Metai: 2020

Videograms. Kaunas International Film Festival

𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘴 is the title of this year’s International Kaunas Film Festival, a curated programme of films, contemporary video art and artists’ films that explore the impact of images and media as active makers of history. The title was inspired by Harun Farocki’s (1944-2014) 𝘝𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 (1992), a documentary film on the role of media in the unfolding Romanian Revolution, during which the execution of the leader of the country was broadcasted live. One of the themes of the festival is how contemporary video cultures become an extension of our visual thinking and what place this reciprocal process takes in our imagination. How the so-called videoimagination, created through moving image and technology, thrives in the world? Can our dreams be called videos too? The programme aims to present specifically artistic videos, artists’ productions, often made outside the film production market and the politics of affiliation behind it.

The programme also pays attention to the various forms of moving image production as collective undertaking, as activism and as research. This year’s curated selection of feature fiction and documentary films profoundly engage with understandings of health and wellbeing and the complex relation between individual and societal ‘health’ whether embodied, economic or environmental and across the political spectrum. Who defines the boundary and the liminal state of health and sickness? In the selection of artists’ films, we see how individual health and illness are affected by social structures. The films show how we might deconstruct these structures and also how we can revisit and question the histories and futures of what it means to be healthy or unwell. The curated selection asks –– what and who holds us together and keeps us apart? What makes societies fragile and resilient?

Tomorrow Is Always Too Long – Opening

Phil Collins
Tomorrow Is Always Too Long, 82’, 2014

Tomorrow Is Always Too Long is a love letter to Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. Developed over the course of a year with various local communities, it paints a portrait of daily life as seen through the scope of human experience, from birth and youth through education and the criminal justice system to old age. The film is built around musical sequences starring non-professional singers accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; public-access-style broadcasts with a cast of Glaswegians from all walks of life; and a series of intricate short animations depicting a night out on the town. The improbable lovechild of musicals and documentary, late-night television and silhouette animation, Tomorrow Is Always Too Long defies classification and embarks on an immersive, hypnotic trip into the heart of the city.

Phil Collins is a British-born filmmaker, visual artist, cultural organiser and educator based in Berlin and Wuppertal. His diverse practice is characterised by close engagements with place and communities, which over the years have included, amongst others, disco-dancing Palestinians, fans of The Smiths from three continents, Kosovan-Albanian refugees, the youth of Baghdad, anti-fascist skinheads in Malaysia, the homeless population of Cologne, and teachers of Marxism-Leninism from the former German Democratic Republic. Rather than static portraits, the works resulting from these collaborations articulate the nuances of relations embedded in the aesthetic regimes and economies that define everyday existence, from news and politics to entertainment and shopping.

The Building

Tatjana Kononenko and Matilda Mester
Budinok / Das Haus, 93, 2019

– Why are there so many people here?
– Why else, to fill the centuries.
(E. Limonov)

In Kharkiv in the eastern Ukraine stands Derzhprom, the House of State Industry. Built between 1925 and 1928 in the style of constructivism it intended to embody the idea of communism through its colossal architecture. Although it is one of the largest realized constructivist buildings and a poster child for the 1920s avant-garde movement, today Derzhprom is a time machine, an immovable object with its set system in an otherwise dynamic geopolitical context. The film Budinok moves between the classic, observational documentary and the experimental cinema. With very little dialogue, this is rather a poem of moving images, musing over the historical possibility of building a new society and its material remnants.

Tatjana Kononenko born in Kirovograd, Ukraine in 1980, currently lives and works between Berlin and Tbilisi. Till 2019 she was enrolled in the film directing program of German National Film Academy (DFFB) and a fellow of the Elsa Neumann Program of the Berlin Senate for particularly promising artists. Tatjana Kononenko has been working with video and photography in projects often dealing with issues of memory and history. Budinok is the director’s first full-length film.

Matilda Mester born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1980. In 2008 she moved to Berlin to study at the German National Film Academy DFFB. Here she made her first feature film Limbo (director: Anna Sofie Hartmann) that premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, was nominated for the Discovery Award at the European Film Awards. Matilda Mester’s work is characterized by an experimental and artistic approach while Budinok is her first co-directed film.

Ocean of Love

Ingo Niermann, Alexa Karolinski
Oceano de Amor, 93’, 2020

Under capitalism, even love has become a commodity and desire has become the driving force of a market obsessed with growth. The idea that violence is the last taboo of the modern welfare state is the antithesis of ‘Army of Love’ –– an open and international project, which radically reconquers the body and consciousness of its participants and asks: can love be a new kind of work? In Cuba, we meet 10 members of ‘Army of Love’, who give it a try. These include, students, pensioners, transgender sex workers and people with disabilities –– an inclusive group of people who we meet at work and at a beach in Havana, where they perform a ritual in the sea of love. Ocean of Love is part of a continuing multidisciplinary project, which in an open and participatory form recruits new soldiers in the name of love for training programmes and workshops.

Alexa Karolinski was born in Berlin, Germany. She received her bachelor’s degree in art history. She worked for Vice in Germany as an editorial assistant. She also produced pieces for Arte, featuring the work of various artists. She relocated to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts and mastered social documentaries. Karolinski’s first major film was Oma & Bella, a documentary about her grandmother and her grandmother’s friend and roommate. Both women were Holocaust survivors. She moves between the worlds of fine art, cinema and commercial video. In 2016 she premiered the film Army of Love at the Berlin Biennale, as part of an ongoing collaboration with writer/artist Ingo Niermann.

Ingo Niermann (Bielefeld, Germany, 1969) lives in Berlin and Basel. He is a writer and editor of the book series Solution. His debut novel Der Effekt was published in 2001. Recent books include Solution 247-261: Love (2013), Choose Drill (2011), The Future of Art: A Manual (2011, with Erik Niedling), Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy (2010), Solution 1–10: Umbauland (2009), Solution 9: The Great Pyramid (with Jens Thiel, 2008), and The Curious World of Drugs and Their Friends (with Adriano Sack, 2008). Niermann co-founded the revolutionary collective Redesign Deutschland, and has invented a tomb for everyone, the Great Pyramid. Together with Rem Koolhaas he has been building Vote, a tool for public ballots, in Gwangju, Korea. In cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) Niermann started the international digital publishing project Fiktion.

Zero

Kazuhiro Soda
Seishin 0, 128’, 2020

The psychiatrist Dr. Masatomo Yamamoto is a pioneer in the movement to unlock the doors of mental hospitals in Japan in the 1960s. His long career spanning over five decades has been devoted to community-based mental healthcare, which puts the needs of the patients above everything else. At the age of 82, Dr. Yamamoto is suddenly retiring from the clinical field, causing a lot of anxiety for many of his patients who have been relying on him as their lifeline for many years. He tries to spend his time caring for his wife Yoshiko, who has been the biggest supporter of his work and career. In early spring, Dr. Yamamoto and Yoshiko embark on a new life, facing challenges they never faced before.

Kazuhiro Soda is a Peabody Award winning filmmaker. He practices an observational method of documentary filmmaking based on his own ‘Ten Commandments’ which prohibits him from doing pre-shoot research or writing a synopsis before filming. He imposes these rules on himself in order to minimise preconceptions and to be able to make unexpected discoveries while filming and editing.

Videograms Day

Videogram days are discursive events at Kaunas Artists’ House and online together with artist talks, discussions and screenings.

During the first day on September 19th we will be talking with:
Shourideh C. Molavi from Forensic Architecture
Kevin B. Lee and Chloé Galibert-Laîné
Olivier Marboeuf and Louis Henderson from The Living and the Dead Ensemble.
Noncitizen Archive

7 pm – I Am Dublin film screening

Island of Souls

Lotta Petronella
Själo, 78’ 2020

Själö (en. island of souls), has captured the destiny of countless women over hundreds of years. When the filmmaker begins to listen to the winds and spirits, hidden memories become visible. For centuries, a closed institution served as a final destination for socially transgressive women at Själö, an isolated island in the Baltic Sea. The outcast women were kept there in detention, to be observed, studied and measured – in much the same way as the surrounding nature is by scientists at the now converted research center. While a young scientist is collecting samples around the island, the past emerges in the whispers of the unsent letters and empty rooms of the hospital. The space fills up with hidden memories as the invisible archives come alive. Whose stories are remembered and whose are forgotten?

Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and curator based on the island of Ruissalo. She has worked with and on islands for the last 10 years and has 15 years of experience as a director, producer and writer of documentary and art films. Her films have been shown internationally at film festivals, art galleries and broadcasted widely. Petronella is trained as a fine artist at Chelsea College of Art in London where she worked and lived for 15 years working on a number of film and television productions. Besides her own work, she has collaborated with other artists, writers and film-makers on independent film and art projects.

Film programme “Mothership”

This screening will show films by three artists — Ulijona Odišarija, Åsa Cederqvist and Josefin Arnell. These works share an interest in the relationship between motherhood and daughterhood which they approach from different angles. Further expanding the interplay of connections that can be found throughout the whole of the festival Videograms, the idea to curate a programme exploring a relationship with the mother has not been accidental and was impelled by a conversation with one of the artists. Ruminating on the preoccupation with heterosexual romantic love in contemporary culture, one can notice how such love both objectified in pop culture and critiqued by contemporary artists. Twentieth-century’s Modernism, with its concept of the traditional family brought attention to the significance of an individual’s relationship with the father and especially the mother figure as the most formative. However, the relationship with the mother is still placed as secondary in contemporary cultural iconography.

In this programme, all three artists focus on their mothers or families. Mothership, by the Swedish artist Josefin Arnell, is a playful interpretation of Mothership Goes to Brazil (2016), from which the programme takes its title and which reflects on artistic elements common to all artists — playfulness, curiosity and experimentation.

Curated by Monika Lipšic

 

Ouvertures

The Living and the Dead Ensemble
Ouvertures, 132’, 2019


Moving from the frozen landscapes of the Jura mountains to the urban centres of Port-au-Prince, Ouvertures brings the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, back to life. In France, a Haitian researcher tries to read the past within the stratigraphic layers of Jurassic limestone, whilst in Haiti a group of young actors translate and rehearse scenes from Monsieur Toussaint, a play written by Édouard Glissant, that recounts the last days in the life of Louverture dying in exile in a prison cell in the Jura, 1803. Ghosts from the pantheon of Haitian history visit Louverture on his deathbed and put him to trial. As the play proceeds, the actors become possessed by their characters and eventually the ghost of Louverture joins the group and takes them on a voyage for a new kind of exile.

The Living and the Dead Ensemble are a group of artists, performers and poets from Haiti, France and the United Kingdom. They initially came together in Haiti in 2017 to produce the Haitian Creole translation and performance of the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant. Their work explores different possible methods of telling the history of Haiti, the first independent black republic in the Americas. Navigating from the utopia of a radical and anticolonial democracy up until the catastrophic situation the country faces today, the Ensemble produces texts, performances, films and installations that reveal the cultural richness of Haiti from within a social, political and ecological crisis. The Ensemble are: Mackenson Bijou, Rossi Jacques Casimir, Dieuvela Cherestal, James Desiris, Louis Henderson, Léonard Jean Baptiste, Cynthia Maignan, Sophonie Maignan, Olivier Marboeuf, Mimétik Nèg. 

Film programme “Videoimagination”

The contents of this programme have been put together quite intuitively while on a lookout for parallels between technological video change and imagination. Trying to define works by five artists, resulted in the programme’s title, Videoimagination. How do produced images reflect our imagination and what impact do they have on its shaping? Thinking of visual memory as a never-ending film and seeking to identify connections between the conscious and the unconscious with video technology, we called the programme Videoimagination, emphasising a mutual relation between video and imagination, technology and gaze. 

All works in this programme explore various spaces — digital, experiential, observational. Work by Marge Monko, Dear D, reflects sensitive and intimate connections not only between two people, but also between inner feelings and technological design. Polak van Bekkum’s The Ride takes place in the virtual world of Google Earth, but the emotional experience occuring in the real world challenges the differences between the two. Broersen and Lucacs use digital devices in Forest on Location to recreate the Białowież forest which is facing extinction, whereas in Allison Henriquez’s Nocturnal Motion the spectator becomes suspended in the experience and immersed into a dreamlike state. Mariano Blatt and Eduardo Williams’ film, Parsi creates one more videoimagination with its poetic space which exists neither in 360-degree captured Guinea-Bissau nor in a poem about that which does not exist. 

Curated by Milda Januševičiūtė and Monika Lipšic

 

Flesh! Flesh! Delicious flesh! The films of Marianna Simnett

Marianna Simnett’s films are tools to expose the hidden violent structures of the world. Skipping between different genres, from cinéma-vérité, to body horror, to West End musical, her games are played out in deadpan seriousness and gleeful humour. 

Intensely crafted imagery and resonating soundtracks are signatures of Simnett’s eccentric storytelling. In the context of Videograms these films test our understanding of sickness, probe conventions and dissect oppressive social norms.

Marianna Simnett lives and works in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, performance, sculpture and drawing. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation. Working with animals, children, organs and often performing herself, Simnett imagines radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales and desires.

Simnett has shown in major museums internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Kunsthalle Zürich (2019), Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2019), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019), the New Museum, New York (2018) and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018). She is a joint winner of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2020, and she won the Jerwood /FVU Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017.

 

Film programme “Healthcare Systems”

This programme explores the relationship between body and healthcare systems. What is the impact of communication on the ‘healthifying’ process and in the context of health care? When do body-related decisions need to be rationalised? The programme illuminates how power plays out between the roles of patient and physician in the contexts of both conventional and alternative medicine. These relationships of body and care maneuver between science and magic, hope and specific terminologies and languages, empathy and available resources.

 Leah Clements work title, To Not Follow Under, comes from an interview between two psychiatrists, R. D. Laing and Antony Clare, who talk about relationships with patients in distress and how doctors need to keep the line between providing help and maintaining distance. This work explores not only forms of communication but also forms of worry and compromise. Rebecca Lennon’s video work, Words Are Angular Sharp Tenant, playfully uses visual and verbal language to examine narratives of body and disorder. Eitan Efrat and Daniel Mann’s film, The Magic Mountain, talks about the mountain and forms of unconventional medicine in the context of natural resource use and how the impact of such medicine can be both positive and negative.

 Curated by Milda Januševičiūtė

 

Film programme “Data and Dirt. Matter as a Historical Body”

Two film programmes inspired by media researcher, Shannon Mattern’s work Dirt and Data. Code and Clay, invite us to look at matter and natural systems as political, historical and social bearers and means of communication. 

The Matter as a Historical Body programme includes films by artists Filipa César and Shirin Sabahi. Although belonging to different contexts, their works discuss materiality and the dimension of time. In Mined Soil, César is reading from and quoting Amílcar Cabral, a Guinean agronomist and liberation fighter who claimed that soil is also a historical body, among other things. Shirin Sabahi’s Borrowed Scenery and Mouthful revolve around the work Matter and Mind by the Japanese artist Noriyuki Haraguchi and the history of its origin as well as its placement at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Oil is used as an artistic material in Haraguchi’s work –– a still, mirror-like, fixed surface. By initiating a careful restoration of the work, Sabahi unveils its historical depth. In their works, the artists nurture and care for the history of materials through their interventions, raising questions and initiating gestures, exposing the political, institutional and personal layers behind the surface.

Curated by Viktorija Šiaulytė

 

Expedition Content

Veronika Kusumaryati, Ernst Karel
Expedition Content, 78’ 2020

In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organised the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (today West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several wealthy Americans wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley among the Hubula people. It resulted in Gardner’s influential film Dead Birds, two photo books, Peter Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, of the Standard Oil Rockefellers, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from 37 hours of tape, which documents the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.

Ernst Karel, born in 1970 in Palo Alto, USA, works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, and post production sound for nonfiction film, with an emphasis on observational cinema. His work often focuses on the practice of location recording and composing with unprocessed location recordings. In the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, Karel has collaborated with filmmakers and taught courses in reality-based audio. 

Veronika Kusumaryati, born in 1980 in Bantul, Indonesia, is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua. Her scholarship engages with the theories and historiography of colonialism, decolonisation and postcoloniality. She has worked as a curator and produced documentaries that have been screened at various film festivals. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Jakarta Institute of Arts, majoring in Film and Media Studies. She is a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and currently a Harvard College Fellow in Anthropology.

Films by Morgan Quaintance

The contemplative films by Morgan Quaintance create a distinct thread through time and history, addressing racial questions, multiracial identity, memory and its loss. ‘Once you can speak, you can learn to sing’, says a black choir teacher in the film South. Her words ring poignantly in a period of racialised subjects still fighting for the right to speak, a cultural condition often reflected in the films by the artist. 

Quaintance, who is also a writer, musician, broadcaster and curator, has cultivated the participatory and political potential of contemporary art. His films are often gentle and sensitive, which is sometimes the most powerful way to speak about important subjects. In his films, Quaintance touches the viewer sorely, yet at the same time there is a strong sense of brightness, of possibility for a change that is so necessary. 

In the context of the Videograms programme this year, we cherish the cinematographic language of the artist as a unique way of talking and writing about history through moving images that are brave in their poetic character, yet resolute in tackling urgent matters.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. Born in South London, he is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and has written for The Guardian, The Wire, Art Review, Frieze, Rhizome.org, and a number of curatorial sites and blogs. He is a contributing editor for E-Flux’s online publishing portal Art Agenda, is a founding member of the curatorial collective DAM PROJECTS, and was the 2015/16 curatorial fellow at Cubitt Gallery, London. He is also the producer of Studio Visit, a monthly hour-long interviews-based program, broadcast on London’s Resonance 104.4 FM, featuring international contemporary artists as guests.

Curated by Monika Lipšic

 

In Deep Sleep

Maria Ignatenko
Gorod Usnul,  71’, 2020

It begins with a serious allegation: Victor is accused of having beaten a mechanic to death on a boat where he worked as a sailor. From then on, the film follows the course of events that might have led to this happening over three chapters. After his girlfriend dies in an accident, Victor leaves the ship and returns to shore. Gradually his perception begins to shift and what was already a cold, forbidding world through and through appears to become an all-encompassing realm of the dead where everyone and everything lies sleeping.

Maria Ignatenko was born in Moscow in 1986. She graduated with a degree in Journalism. Ignatenko then studied Film Directing at the Moscow School of New Cinema, where she has been teaching Film Directing since 2018. In Deep Sleep is her first feature film.

Film programme “Data and Dirt. Technoecologies”

The air in the Arctic, the landscape of West Java, the rainforest of the Amazon or the cotton fields of Guinea –– these are not just natural systems. These places are not only technology-enabled, but are also influenced by our technological or scientific gaze. The history of information and technology is inscribed in different landscapes and the practices of their exploitation or care. The film by the artist Hanna Husberg is part of her artistic research into air as a political imaginary and the materiality of clouds. Riar Rizaldi’s film looks at the mountains as a means of communication and geotechnology used by both Dutch colonists and locals; and Barbara Marcel reflects on a conventional look at the Amazon forests from a bird’s eye view. The films take a closer look at the relationship human subjects have with these techno-natural systems and reflect upon their power and resistance, while questioning what is technology in general and whether it can be separated from nature at all.

Curated by Viktorija Šiaulytė

 

Film programme “Social body”

This programme presents films by artists Monika Janulevičiūtė and Celyn June, Miša Skalskis, April Lin and The Institute of Queer Ecology on the fragility, permeability and transgression of bodies and the digital, environmental and social networks that they are enmeshed in. From intimate and eerie travel diary-like storytelling to nostalgic yet dystopian family vacation, perception and interaction with death in the social media, to through CGI rendered animation as a metaphor for a warm, blurry queer future. 

Curated by Milda Januševičiūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė

 

Feedback

Simona Žemaitytė
Feedback, 74’, 2019

Saulius, or Sal as his friends from London called him, was a Dj, a passionate vinyl collector as well as one of the creative minds behind the last.fm internet radio project in its early beginnings. He was a universal restless character, a rebel, an anti-system, always part of collaborations and multiple creative projects, organising parties and events, listening to music and gathering people. Born as Saulius Čemolonskas in 1964 in Kaunas, he escaped Soviet Lithuania with forged documents in 1989 and spent most of his life in London. Countless hours of his archive of music, sound and videos recorded on VHS, DV and 8mm cassettes encapsulate Saulius’ rebellious character, his playfulness and creativity as well as his surroundings from times of turmoil and revolt in 1980’s Lithuania to the late 90’s London music scene to recent times and his own private past. Filmmaker Simona Žemaitytė who had known Saulius for almost a decade, uses his archive material to depict the story which could be called a universal human quest to escape or an attempt against the system (any, really). The longer we look beyond the ‘patina’ of time through the VHS and the DV (bringing images of long lost cities, both Kaunas and London) the more we understand that perhaps Sal was one such person that each of us has known once, anywhere, anytime in our lives. Saulius passed away in 2017. His ashes are in his friend’s music studio in London.

Simona Žemaitytė (born 1984) is a Lithuanian artist and filmmaker, living and working in London and Vilnius. It took Simona almost five years to find VHS tapes that Sal occasionally mentioned in their conversations after giving her a copy of his entire archive. She had filmed Sal performing with Terry Burrows and Laure Prouvost among others and made a few projects based on his biography. Simona’s own work was previously awarded at the 15th Tallinn Print Triennial and nominated for an award at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival. Previous exhibitions and shows include Kasa Gallery, Galata Perform (Istanbul), BAFTA, RichMix (London), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius) and others.

Videograms Day

Videogram days are discursive events at Kaunas Artists’ House and online together with artist talks, discussions and screenings.

During the second day on September 26th together with:
Metahaven
Broersen and Lukács
Researcher Karolis Žukas
Artist and filmmaker Ieva Kotryna Skirmantaitė.

Eurasia (Questions on Happiness)

Metahaven
Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 64’, 2018


Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) combines cinematic sequences, found footage, animation and graphics. Through its different visual, aural, linguistic and material textures, the film moves between the distinctive temporality of a YouTube viral video, a poetic and folkish mode of science fictional storytelling and moments where the film seems to overlap with experience in real-time, destabilising the hyped-up editing of its neighbouring sequences. In the speculative narrative that underpins the film, the continent of Eurasia has assumed the name ‘DVD Zone 5’ with regional empires, breakaway states and petty-nationalist republics. The continent of Eurasia, as both geographical and geopolitical concept, is a locus for the grand claims for the  projects of unification and hyper-fragmentation in an increasingly neo-medieval political order. 

Shot in the southeastern Ural and Macedonia, the film’s evolving narrative is framed by three poems: Marina Tsvetaeva’s I know the truth (1918); Fyodor Tyutchev’s Silentium! (1830); and Alexander Vvedensky’s Snow Lies (1930). Each of these poems, all read in voice-over, embodies a distinct position of the poet as a filter of reality. In the exhilarating ‘Snow Lies’, Vvedensky denies language its pretence to convey any coherent meaning, running away with the listener’s imagination as well as with the concept of poetry itself. 

The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing and design. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016, nominated for the 2017 European Film Awards), Hometown (2018) and Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018). Recent publications include PSYOP: An Anthology (Koenig Books, London, 2018), and Digital Tarkovsky (Strelka Press, Moscow, 2018). In the long essay ‘Digital Tarkovsky’, Metahaven identify online experience as a slow, cinematic proceeding, projecting the textures and motifs of Andrei Tarkovsky as a deeper artifice of digital aesthetics and filmmaking. Metahaven teach at Strelka Institute, Moscow, and are advisors at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.

Video room “Videograms”

How do moving images work, create and participate in history? One of the main films shown in the exhibition, which also inspired the title of the entire Kaunas International Film Festival – Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution – indicates that moving images not only represent or reflect reality, but also actively create it. It is impossible to think about the moving image and its power to act without considering the role of the mass media. This role is assessed with irony and staged both by the classic work of media art – the documentation of the US media art collective Ant Farm performance Media Burn, and by Dovilė Aleksaitė’s Hypnosis Session, which reminds of a widespread cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union – broadcasted hypnosis sessions. 

How we consume images affects not only history-in-the-making, but also the vision of the past and its reproducible worlds. Max Grau analyzes his own narratives, evoked by the scenes of the popular Hollywood film Grease. His work Craving for Narrative is about the “second-order nostalgia”, the nostalgia for nostalgia of certain images. Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács deconstruct the image of an idyllic landscape occurring throughout the history of cinema. The work by Allison Henriquez poetically conveys a nightly vision in nature. Meanwhile, the work of Forensic Architecture in Triple-Chaser presents its study and video as a tool for retrieving and tracing stories from a variety of perspectives.

 

Participating artitists and works:

Dovilė Aleksaitė, Hypnosis Session, 2015
Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975
Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Establishing
Eden, 2018
Harun Farocki, Videogramme einer Revolutionen, 1992
Forensic Architecture, Triple Chaser, 2018
Max Grau, Craving for Narrative, 2015
Allison Henriquez, Nocturnal Motion, 2019
Ulijona Odišarija, The Dying Swan, 2016

Architecture: Vladas Suncovas

 

Sponsored by Lietuvos kultūros taryba, Collection Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Nordic Culture Fund

Iris Smeds exhibition “The Average”

The Average explores how the increasing measurability in our society forms us. In a time when our own fire should be greatest –– where we constantly compare ourselves to each other –– are we all still part of the same mean value? The Average wants to use the mean value as a way of talking about human existence. What happens when everybody wants to stand out from the crowd? What is the total sum of our unique value? The viewer follows associative threads on the average in different chapters with visual nodes in the form of Dali’s melting clocks, a centipede that breaks in two and an Ikaros who no longer wants to burn. Smeds creates a new mythology and language of symbols to embody the tale of the average. 

Iris Smeds works with issues regarding identity as merchandise and art as entertainment. Her projects often are shaped as video pieces and public performances and deal with comparing the monetary and spiritual value of art and humankind which are all elaborated with surrealism and poetry as a method for the production of ideas. In addition to her visual practice, Iris Smeds also performs with her one-woman punk band Vaska Fimpen. Smeds was the 2019 recipient of the Maria Bonnier stipendium and has exhibited widely in Sweden and internationally.

 

Sponsored by Lietuvos kultūros taryba, Nordic Culture Fund.

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