The modernity of cinema, which began from the artistic possibilities of optical images, can be found in the diverse aspects of today which were formed through the diversification of media and by undergoing the changes of the phenomenon of perception. Scintillation or Disappearance_Focus on Artist Film and Video, which opened as a program in the ‘open film’ section last year within the flow of attempting to analyze and create the modernity of cinema, introduced works by artists that shift between exhibition and screening, confirming the current status of moving images. A collaborative program between MMCA Film and Video and Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlinale Forum Expanded_MMCA will be a time for presenting liberal, experimental spirit based on cinematic characteristics. MMCA Film and Video and Berlinale Forum Expanded both strive to explore new territory for moving images while studying the origin and the future of cinema art by expanding the scope of cinematic experimentation. In commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Berlinale Forum Expanded, curators Ulrich Ziemons and Nanna Heidenreich have selected 24 pieces out of the numerous works that passed through its doors which respond to the question of what expanded means. I hope to see this program be an opportunity for discussion on the identity and direction of ‘expanded’ and serve as a small break for the audience to put aside familiar standards of evaluation and expand stagnant thinking and limited perspective.
KIM Eunhee
Assistant Curator / MMCA Film and Video
※ Arsenal Website http://www.arsenal-berlin.de
The Forum Expanded program of the Berlin International Film Festival(Berlinale) was founded in 2006. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Anselm Franke, the founding curators, created it in response to the growing number of works submitted to the festival calling for presentation outside the cinema. It started with an exhibition of 11 works in its first year. Forum Expanded has since grown exponentially and, over the course of the last 10 editions, has presented more than 400 films, videos, installations, and performances in the cinema, in exhibitions, on stage, and even in a swimming pool. The selection of 24 works presented at MMCA can therefore only give a small glimpse into the vast and multifaceted iterations of moving image practice which were part of our program in Berlin during this time. We hope, however, that each work selected for ”Berlinale Forum Expanded_MMCA” will open up possibilities and hint at connections with and affinities to other practices, artists, genres, scenes, discourses, and politics. The driving force of Forum Expanded has always been the exploration of spaces beyond the cinema. But the program never left the cinema behind. Our work and our program isare deeply rooted in the ever evolving history of cinema, constantly circling back to the space in which it all began. The aim is to broaden and re-define what cinema can be, constantly seeing and experiencing cinema “for the first time”, like the villagers in Octavio Cortazar's “Por Primera Vez.” Some of the works presented at the MMCA cinema were first shown as installations at Forum Expanded, such as Basma Alsharif's exploration of the Israel-Palestine conflict through a story of unrequited love, “The Story of Milk and Honey”, or Harun Farocki's analytic dissection of D.W. Griffith's innovations in cinematic storytelling, “On Construction in Griffith's Films”. Others, like Bruce LaBruce's “Pierrot Lunaire”, incorporate opera and contemporary dance into their practice. The films investigate and subvert cinema history and its politics of gender, as in Constanze Ruhm's and Christine Lang's “Kalte Probe”, or read current events through the lens of that same history, such as “La dolce Siria”, by Amar Al-Beik. Proponents of the NorthAmerican film avant-garde, like Ken Jacobs, can be found in the program alongside artists that predominantly work within a gallery context, as for example Keren Cytter, Jeanne Faust, or Armando Lulaj. We are very honored to present Forum Expanded at MMCA and to bring our Berlin-based contemporary curatorial expanded cinema practice to Seoul to have the work form new resonances.
Nanna Heidenreich, Uli Ziemons(Co-curators Forum Expanded)
Program #1 78’/⑫
6.10 Wed 4:30 / 6.19 Fri 1:00 / 6.27 Sat 7:00 / 7. 1 Wed 3:00 / 7. 5 Sun 1:00
COFFEE
Ayşe Erkmen Turkey/ 2007/ Betacam SP / Color/ 25minutes/ English
“COFFEE is a short film about coffee grounds reading. The film starts with an image of a dog, announcing the start of the entertainment, who also witnesses everything that is told during the film. The coffee grounds reader tells a woman(the artist herself whose fortune is being read in the coffee grounds) what is happening at the time and could happen in her life in the near future. The story is full of strange, obscure characters, objects, events, rumors, gossip, all constructing very visual, imaginative, and colorful imagery through the cool, dry, literate language of the film.”(Ayşe Erkmen). “COFFEE constructs with and in its classical talking heads framing a cinematic space - the spatiality of the cinema - between a coffee grounds reader and his client. The coffee grounds becomes the projection screen of a film that is made up of wishes, memory, speculation, processes of naming, interpretation and refusal.”(Stefanie Schulte Strathaus) COFFEE was part of the programm Forum expanded at the Berlinale 2007, curated by Anselm Franke and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus. There it premiered at Cinema Arsenal within the Laborsituationen.
Ayşe Erkmen was born 1949 in Istanbul, Turkey. Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey and Berlin, Germany. Solo Exhibitions(Selection) 2009 Ayşe Erkmen, Bluish, Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany 2008 Weggefährten, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin, Berlin Ayşe Erkmen, Hausgenossen, K 21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf Ayşe Erkmen, Ups and Downs, Yapi Kredi Art Gallery(curated by René Block), Istanbul 2007 Habenichts, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin 2006 Awesome, The Physics Room, Christchurch, New Zealand 2005 Busy Colors, Sculpture Center, New York 2003 Kuckuck, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen Group Exhibitions(Selection) 2009 Beyond These Walls, South London Gallery, London For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis, St. Louis 2008 All-Inclusive, Die Welt des Tourismus, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt Above-the-Fold(mit Floyer und Lamelas), Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel Scape Christchurch Biennale of Art in Public space, Christchurch, New Zealand 2007 Time Past, Time Present, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul 2005 Projekt Migration, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne 2003 Niemand ist eine Insel. Sechzehn kooperative Kunstprojekte in Bremen, Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen.
FATHER, MOTHER, WHAT SHOULD I FILM TODAY?
Vater, Mutter, was soll ich heute filmen?
Isabell Spengler Germany/ 2012/ HDCAM/ Color/ 52 minutes/ English Subtitle
“The idea for FATHER, MOTHER, WHAT SHOULD I FILM TODAY? came to me one summer when I was visiting my parents at their vacation house in France. While they were working in the garden, my father and mother would call out to me at least five times a day: ‘Isabell, quick, there‘s a praying mantis/a snail/a flower, etc., you have to film it!‘ Provoked by this other idea of how to make films, I decided to do interviews with my parents, in which they could describe their film wishes as precisely as possible. Then I made some of these wishes come true. FATHER, MOTHER, WHAT SHOULD I FILM TODAY? juxtaposes my parents‘ descriptions of films with my own translations into film: wishes for films in words are followed by the wished-for films in images.”(Isabell Spengle). FATHER, MOTHER, WHAT SHOULD I FILM TODAY? is part of a series of experiments with visual description, carried out between friends, relatives, and the public; between filmmakers, interpreters, and the audience. The experiments mark out clear positions for those involved-behind, in front of, and in the film image. Spengler‘s split-screen video installation Telephathy Experiment I was shown in the Forum Expanded in 2007. Two friends attempt to send thoughts over a spatial distance(and from one half of the image to the other). While Telephathy Experiment I operate with the links between simultaneous streams of signs, FATHER, MOTHER, WHAT SHOULD I FILM TODAY? presents verbal descriptions and their visualizations in succession. The film is also the portrait of a passionate relationship to the image of nature.
Isabell Spengler was born 1972 in Berlin. 1992 - 1999 Studies in visual communication and experimental film and media design at the Universität der Künste, Berlin 1996 - 2001 Studies in film and video at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Los Angeles From 2001 to 2004 Isabell Spengler lived and worked in Los Angeles. Since 2004 she is teaching experimental film at the UdK, Berlin. In 2005 she curated the film program, "Perfect City Telepathy" at Filmforum, Los Angeles. Since 1997 her work has been represented at national and international art exhibitions
and film festivals. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Program #2 78’/⑮
6.11 Thu 12:30(GV) / 6.17 Wed 7:00 / 6.25 Thu 3:00 / 7.3 Fri 1:00
BLACK PRESIDENT
Mpumelelo Mcata Zimbabwe, South Africa, Great Britain/ 2015/ DCP /86 minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
“What is Black Guilt? I’ve often asked myself, why can’t artist Kudzanai Chiurai be free to just paint flowers or some shit…? If he wants to that is. Will he and can he ever be President of his own State of Being? Or must he forever carry the fate and history of his people on his shoulders? “A child is born with no state of mind... blind to the ways of mankind,” proclaim Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in The Message, their seminal hip hop behemoth of a song about African-American ghettos in the ‘80s, then comes consciousness. In the case of this boy, a certain young Zimbabwean man, the fine artist named Kudzanai Chiurai, black consciousness appears, closely followed by black pride or ideas of black power. An ideological militancy adopted perhaps just as a means to access the freedom he needs to truly fly and to find his spirit. His flight however, as is the case for many a young black artist, is often weighed down by guilt, a guilt masquerading as responsibility. This black guilt is Kudzanai Chiurai’s last hurdle before true freedom - it is a demon that must be slayed. The central thesis or question of this film is focused on this idea of ‘BLACK GUILT’. In this film we question the responsibility of African artists in an ever more globalised universe, where we maybe find ourselves “playing catch up” to the West as opposed to following our own paths. Are we victims of our past, forever beholden to our so-called arrested development, or is our superpower our burden? Will we ever be truly free to express without having to necessarily represent all our people in our every breath, or is the need to be that kind of free simply irresponsible. How much do these complexes and relationships owe(compare) to the ghost of our continent’s violent collective history of oppression, exploitation, and struggle haunt us? Is there such a thing as postcolonialism or indeed neocolonialism if colonialism never ended in the first place? Are we still slaves? Am I a slave? In Black President ‘The White Queen’(a character from one of Kudzi’s pieces) personifies the idea of an externalised and internalised quasi-colonialism, when she first appears in a work by Kudzanai Chiurai and then steps out of that frame and into the world of the film. She soon goes rogue and irritates everyone around her, while trying to buy up every African person and object she sees. How will this end?”(Mpumelelo Mcata)
Mpumelelo Mcata was born in Port Elizabeth/Nelson Mandela Bay, is an artists, musician, and cultural activist based in South Africa. He is a member of the internationally acclaimed South African band BLK JKS. Black President is his first feature film.
Program #3 75’/⑮
6.11 Thu 3:00(GV) / 6.18 Thu 1:00 / 6.20 Sat 7:00 / 6.27 Sat 3:00
SAID DEATH TO PASSION
Jeanne Faust, Jörn Zehe Germany/ 2008/ DVD/ 4minutes/ Color/ English
With: Dying persons(Rudy Radu, Christoph Esser, Falk Pepperhoff) and Jeff Turek.
A singer stops singing in the middle of a song in order to follow an apparition into the garden: reciting a poem, receiving passion, failing.
Jeanne Faust was born 1968 in Wiesbaden, Germany. 1993-1998, attended Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. 1999, awarded Hamburg stipend. 2002, Kunstfonds. 2002, artist-in-residence at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. 2003, BDi ars viva. 2004, Lichtwark stipend, Hamburg. 2006, cité internationale des arts Paris. Since 1998 participation in various group shows in Germany and abroad.
Jörn Zehe was born 1966 in Hamburg, Germany. Attended art school in Berlin and Braunschweig from 1985 to 1990. In 1991, master student of the film class with Birgit Hein and Gerhard Büttenbender, Braunschweig University of Art. Numerous stipends. 1997-1999, professor at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway. 1999-2004, professor at Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1988, exhibitions and festival participation in Germany and abroad.
LA ROUGE ET LA NOIRE
Isabelle Prim France/2011/ HDCAM/ 74 minutes/ Color, B&W/ English Subtitle
“Carrying on Luc Moullet’s unfinished screenplay about the theft of ‘la pénélope,’ a camera created by Aaton and capable of recording equally well in 35 mm and digitally, LA ROUGE ET LA NOIRE is a film in kaleidoscope form. The portrait of Aaton’s founder, Jean-Pierre Beauviala - creator, inter alia, of the ‘time-code’ and the light cameras used by the New Wave(in particular the ‘bush camera’ specially designed for Jean Rouch) - is centered around the basic plot introduced by two women thieves who talk as voice-overs, and whose identities will only be revealed at the end. The film weaves its canvas through many different styles of imagery: Beauviala’s private archives shot in 16mm, images that the artist produces in Aaton work areas, digital inlays of a little monster who metamorphoses on the screen. The latter, a variant hailing from the Aaton advertising icon of the ‘cat on the shoulder,’ permeates and interferes with the film, embodying potential menace and representing the narrative thread. Through an operation involving the desynchronization of sound and image, Isabelle Prim creates a gap between the plot and her commentary, and increases the number of image-related signifiers, to the point of introducing doubt about what we are being shown. Right up to the final slip, when the thieving women get in a muddle over the camera, and make off with the one used by Beauviala himself to produce his archives. Full circle.“(Mathilde Villeneuve France)
Isabelle Prim was born in 1984 in Paris. Her artistic practice encompasses experimental film, video installations, and animation. Her film Mademoiselle Else(2010) premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. CREAMY KRIMI(2008) was presented in the Forum Expanded. Other films and installations: CLIPEATA(2009), ET ORNEMENT(AND ORNAMENT)(2008), LET'S SCORE(2007), THE WET INDEX(2006).
Program #4 70’/⑮
6.12 Fri 12:30 / 6.18 Thu 3:00 / 6.26 Fri 1:00 / 6.28 Sun 1:00 / 7. 1 Wed 1:00
ON CONSTRUCTION IN GRIFFITH’S FILM
Eine Doppelkanal-Videoinstallation von Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki Germany/ 2006/ 8minutes/ Color, B&W/ Silent/ English Subtitle
A sequence by Griffith from 1916's INTOLERANCE. There are numerous forms of montage: naturally, the wide shot, the varying camera angles, shot-reverse angle, parallel montage, leaps in time across many decades. But one sequence is especially notable. It causes one to think that with it, the shot-reverse angle form of expression was invented. Or that it's meant to emphasize, through repeated affiliation, something one wasn't yet sure of. This sequence is like one of those animals that only exist to provide an example for the correctness of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. But cinematic Darwinism is neither right nor wrong.
Harun Farocki was born in Neutitschein(today Nový Jičín, Czech Republic) in 1944. From 1966 to 1968, he studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin(dffb).
For ten years, Farocki was an editor and writer for the magazine Filmkritik. Since 1974, he has been a lecturer in Hamburg, Munich, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Vienna, Berlin and Berkeley. His art has often been shown in art institutions since 1995.
DER SPIEGEL
THE MIRROR
Keren Cytter Germany/ 2007/ DVD/ 5minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
In DER SPIEGEL the viewer is confronted with the naked body of the 42-year-old protagonist, who sees herself as a 16-year-old that the man she wants must love. Her reflection in the mirror shatters this self-image. Cytter gives a clear comment on the state in which society is right now. In the film this criticism is expressed by the remarks of the choir - representing the voice of the masses - when the protagonist expresses her love: “Subtitles: and young bodies are better than an old woman.” As in Keren Cytter’s previous films, DER SPIEGEL ends in a cruel way.
Keren Cytter was born in 1977 in Israel, studied art at de Ateliers, Amsterdam(2002-2004.) Her work has been shown in renowned art spaces such as Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Kunsthalle Zurich; MUMOK, Vienna; Lyon Biennial; Cubitt Artists, London; and in STUK, Leuven. She has published two novels, Yesterday’s Sunset(2003,) and The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats(2005.)
MONDIAL 2010
Roy Dib Lebanon/ 2013/ HD/ 19minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
MONDIAL 2010 is a discussion of institutional borders in modern day Middle East. It uses video as an apparatus to transgress boundaries that are inflicted on people in spite of them. It is a travel film in a trajectory that doesn’t allow travel, starring two male lovers, in a setting where homosexuality is a punishable felony. Shot with a hand-held camcorder, MONDIAL 2010 borrows the aesthetics of a travel video log. It normalizes the abnormal, and by doing so creates its own universe of possibility. It is a shift from the mainstream passive view of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that places the victim/oppressor in the forefront of the produced imagery. This video glides over this conflict with an upper hand.
Roy Dib is an artist and an art critic. He has cofounded the theater group Zoukak(2006-2009). He has presented works at venues and events such as Video Works(Beirut), Palais de Tokyo(Paris), Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan(Beirut), and Videobrasil(Sao Paulo). He currently writes for the cultural section of Al-Akhbar newspaper, Beirut.
O QUAM TRISTIS
O HOW SAD
Maite Abella Netherland/ 2009/ Digi betacam/ 9 minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
Mother and Daughter have always been fighting. In William Wyler’s "The Big Country"(1958) the actors Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston are fighting in the middle of a vast landscape the whole night long until the next day - that was the way to solve their problems. This physical last battle was the inspiration for a family home movie.
Maite Abella was Born 1966 in Lleida, Spain, lives and works as an artist(painting and site-specific projects) and filmmaker in Amsterdam since 1995. Films: 2000: Dejando huella; 2001: I am stronger than trees, 2008: Het wachten(The Waiting); 2009: O quam tristis(O how sad).
THE SHEIKH IMAM PROJECT
Gheith Al-Amine Lebanon/ 2014/ HD/ 7 Minutes/ Color
This work is a performative audio-visual tribute to the great talent of Sheikh Imam Issa(1918-1995), a revolutionary leftist Egyptian composer and singer who spent 18 years in prison for speaking out against corruption, oppression, and injustice in Egypt, the third world and beyond. A piano-forte, a smartphone, an old bulb TV, and a few lines written on two masking-tape strips compose this vision. Shot in one continuous sequence it revolves around the love song El Bahr Biyidhak Leh [Why Does the Sea Laugh], which is based on a poem by Nagib Sorour(1932-1978), a militant Egyptian communist poet, playwright, and director who also spent many years in prison for his convictions - taking apart the various elements of this love song in order to appreciate, understand, and savour its beauty in multiple ways. This video is also a document of how Arabic music could be played on a German musical instrument.
Gheith Al-Amine was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1973, is a video artist, filmmaker, radio dj and art critic.
NEVER
Armando Lulaj Albania/ 2013/ HD video/22minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
In 1968, by order of the Labour Party, the army, helped by the voluntary youth, undertakes one of the greatest voluntary works of the Communist era in Albania: on the side of a mountain range nearby the Albanian city of Berat, Albania’s dictator Enver Hoxha has his name displayed in a monumental engraving. 44 years later, a group of villagers take the effort to climb the mountain and change the letters by overwriting a new word, referring to the past dictatorship and the current government. ENVER becomes NEVER in a laborious process of ‘(un-)naming’ the recent past.
Armando Lulaj was born 1980 in Tirana, Albania, lives and works in Tirana. His works have been shown, among others, of the 6th Berlin Biennial(2010), and at the Albanian Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennial(2007).
Program #5 88’/⑮
6.12 Fri 3:00(GV) / 6.21 Sun 3:00 / 6.24 Wed 7:00 / 7. 1 Wed 7:00
ANDERS, MOLUSSEIN
autrement, la Molussie
differently, Molussia
Nicolas Rey France/ 2011/ 16mm/ 81 minutes/ Color or B&W
“Nine reels of unbelievably gorgeous 16mm, eight of which feature allegories drawn from philosopher Günther Anders’s posthumously published 1931 novel "The Molussian Catacomb", which exposes the fascism inside capitalism and vice versa. The sequencing of the reels - i.e. the stories and the way certain motifs, aesthetic strategies, and cinematic devices are introduced and worked through - is interchangeable; what carries over from reel to reel are the colors and textures. Few works so perfectly combine cinesensuality and Marxist dialectics.”(Olaf Möller, Film Comment)
“I wanted to make a film based on a novel that I couldn‘t read, since it was written in a language that I don‘t understand, and there‘s no translation. Strange idea, you might say. But it‘s a matter of trust. Maybe a little bit of intuition, but mostly trust. All that I knew was the fictional framing: prisoners, plunged into the darkness of a jail in an imaginary fascist state, Molussia, tell each other stories about the outside, like so many philosophically inclined fables. Looking back I can say that I made no mistake; the novel is profoundly topical today. But how to film it? Just film this imaginary landscape. No need to travel very far. Wander through more or less industrialized landscapes with my friend Nathalie, stopping here and there. Build a few machines with my friend Christophe to add to the complexity. My friend Stefan gave me a pile of outdated 16mm film stock. I asked Peter to read the book for me, and he picked out a few chapters. He knows me very well, he translated my last film. Trust. I add a few more chapters, whose titles appeal to me. Together with Nathalie we make a rough translation. The random order makes for a quite particular experience editing the film. I have to adjust, shift, invert, shorten it here and stretch it out there. Not too many constraints so as not to betray the pleasure of simply putting sound and image together. And then to let the whole thing rest a bit before periodically coming back to listening to the film.”(Nicolas Rey)
Nicolas Rey was born in 1968. Unlike the famous American director, his name is not a pseudonym. Nor is he the son of the French experimental filmmaker Georges Rey. He is also not related to the other Nicolas Reys who live at Place de Paris, although he often gets their mail. Since 1993, he makes films that combine elements of photography, documentary film, and experimental film. He is also a co-founder of the collective film lab L‘Abominable.
Program #6 81’/⑮
6.13 Sat 12:30(GV) / 6.17 Wed 3:00 / 6.25 Thu 1:00 / 7.4 Sat 3:00
BRUCE LEE IN THE LAND OF BALZAC
Maria Thereza Alves France/ 2007/ DV/ 2minutes/ B&W
What does a Brazilian artist do when confronted with the vast beauty of the French landscape? A beauty which the French writer, Honore de Balzac, wrote exactly and precisely about. In particular, he wrote about this area, Sache, and human nature as bent by the structures of the local society’s "normality". In Bruce Lee in the Land of Balzac, Maria Thereza Alves introduces the "Other" removed but now replaced within the context - and there is no return.
Maria Thereza Alves was born 1960 in Brazil. Lives in Europe. Has participated in Manifesta 2008. She has exhibited at the Arnolfini GAllery, San Francisco Art Institute, Basel Kunsthalle, NBK Berlin, Liverpool Biennale, Palais Tokio, Werkleitz Biennale, and is a recipient of a DAAD grant. Co-founder of the Green Party of Brazil in São Paulo.
KALTE PROBE
Constanze Ruhm, Christine Lang Austria/ 2013/ HDCAM/ 86 minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
The director Hans - once famous and successful - has landed at a low point in his career. He finds himself caught up in an intrige spun by a pair of dead actresses who are languishing away in hell. They invent a story for Hans, performing a fantasy of actor’s revenge. Hans unwittingly winds up a character in a plot that ends in his own death. In this nightmare, all the important women in his life come to meet him once again. Aside from them, there’s the TV moderator Josephine Le Caro; her assistant Viens Ici; the reincarnation of a David Lynch character named Grace Zabriskie; Serge Gainsbourg; Carol, a famous actress who was locked in the closet as a vendetta by her make-up girl more than a hundred years ago; a talking donkey; a stuntman dressed up as a duck; a nameless, hapless TV show contestant; and finally Freud and Lacan. In the end, Hans meets himself as a child in a run down park. Eventually he has to accept the fact that he has landed once and for all in the great beyond.
Constanze Ruhm was born in 1965 in Vienna. She studied at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna and at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Since 1990, her installations have been shown in international exhibitions, and retrospectives of her films and videos have been presented. She is also active as an author and curator(haus.0 program at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart 2001-2003; Fate of Alien Modes, Secession Wien 2003; ZKM Karlsruhe). The work focuses on contemporary forms of an art practice established around the relation of cinema and New Media with an emphasis on notions of identity, representation and(feminist) film theory. Productions including and intersecting the fields of installation, film / video, text / publications, curatorial projects and websites. Furthermore,
the projects include works in public spaces(the most recent one an invitation for the competition in the framework of a redesign of a section of Vienna's Karlsplatz subway passage). From 2004-2006 she was professor of film and video at the Merzakademie in Stuttgart. Since 2006 she is professor of art and media at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Since 2007 also adjunct professor at the Art Instiute Boston / Lesley University. Lives in Vienna and Berlin.
Christine Lang works at the borders between film, theory, and pop culture as a filmmaker, author, curator, and DJ. Since 2009 various artistic collaborations with Constanze Ruhm. She teaches in the program screenwriting/dramaturgy at the HFF “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Filmography: TRAILER.PARK(2011) with Constanze Ruhm, DAS FACHGESPRÄCH( 2011), QUIO: RISING TIDE(2008), THE COURAGE, THE CARS & THE CHURCH(2007), GLORIA“(2006), QUIO: SO DAZED(2006), DIE BABYSITTERIN(2005), until 1998 music videos(for Tarwater, Quarks a. o.).
Program #7 62’/⑮
6.14 Sun 12:30 / 6.20 Sat 3:00 / 7.3 Fri 3:00 / 7.5 Sun 3:00
ORCHARD STREET
Ken Jacobs USA/ 1955/ QuickTime ProRes/ 15minutes/ Color/ Silent
“1955, Alan Becker sometimes assisting. My first film, revisiting the Jewishness(permeating the street at that time) of my upbringing. Originally lasting close to a half-hour, I was afterwards told there was no chance of screening a documentary longer than 12 minutes and, broke and hungry the way young artists are expected to be, I cut it down.
There was no fat so the cuts were into bone and muscle. And then, the deed done, I despised myself and did nothing with it. An engagement broke(she went West and connected to Christopher MacLaine) and in my economic free-fall I began filming STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH starring the unknown Jack Smith and Jerry Sims, 1956-1959, though the somewhat-more-affordable shorts LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS and BLONDE COBRA came out earlier.
2014: after very occasional screenings of the disaster, and with daughter Nisi at the computer, a close return to the original was effected, in luxurious silence. I’d been on the street a lot with my Bell and Howell 16mm 70DL and no one ever objected. Some asked what channel would they see themselves on and I would explain ‘independent filmmaker,’ aka bum with a camera. Knocks me out to see how Kodachrome preserves semblances of time. Sorry to have disappointed you, people of Orchard Street of over half a century ago, you were wonderful. The couple in the clinch: she worked on the street and embodied it, the kisser is me.”(Ken Jacobs)
LET THERE BE WHISTLEBLOWERS
Ken Jacobs USA/ 2005/ Digibeta/ 15minutes/ Color, B&W
A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space is toyed with. Composed to the first part of Drumming by Steve Reich.
CYCLOPS OBSERVES THE CELESTIAL BODIES
Ken Jacobs USA / 2014/ QuickTime ProRes/ 27 minutes/ Color
※ Warnings; Those people afflicted with epilepsy or other uncommon brain conditions must avoid obvious flicker. If you even suspect this could be your condition, please don’t risk watching this movie.
In Ken Jacob’s latest film, a stream of water shooting from a fountain, arrested in mid-air, serves as the material for a hypnotic, frenzied exploration of 3-dimensional cinematic vision.
“Cyclopean 3D is the most 3D a single eye can come up with. This means the celestial horde on display here can only seem to be galloping through space. Actual seeing into depth must be denied, it’s the law.”(Ken Jacobs, 2015)
“Hollywood might do well to learn from Ken Jacobs, who can boast more than 40 years of provocative, demanding, and transformative explorations of various permutations of 3D, putting the primitive, in-your-face assaults of Hollywood to shame. The 78-year-old New York-based artist has dedicated his life to exploring both the mechanics of human perception and the technologies of movies, returning to cinema’s origins in the 19th century to create transcendent experiences of film viewing, experiences that lift you out of your seat and transport you into the space and movement of the image itself.… Rather than dutifully depicting a more realistic space or, worse, using 3D for gimmicky visual tricks, Jacobs deploys 3D technology as part of a larger, lifelong exploration of vision, consciousness, and the materiality of cinema, even in its incredibly ephemeral manifestations.”(Holly Willis, LA Weekly, 2011)
Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, is an artist and filmmaker. He studied painting with Hans Hofmann from 1956 to 1957 and started making films in 1955. He created and directed The Millennium Film Workshop, NYC from 1966-68, started the Department of Cinema at SUNY at Binghamton in 1969. He is Distinguished Professor of Cinema Emeritus. His films and videos have been shown worldwide.
Program #8 51’/ ⑱
6.14 Sun 3:00(GV) / 6.20 Sat 1:00 / 6.26 Fri 3:00 / 7. 2 Thu 3:00
PIERROT LUNAIRE
Bruce LaBruce Germany, Canada/ 2014/ HD/ 51 minutes/ Color, B&W/ English Subtitle
In 1912 the actress Albertine Zehme asked the composer Arnold Schönberg to set to music part of the Pierrot Lunaire-poems by the Belgian Albert Giraud: For five musicians and a female singer Schönberg arranged 21 of the 50 poems to become one of his ground-breaking works for music theatre. In 2011 the conductor Premil Petrovic asked the filmmaker Bruce LaBruce to direct a stage version of Pierrot Lunaire with actress Susanne Sachsse singing and performing in the title role. The concept for the stage production is grounded in Schönberg’s understanding of cabaret, which took him to a dreamworld, full of “decadent longing, guilt, rapture and fear”, endowed with horror scenarios and an ironic-satiric humour.
In 2013 LaBruce took Pierrot Lunaire to the streets of Berlin to film a dark story of longing, love,
and transgression. This film features a soundtrack with Petrovic’s interpretation of Schönberg’s musical melodrama, sung by Sachsse. Based on a true story, LaBruce’s Pierrot Lunaire lends an appropriately radical queercore vision to one of the most innovative contributions to atonal music. “While I listened to the music of Arnold Schönberg I tried to associate a concept that would match well with the mood of his atonal music on the one hand, and on the other hand could be combined with the poems by Albert Giraud in a more contemporary context. From the jungle of thoughts of my unconscious rose a story that is supposed to have happened decades ago in Toronto, and that is both odd and universal […]: A young girl that regularly dresses as a boy falls in love and seduces a young girl that has no clue that her lover has the same sex. When the girl introduces ‘her boyfriend’ to her father he becomes skeptical and unmasks the fraud [and] does not allow them to ever see the other again. Furious and delusional the ‘boy’ develops an adventurous plan to prove his true ‘masculinity’ to the father of his lover.”(Bruce LaBruce)
Bruce LaBruce is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and artist based in Toronto but working internationally.
Program #9 60’/ ⑱
6.17 Wed 1:00 / 6.21 Sun 1:00 / 6.28 Sun 3:00 / 7.2 Thu 1:00 / 7.4 Sat 1:00
POR PRIMERA VEZ
Octavio Cortázar Cuba/ 1967/ HD/ 9minutes/ B&W
With the act of founding the ICAIC, the Cuban Institute for Film Art and Industry, on March 24, 1959, shortly after the Cuban revolution, the history of a new Cuban film culture began. With the goal of the “audiovisual alphabetization” of the population, the government created the ‘cine móvil,’ which brought cinema into even the most isolated areas of the island, on trucks, mule-drawn carts, or boats. POR PRIMERA VEZ is a testament to this film educational program. We see the inhabitants of a remote mountain village watching a film for the very film time thanks to the
mobile cinema. Interviews before their first encounter with film and shots of their faces during the screening of Charlie Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES portray the cinema as a world of illusion and a means of enlightenment.
Octavio Cortázar was born 1935 in Havana, died 2008. Worked as director and production leader of cultural broadcasts, starting in 1959 production assistant for the ICAIC. Between 1961 and 2005 directed 12 films, including EL BRIGADISTA(THE TEACHER 1971), which won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic achievement at the 28th Berlin International Film Festival.
LA DOLCE SIRIA
Ammar Al-Beik Egypt, United Arab Emirates/ 2014/ DCP/ 23minutes/ Color, B&W/ English Subtitle
“A cinematic letter to Federico Fellini: Dear Federico, I don’t think that this circus from Italy, which is visiting Syria, has ever visited Rimini, your town in the past. This circus is nothing like the one in your childhood. No one can tame the lion here in this tent; it’s smashing everyone and everything. Even the clowns with their wide, grotesque, make-up smiles and their cheap colourful costumes, meant to make my brother and me and all the other kids laugh, are terrified. Everybody is running out of the circus. Everyone is leaving their excitement inside and carrying the sadness on their shoulders and the terror in their eyes while sprinting out of the tent. No fireworks around the tent Federico! Neither their mesmerizing colours are there when they explode, nor is the sound of their explosions. Scud and bombs are the fireworks that we recognise my friend! Red is the colour that we see. And everyday here, my friend, the usage of the word ‘Mama’ becomes less and less; either children die, or mothers.”
“’Vita’ is not ‘dolce’ in Syria, Federico!
The circus is boring.
And I miss you.
I forgot to tell you this earlier: ‘Lion’ in Arabic means: ‘Al Assad’“(Ammar Al-Beik)
Ammar Al-Beik was born in Damascus, Syria in 1972, is an award-winning filmmaker and artist based in Berlin, Germany. His films have been shown at numerous international festivals, including
Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Yamagata, Busan, and Oberhausen. Represented by Ayyam Gallery since 2008, Al-Beik’s artworks have been featured in exhibitions across the world, most recently at Photo Shanghai, China(2014), and are housed in private and public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
SURFACE NOISE
Paul Rowley, David Philips, Tim Blue USA/ 2010/ HDCam/ 7 minutes/ Color
By re-programming instruments used in film restoration labs, the artists were able to digitally isolate the damaged elements of old film prints, the dust, dirt, and scratches. The selected material focuses on excerpts from the archives of cinema which depict political conflict, demonstrations, riots, and state interventions in public assembly. As the damaged images rush across the screen, interesting parallels emerge between the mechanics of cinema and patterns of social disturbance and unrest. The process of creating the soundtrack followed the making of the images.
Paul Rowley was born 1971 in Dublin, lives and works in New York.
David Philips was born 1970 in Memphis, Tennessee, lives and works in New York.
Tim Blue was born 1962 in Portland, USA lives and works in Berlin.
INTRODUCTION TO A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Florian Zeyfang Germany/ 2008/ DigiBeta/ 12 minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
INTRODUCTION TO A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY sheds a new light on early discussions of mass distribution of images. Florian Zeyfang´s video experiments with the photographs, the printed reproductions from the books that Benjamin had at hand when writing his essay “Small History Of Photography.” The video changes stills to moving images, searching for traces, zooming in, opening a new view onto materiality and structure not visible in the original print. The fast edit and the soundtrack render the initially still visible gesture of turning the pages into a rapid image cosmos. The musical score of the first version of INTRODUCTION TO A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY from 2006 is "In C", conceived originally by Terence Riley in 1964, interpreted 2003 by the Japanese group Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. For the second Version, INTRODUCTION TO A SHORT HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPH - FORMALIST HEADY PATTERN VERSION(2008) new musical piece was conceived by Alejandra Salinas und Aeron Bergman. Cinematic premiere 2006 in Kino Arsenal as part of the project "JETZT - The Now of Recognizability".
Florian Zeyfang was born 1965 in Stuttgart, Germany. 1987 to 1993 at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. 1997/8 at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, currently Professor for Video/Installation at the Art Academy in Umeå, Sweden. In his texts, videos and installation work, the Berlin based artist, videomaker and writer Florian Zeyfang critically looks at the connotations of a globalized world of media signs and at the consequences for the society and the individual, taking into account historic aspects of both art and political movements. His projects are conceived within different forms of the moving image: film, video, slide projection, animation. Spacious installations as well as slide series("slow films") form an important part of his discussion of “time-based media.” Florian Zeyfang regularly takes part in exhibitions nationally and abroad, recently in Kunstverein Köln, at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Artists Space, New York; at the 2nd Tirana Biennale, at ICA Moscow, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Kunstverein Hannover, at the 6th Werkleitz Biennale in Halle and at the KW Berlin. Furthermore, the artist curates projects for institutions like CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warschau, sala rekalde in Bilbao, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the 8th Havanna Biennale, the foto festival in Houston, in the Museum for Applied Arts Wien, in the MAK Schindlerhaus in Los Angeles and the Swiss Institute in New York. Currently, Florian Zeyfang works on exhibition projects ranging between Art and experimental film(“Poor Man´s Expression”, Berlin 2006; “1,2,3 Avant-Gardes”, Warschau/Stuttgart/Bilbao 2006-2008). Lisa Schmidt-Colinet and Alexander Schmoeger are architects and live in Vienna. Since 2001 Schmidt-Colinet/Schmoeger and Florian Zeyfang have collaborated on exhibitions and projects. Together with Eugenio Valdés Figueroa they published “Pabellón Cuba,” an extensive reader on art, architecture, and film in Cuba.
THE STORY OF MILK AND HONEY
Basma Alsharif Lebanon/ 2011/ 10minutes/ Color/ English Subtitle
THE STORY OF MILK AND HONEY is a series of interrelated projects that present the visual, textual, and sound explorations resulting from the failure to write a love story set in the Middle East. The work is comprised of three photography projects: Corniche Beirut, Original Family Archives, Les Sauvages, and a short video: The Story of Milk and Honey. The video, an experimental documentary, tells the story of an unnamed individual who travels to Beirut, Lebanon to write a love story. Through voice-over narration of what ensues, the video details repeated failed attempts to distinguish the political body from the subjective experience. The unnamed individual, lost in his research, transpires into a journey of images, letters, songs, and an ultimate confusion of love for patriotism. The photographs are presented as material testaments of the failures: Corniche Beirut: a single image taken from a selection of photographs of
anonymous people on Beirut’s Corniche each Sunday. Original Family Archives: a collection of images of people without faces, taken from the narrator’s family photographs and from photographs belonging to families the narrator does not know. Les Sauvages: pages excerpted from a book on nature and the environment represented as a text with no plants and a redrawn illustration. The works can be seen simultaneously as autonomous projects and dependent works. The visual content is bound together by an exploration of how we perceive information, understand facts, history, images and sound, and how to identify the individual in the midst of the material.
Basma Alsharif was born in 1983 Kuwait, US citizen of Palestinian origin. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally including Manifesta 8(2010), Toronto International Film Festival(2010), the London Palestine Film Festival, London(2010), the 9th Edition of the Sharjah Biennial(2009). She lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon.
Program #10 84’/⑫
6.19 Fri 3:00 / 6.24 Wed 1:00 / 6.27 Sat 1:00 / 7.4 Sat 7:00
LUNCH BREAK
Sharon Lockhart US/ 2008/ HDCAM/ 83 minutes/ Color
Lockhart spent the last year looking at the lives of workers in Maine's Bath Iron Works. Lunch Break features 42 workers as they take their midday break in a corridor stretching nearly the entire shipyard. Contrary to her previous films, the camera is untethered and, as it slowly moves down the corridor, we experience what was a brief interval in the workday schedule expanded into a sustained gaze. Lined with lockers, the hallway seems not only an industrial nexus but also a social one, its surfaces containing a history of self-expression and customization. Over the course of the lunch break we see workers engaged in a wide range of activities - reading, sleeping, talking - in addition to actually eating their midday meal. The soundtrack is a composition designed in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and filmmaker James Benning, in which industrial sounds, music, and voices slowly merge and intertwine. Together, picture and sound provide an extended meditation on a moment of respite from productive labor.
Sharon Lockhart was born in Norwood, Massachusetts. Her films and photographic work have been widely exhibited at international film festivals and in museums, cultural institutions, and galleries around the world. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts.
