes and architecture shots, and with a soundtrack that interweaves the original conversations in a complex way, the film travels along the Akaki river gorge, dissecting the more than symbolic rift between city and rural. It takes the concrete geography, architecture and the every day life of individual agricultural and construction workers in the east of Addis Ababa (in Oromo: Finfinnee) as the starting point for an allegorical narrative about the becoming urban of an African society on the edge of civil war.

Daniel Kötter is an international filmmaker and theater director. Visual research leads him again and again to the African continent and the Middle East. 2014-18 he worked with the curator Jochen Becker (metroZones) on the research, exhibition and film project CHINAFRIKA. Under Construction. In 2017-20 he worked on the documentary film trilogy Hashti Tehran (2017, 60 ’), Desert View (2018, 84’) and Rift Finfinnee (2020, 80 ’) about urban peripheries in Tehran, Cairo and Addis Ababa. Hashti Tehran won the special award of the German Short Film Award, Rift Finfinnee the DEFA Award at DOK Leipzig. Daniel Kötter is currently working on a series of spatial performances and 360° films on the landscape and social consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua, DR Congo and Estonia under the title landscapes and bodies.

"Out Of The Blue" is a living diary and structural breakthrough in the New York filmmaker's quest for a visual language equal in both thought and expression. Mischievously yet rigorously edited text and images, both Fisher's own plus "borrowed" materials, are laced within infinite blue sky images filmed from the airplane window as the filmmaker travels from Berlin to JFK Airport in NYC. Her passage home links timetravel with mind-journey. Multiple storylines play within conflicting time zones. Memories are juxtaposed with historic disasters (especially the bombing of Hiroshima, and the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center) or personal feelings - especially sorrow, since OUT OF THE BLUE took shape within the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown. Featured music is Lois V Vierk's "Words Fail Me", in its entirety, a work inspired by Vierk's eye witness of the World Trade Center towers crashing down, twenty years ago on 9/11.

Holly Fisher received a B.A. in Asian Art History at Columbia University in 1964, and a M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University in 1982. She lives and works in Tribeca, New York City. Holly Fisher has been active since the mid-sixties as an independent filmmaker, printmaker, teacher, and film editor. She was the editor of Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s feature documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin?. This film about a racially motivated Detroit murder case of 1982 was nominated for an Oscar in 1989. Her experimental short works and long-form essay films –– explorations in time, memory, trauma, and perception –– have been screened in museums and film festivals worldwide including Whitney Museum Biennials; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Film Forum, Japan; and two world premieres in The Forum of the Berlinale, Germany. She has received multiple grants from The Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, CAPS, and The American Film Institute, among others. Her silent film Rushlight won the Grand Prize in the 1985 Black Maria Film Festival, and her feature Bullets for Breakfast received “Best Experimental Film Award” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1992. Her solo retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art (1995) and more recently Anthology Film Archives (2019), were both entitled THE FILMS OF HOLLY FISHER. Fisher completed two new works during the past year of Coronavirus Lockdown, one long-form and one short; Softshoe for Bartok (23 minutes) will be premiered at The Brooklyn Film Festival held in early June 2021; her two feature works Out of the Blue (2021) and Deafening Silence (2012) concerning Burma under dictatorship, will be available for free streaming by Anthology Film Archives, June 16 - 29, 2021. The AFA will also sponsor multiple in-house screenings of Out of the Blue and her feature documentary A Question of Sunlight over the weekend of 9/11. This event has added intrigue since the two films variously frame the creative response of each of us involved –– New York avant-garde composer for both works Lois V Vierk; NY Downtown artist/protagonist José Urbach featured in A Question of Sunlight; and filmmaker Holly Fisher –– because each of us witnessed first hand from our own windows, the attack on the World Trade Towers twenty years ago, Sept 11, 2001.

THE MOIST CABINET is inspired by the literary genre of climate fiction. Through the voice-over of the film, we encounter poems by Bettina von Arnim and William Shakespeare, each in the original language. Hanakam & Schuller view these poems from the 16th and 19th centuries a prequel to cli-fi. Both poets seem to be in dialogue with each other, yet testify to different attitudes: in Shakespeare, the description of nature serves as a catalyst of sexual desire; in Arnim, the physical encounter with nature triggers a need to preserve the source of erotic experience: “Your silence, nature, do not break.?/?Not on rustling leaf?/?With stylus wake thee.” THE MOIST CABINET thus also describes the influence of literary narratives on the relationships between nature and humans, and the consequential actions.

HANAKAM & SCHULLER is an artist duo living in Vienna. As artists and explorers, Markus Hanakam and Roswitha Schuller redesign the rules of fine arts and create unconventional arrangements and new world designs in videos and objects as well as applied artforms. Their works have been shown in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; MAK, Vienna; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and the National Art Center in Tokyo. In 2022 they will work with Current Interests on a spatial installation for MAK Garage Top in Los Angeles.

Musarion adapts the eponymous work by German writer Christoph Martin Wieland and transfers the love story into the present day. Phanias withdrew from the city of Athens to the countryside to leave his old life behind. But one day he encounters his former girlfriend Musarion who tries to bring him back to reason. The art film follows their struggle to find an enlightened form of love that can overcome philosophical and political fanaticism. Musarion was directed by a collective of five young artists and mixes elements of the original text, opera, theatre, video art and narrative film.

Vincent Hannwacker was born in 1997 in Munich, Germany. Since 2016 he studies Media Art at Julian Rosefeldt's class at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since 2017 he studies Screenwriting at the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF).

Un chant d’oiseaux nous, ouvrant sur une forêt verdoyante un jour de pluie. Une langue de brume s’insinue lentement dans l’image et s’enroule autour des arbres. Des silhouettes humaines la traversent, paisibles malgré les flammes qui lèchent leurs vêtements. Ces âmes errantes fuient-elles quelque catastrophe urbaine ou font-elles partie du bestiaire de créatures merveilleuses peuplant les forêts ? Sont-elles des messagers de l’Apocalypse ou des martyrs, après un geste ultime de protestation ? Le cheval qui les observe sans broncher, tapis dans les fougères, se contente de renforcer l’inquiétante tranquillité de la scène sans donner de réponse. Julie Chaffort connaît bien ce sentiment, pour avoir tourné dans les forêts nombre de ses vidéos, la figure animale y étant quasi omniprésente. Pour l’artiste, le cheval est le « témoin privilégié de quelque chose que l’on arrive plus à percevoir en tant qu’humain ». Un témoin dans une partition tragi-comique nous menant d’un univers « intemporel » et obscur propre aux contes.

Les vidéos de Julie Chaffort mirent le paysage, le toisent et le parcourent ; on y croise des hommes au destin tragique et des héros aussi beaux que les chants qui les accompagnent – peut être pour en donner la mesure. Les gestes accomplis sont tout à la fois drôles et absurdes, l’avenir toujours incertain et les paroles s’envolent, attrapées par les branches d’une forêt ou englouties dans les eaux d’un lac. Les plans fixent les branches ; ils convoquent les tableaux de l’école de Barbizon où les bruns apparaissent comme chargés de bitume et les lumières s’accrochent aux pâtes colorées. Les récits s’écrivent entre les longs plans-séquence et se devinent dans les détails que la lenteur permet d’observer comme l’on admire une nature morte. L’artiste ouvre des univers parallèles, atemporels et insituables, où le monde se signale à nous par ses infimes déplacements et l’infinité de ses signaux – étrangement menaçants. Pour Julie Chaffort, le cinéma est un médium dominant, naturel, qu’elle choisit très tôt de développer, à l’école des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux où elle étudie, puis auprès de Roy Andersson qu’elle assiste en Suède, et de Werner Herzog dont elle suit le séminaire à sa Rogue Film School à New-York. Elle expose en France et à l’international. Ses œuvres font parties de collections nationales et privées Julie Chaffort est née en 1982. Elle vit à Bordeaux et travaille partout.

Inspired by the children’s book About Two Squares created by El Lisstzky exactly 100 years ago, Transient Witness simultaneously merges and obscures the intimate from the public, in a story where the actions of collecting and stealing function as synonyms and inheritance and loss immerse. It is a fictional story of the transfer of the objects from the private house of avant-garde collector Egidio Marzona in Berlin to their new domicile – the Japanisches Palais, a Rococo building that belongs to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD). The plot is told through the eyes of three main characters: Christina, the manager of the collection; Maurizio, the art mover; and Präsens the collector’s dog. Fiction meets reality: the film takes place on 25 November 2019. On that day, priceless jewelry of immense cultural value was stolen from the Green Vault in Dresden in one of the biggest art heists in history, causing a national shock in Germany. The film unfolds a complex story, navigating between historical facts about the Baroque and the Avant-garde; art and its politics.

Assaf Gruber (b. Jerusalem, 1980) is a sculptor and filmmaker who lives and works in Berlin. The dialectical relationship between the individual and the establishment is at the centre of his work, which explores how political orientations of institutions impact the lives of individuals and how institutions choose to represent and communicate facts and artefacts. Gruber studied at the Cooper Union in New York and is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent. His solo exhibitions include the Muzeum Sztuki, ?ód? (2015), the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2018), Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2018), among others. His films have been featured in festivals including the Berlinale Film Festival, FID Marseille (2019), and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2016).