Events

  • Filmmakers' Choice: Deborah Phillips

    By on

    Untitled Colourmation (Deborah S. Phillips, 1991)Filmmakers' Choice: Deborah Phillips
    Monday June 25th, 19h
    Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art
    Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin
    Introduced by Deborah Phillips

    I looked for films in which colors, textures, light and time were more important than people and stories. More and more, my research became a journey of discovery into the East European part of the Arsenal Archive. We begin with a film that observes nature, Viragat a Napnak. In Exú, which features magical compositions by Christoph Janetzko, reality is consumed. Painting in movement Encounter and animated buttons Guzik lead on to my animated painting film in different dimensions Untitled colourmation whereas Eye music in red major, a classic of pure color and light, paves the path to one of the most interesting portraits of an artist: Witold Lutoslawski. Heat shimmer is a subtle example of the three-color separation process, which brings us back to the observation of nature. (Deborah Phillips)

    Category: 

  • Aesthetic Queeries

    By on

    Stages of Mourning (Sarah Pucill, 2004)Aesthetic Queeries
    Part of the Open City Docs Fest
    Saturday June 23, 17h
    Institute of Contemporary Arts
    The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

    This programme of short documentaries queers the aesthetics and forms of filmmaking as well as exploring and documenting queer lives, staged reality, psychological states and audience participation and reaction. From the cut-up techniques of Daniel McIntyre and Ruth Novaczek, the camp aesthetic of Kuchar’s documentary ode to his dog, the handmade DIY punk of two films from Pitbull Productions’ The Filmic Pleasure Trilogy, to the delicate formalism of Sarah Pucill’s meditation on grief, is there such thing as a queer aesthetic? Barbara Hammer thinks there is and a rare screening of Audience celebrates the 20th anniversary of this film in which Hammer turns her camera on her audience(s) chronicling three film and lesbian scenes at her screenings: politicised San Francisco, expressive Montreal and a more sombre London still finding its voice.

    Category: 

  • History, Memory, Return

    By on

    The gravity of our wakefulness (Michael Rice, 2011)History, Memory, Return
    Abraham Ravett, Baba Hillman, Michael Rice
    Wednesday June 13, 20h
    Les Voûtes
    19 rue des Frigos 75013 Paris

    This programme focuses on the concepts of memory and return, proposes to introduce the films of three artists from Amherst and Massachusetts through varied works combining two projections, performance and found footage. How does the body experience memory? How does memory become body experience? How do we decipher or do we interpret the visible and invisible maps that memory, landscape and return draw on the body?

    Abraham Ravett was born in 1947 in Poland, grew up in Israel and moved to New York in 1955. He lives and makes films in Amherst three decades. He received first prize at the Venice Biennale and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. His films were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Image Forum in Tokyo, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, Scratch Projection, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and the LA Forum.

    Baba Hillman grew up in Venezuela, Mexico and Japan. Her films were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, ICAIC (Havana), the Rencontres Paris, Berlin, and the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruck).

    Michael Rice is a young filmmaker who works in Amherst. His films will be screened in France for the first time.

    Category: 

  • Bozar Cinema: Michael Robinson

    By on

    And We All Shine On (Michael Robinson, 2006)Bozar Cinema: Michael Robinson
    Thursday June 7 2012, 20h
    Palais des Beaux-Arts / Studio
    Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Bruxelles

    Michael Robinson (b.1981) is a film and video artist whose work explores the joys and the dangers of mediated experience. His collage films point to the mechanisms of mediation and manufactured sentiment while at the same time unlocking the power popular images exercise over us. In These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us for instance he combines footage of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 Hollywood epic Cleopatra with images of Michael Jackson’s mid-1990s Egyptomania. The result is funny but not ironic, sincere but not naïve, heartfelt but not sentimental. Robinson’s films have screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, museums, and cinematheques all over the world. He was listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000s by Film Comment magazine.

    Category: 

  • The Risky Visions of Barbara Hammer

    By on

    Tender fictions (Barbara Hammer, 1995)The Risky Visions of Barbara Hammer
    12 June - 01 July 2012
    Jeu de Paume
    1, place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris

    Since the early 1970s, Barbara Hammer has claimed the double identity of feminist and lesbian activist. Pioneer of queer cinema, she has gained an international reputation in the field of American experimental cinema.

    From her earliest films (X, Dyketactics, Superdyke), her boldness is evident in the enthusiastic and lyrical exploration of sexuality and women’s pleasure, previously terra incognita in the geography of cinema. For this, it invents new formal representations of flower and plant outbursts (Women I Love) to a symbolic vocabulary close to Surrealism, revealing its proximity with Maya Deren, and Claude Cahun (I Was / Am I, Psychosynthesis) and two recent works (Maya Deren’s Sink and Lover Other: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore).

    The creative energy of Barbara Hammer fires up all of the rich technical syntax of the avantgarde: superimposed layering of images, visual collage, coloring or alteration of the film, de-framing, use of solarized and negative film, and editing in post production to transform the movie into poetic form by manipulating the film before our eyes (Endangered). All these effects contribute to the technical deployment of a work rich in radiant colors and sounds more and more skillfully worked (Generations). Even in her many films shot in black and white, Barbara Hammer is a filmmaker of light and perceptual experiments. She is also highly attentive to the accompanying sound of her films: music and sound effects that give a color, a tone, sometimes lyrical and sometimes humorous, to films that accompany the memory they hold.

    Category: 

  • LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images Symposium

    By on

    LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images Symposium
    May 26-27
    ICA Theatre, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

    In addition to the talks programme, the students of the LUX/Central Saint-Martins MRes Art: Moving Image course will co-produce a two-day student symposium for UK-based MA and PhD students to present their research into artists’ moving image. The two days will explore ideas around ‘failure’ and ‘contemporary currents’.

     

    On Failure
    Saturday 26 May, 10am – 1pm, ICA Theatre

    Keynote address: Jan Verwoert, Why Rudie Can’t Fail
    Jan Verwoert is a critic, writer, curator, art historian, and contributing editor to Frieze magazine.

    Further papers by:

    Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Failure as Possibility: Reading Two Fragments of Moving-Image Work
    Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi

    Conventionally, in radical political and aesthetic practice, the body of the exhausted person is sought to be energised, radicalised and politicised. Failed, exhausted bodies must be re-energised so that they can engage in the project of (political) transformation. Following a different path, through a reading of two fragments of moving-image work, this paper argues for failure as possibility and attempts to locate exhaustion and failure as potentiality, as moments when, freed from the teleology of the search for a ‘better future’, we see every moment in the now as being open to various possible futures.

    Category: 

Pages