A central figure in the Berlin experimental film scene since the 1980s, Ute Aurand is one the most vital filmmakers active in the diary and portrait tradition today. For Aurand, who works in 16mm just like her precursors Jonas Mekas, Margaret Tait and Marie Menken, “the diaristic form develops out of an inner dialogue with my surroundings, a silent visual conversation. The source of inspiration is daily life, the fountain which never stops and offers itself to everyone. It is a great joy and challenge to transform my inner dialogue into film.”

Minimalize: Video-Dance Nr1 by Walter Verdin Video b/w, stereo sound, 11'27'', 1981

It's hard to explain how a successful pop artist, embraced by stardom, suddenly devotes his life to unglamorous work. In the early 80's, Walter Verdin was hit by success, as a member of one of the most interesting bands to ever compete in the Eurovision Song Contest. Shortly after having represented Belgium with "Pas de Deux", Verdin became a video practitioner adopting video as his sound instrument. For many years he devoted himself to a new field called Video-Dance, creating a pioneering body of work that revealed an acute and unstoppable sense of rhythm.

Laida Lertxundi (b. 1981, Spain) makes films with non-actors – often friends – in and around Los Angeles, the city where she studied under James Benning and Thom Andersen, and where she has been living for a number of years. Shot under the blue Californian sky, her films feature the same topography as Hollywood cinema. Lertxundi questions cinematic conventions of representation and storytelling in her work at the same time that she proposes new associations between sound and image. In London, Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978, UK) addresses similar formal and conceptual concerns in her work, which is also shaped by the material constraints and aesthetic properties of 16mm film. Beyond the differences in the specific subjects of their films, the underlying themes in their work – speculative narrative, film as landscape, sound as material, the production process, collaborative practice – resonate in an uncanny way. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the two filmmakers and curator Maria Palacios Cruz, who has written an essay on the films of Gibson and Lertxundi for the forthcoming issue of Sequence.

This series presents films and videos that depict and embody systems of power and ruptures where these systems become visible. The nature of observing and being observed; life within a surveillance state; individual testimony and collective memory; and the role of the artifact as evidence within suppressed histories are ideas and themes that will be explored throughout the six programs.

Programmed by David Dinnell and Ted Kennedy.