2023 Archives - VIDEOGRAMS

Exhibition “Gestures of Longing”

The Videograms programme is complemented by the exhibition Gestures of Longing (Ilgesio gestai), presented at the “Meno avilys” cinematheque in the form of screening stations. These stations will showcase five films by contemporary artists Maryam Tafakary, Morgan Quaintance, Akram Zaatari, Jill Magid and Mohammad Shawky Hassan. Employing diverse archival material and an experimental approach, the films explore human relationships through the themes of longing, divorce, trust exercises and censorship. While each of these works is highly distinct, they are nevertheless linked not only through their themes but also by sensitive, curious approach to repurposing existing material: the exhibition explores human connections and relationships through the lens of censored Iranian films, police surveillance cameras, and intimate correspondence between lovers.

The exhibition is hosted at “Meno avilys” Cinematheque.

Visitors are welcome from 21 November to 2 December, on Tuesdays through Saturdays between 2:00 and 7:00 pm.

Curators: Karolis Žukas, Marija Nemčenko

Translator: Paulius Balčytis

Technical implementation: NOD47 electronics

Opening. Film programme “The Sun Has No Shadow”

7 pm DJ Ugnė Sync
8 pm Film programme “The Sun Has No Shadow” , dir. Rebecca Salvadori
9.40 pm DJ Mirror Slave

The Sun Has No Shadow is a program of films by video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori that includes an intimate visual journey through raves, audio performances, portraits and conversations of musicians and artists. Documenting the techno and experimental music scenes and her friends, Rebecca Salvadori amassed a huge video archive, some of which was used to create these films.

Bio

Rebecca Salvadori (1984) is a London based artist working at the intersection between video art and documentary. She has a long experience of filming environments with a focus on non-hierarchical / chronological layering and sequencing of audio to footage. Her film works act as constellations of highly personal and wilfully elusive heterogeneous elements: multifaceted portraits of moments, people and environments that can be approached from different angles as they move in between personal and transpersonal scales. Over the last 15 years she has consistently engaged with experimental music, with a great interest in finding ways to connect the moving image with sound practices, live performance and alternative forms of storytelling. Among many other works, she’s the author of “Rave Trilogy” (2017-2020), a series of film works dedicated to electronic music shot across Sheffield, London and Morocco’s Agafay desert; “The Sun Has No Shadow” (2022) an intimate visual journey centered on London’s FOLD club and UNFOLD day rave format; “Tresor Tapes” (2022) commissioned by TRESOR and reflecting on different ways of approaching personal & collective archives, memory and club documentation; “Messengers” (2023), creating a collective dimension through reflections on the nature of friendship and music. Salvadori is the co-founder of «Tutto Questo Sentire», an artist-run platform that brings together a group of international researchers to reflect and explore their own personal practices in relation to the experience of sound. Her audio/visual work has been exhibited at venues and festivals such as Atonal (DE), ICA (UK), South London Gallery (UK), Niimoscow Science & Art (RUS), Macro Museum of Contemporary Art (IT), Barbican Art Center (UK), Festival of Film and Animation Olomouc (CZ), Festival IMAGE S(CH), Crosstalk video art Festival (HU), David Lynch’s Silencio (FR), SCHNUCK Glaspalais (NL), Sophiensaele Theatre (DE), Future Everything Festival Manchester (UK), III Point Festival Miami (US), No Bounds Festival x Warp Records(UK), Camden Art Centre on Cork Street (UK), Cafe Oto (UK), Freud Museum (UK).

Work-in-progress “The Poor Cry Too” with Viktorija Mickutė and Ieva Balsiūnaitė

Lithuania, 1992. A dark winter morning. Crowds of people are squeezing into overcrowded trolleybuses; others are standing in long queues outside shops. Just a few hours later, the streets suddenly become empty, cashiers evaporate from the shops. What happened? The same sounds are coming from every corner, everyone is glued to their small TV screens, watching the hugely popular Mexican telenovela The Rich Also Cry.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mexican telenovelas began to appear on television and became an unexpected form of therapy for Lithuanian women, bringing hope and courage throughout the chaos of the early 1990s. The Poor Cry Too looks at the changes in the personal worlds of women of various generations at that time. The film crew, alongside the protagonists of the film, even reach Mexico, where they meet Veronica Castro who played Mariana, the lead character of the TV series The Rich Also Cry. Together, the women reflect on the impact of telenovelas, now a distant but still vivid memory, on their lives.

Production: Just a moment. Producer: Dagnė Vildžiūnaitė.

Bios

Viktorija Mickutė is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who has received three Emmy nominations. Viktorija’s project Still Here (Vis dar čia) on mass incarceration and gentrification in the USA was featured at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. Since 2017, Viktorija has been making immersive interactive documentaries for Al Jazeera news network’s media innovation studio AJ Contrast, where she holds the position of Senior Producer. Viktorija’s work has won 37 international awards, including Amnesty Media and numerous Drum Online Media awards. Her films and projects have been screened at numerous festivals, including the Sheffield Documentary and One World film festivals. Born and raised in Lithuania, Viktorija has been awarded a Fulbright scholarship and holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri, USA. In 2022, she was selected to participate in the Lithuanian Internet Media Association’s Women’s Leadership Programme. In the spring of 2023, Viktorija was selected to participate in the Mercury Store theatre directing programme in Brooklyn. In June, she directed a play at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage in Soho, NYC.

Ieva Balsiūnaitė is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Vilnius. Her previous projects include the documentary The Snowball Rolled South (Riedėjo gniūžtė į pietus), which explores the relationship that Litvaks in the South African Republic have with Lithuania. Other notable projects include a radio documentary on women in the Ukrainian army (2022) and a documentary about everyday life in the dark and cold as Russia was attacking the country’s energy infrastructure. In 2022, Ieva’s radio documentary on Belarusian activists living in Lithuania won 1st prize at the prestigious Czech radio festival Prix Bohemia Radio. Currently, Ieva works as a foreign news editor, journalist and presenter of special broadcasts at the Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT), where she continues her multi-format work focusing on international events, human rights and socio-political topics.

Discussion: “(Non)secret archives”

A discussion on the relevance of the archive in visual art and cinema. The participants will discuss why working with archival material is still a rare phenomenon in Lithuania, and how this relates to the situation of accessibility of archives. They will also touch upon our relationship with the grand historical narrative and the visual interpretations of the archive to create a new and distinctive narrative.

Hosted by Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė with panellists Lukas Mykolaitis and Margarita Žigutytė (Paveldo institutas), Karolis Kaupinis, Ieva Balsiūnaitė.

Presentation by Inesa Brašiškė: “Archive Work”

Using examples of the works of mainly contemporary Lithuanian artists, filmmakers, activists and curators, this presentation looks at the nature and various ways of working with archives, and strategies and forms of recycling, while also reflecting on the powers of such material as it is being actualised, i.e., asking the question of what sort of work such archives are performing in our times.

Bio:

Inesa Brašiškė is an art historian and curator who holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art from Columbia University in New York. Her research covers post-war European and American art, and avant-garde cinema. Brašiškė is one of the co-authors of the book Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running (Yale University Press, 2022) and curator of the exhibition Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde at the National Gallery of Art. She is currently working on several books, including the first-ever monograph on the Romanian artist André Cadere (1934–1978). Brašiškė has taught at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, organised a series of symposia titled The Post-Socialist Object: Contemporary Art in China and Eastern Europe (Columbia University, 2017) and Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Gard (National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, 2022). She is also the initiator of the lecture series Thinking Contemporary Art. Brašiškė publishes her writing in academic publications, catalogues and journals, and curates exhibitions and film programmes.

Film “Home Invasion” + Q&A

Graeme Arnfield
UK, 92’, 2023

A nightmarish essay film on the history of the doorbell, tracing its invention and constant reinventions through 19th-century labour struggles, the nascent years of narrative cinema, and contemporary surveillance cultures. Along the way producing a terrifying portrait of the technological ideologies that have shaped our present and the nightmares of the people they emerged from.
Made in bed with a mixture of found materials from archival patent illustrations, domestic security footage to suspenseful horror movie clips, soundtracked by historical prepared-piano pieces and manipulated field recordings – the film asks what is to be done with machines that don’t work for us? With systems that hinder radical futures, that profit off convenience and use our fears against us. What happens when our homes and our dreams have been invaded?

Bio:

Graeme Arnfield is an artist filmmaker and composer living in London, raised in Cheshire. Producing sensory essay films from networked imagery, he uses methods of investigative storytelling to explore issues of circulation, spectatorship, and history. His work has been presented worldwide, including Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Sonic Acts Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Transmediale, LUX, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Whitechapel Gallery, and on e-flux & Vdrome.

Film programme “The Many Faces of Resistance Propped by Our Screens”

A blurry phone recording, a snippet from the militant cinema, a reenactment, or a track – cut and twisted and rearranged altogether – doesn’t so much dictate under what conditions historical events came to be, but rather attempts to insert the I or the you into the picture. The program starts with the re-enactment of Jamila Bouhired, an Algerian revolutionary hero, or a terrorist, depending on whose records you read, in Marwa Arsanio’s “Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila” that shifts the roles of historical responsibility. Meanwhile, Alaa Mansour’s feature film “Ainata” records a relatable scene of an elderly couple bickering on the balcony in Ainata, Lebanon ,,, about the way to approach the memory of their martyred son, a scene embedded within archival imagery of the dream that was once the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) at the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war. Lastly, Oraib Toukan’s gentle images of the sea, the plants, a fun fair ,,, set alongside a breaking sound of an online call recalling the war on Gaza in 2021. What’s so startling about the montage of vision and sound in the “Offling” is not the atrocities under which Palestinian people lived, and continue to live, but rather, the transparency of the film to lend these images to our own being.

Film “Foragers”

Jumana Manna
Palestine, 64’, 2022

Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

Bio:

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

“New Pessimism” studio film programme

New Pessimism Studio is a production and publishing cooperative. Established in 2018 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, by Natasha Tontey and Riar Rizaldi, the studio aims to support their artistic production, in which often they label their work as a ‘new style of pessimism’—a term they used to describe their artistic practice and pessimism towards the social, political, technological and ecological situation in Indonesia and beyond. New Pessimism Studio has produced award-winning films, video installations, printed objects and audio pieces.

Bios:

Natasha Tontey is an artist based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings. Her recent exhibitions include solo show at Auto Italia, London (2022). And selected group shows at Singapore Biennale (2022); De Stroom Den Haag (2022); GHOST;2565, Bangkok, Thailand (2022); Protozone8 Queer Trust, Zurich, Switzerland (2022); Arko Art Council, Seoul, Korea (2022), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); transmediale, Berlin (2021); Performance Space 2021, Sydney; Other Futures, Amsterdam (2021); Singapore International Film Festival (2021), Kyoto Experiment 2021; Asian Film Archive, Singapore (2021). In 2020, she received the HASH Award from the ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Akademie Schloss-Solitude. She is a fellow for Human Machine of the Junge Akademie at Akademie der Künste Berlin 2021-2023.

Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between capital and technology, labour and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc) as well as NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, Centre Pompidou Paris, Times Museum Guangzhou, Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, Biennale Jogja, and National Gallery of Indonesia amongst others. His short film Tellurian Drama (2020) won Silver Screen Award for Best Southeast Asian Short Film at Singapore International Film Festival 2020 and awarded Honourable Mention at DOK Leipzig 2021.

Work-in-progress “Woman, girls and more. What’s next?” with Agnė Jokšė

The artist Agnė Jokšė will give an insight into her fragmented personal video archive, which she has been collecting for more than a decade, capturing moments of her own and the everyday life of queer women in her environment. At a stage in the creative process where she feels distanced from the material, Agnė intends to share her insights into working with personally sensitive private footage, discuss the resulting problematics, open up a space for conversation and reflection.

Bio

Agnė Jokšė (b. 1993) artist and writer, currently based in Vilnius. Using the tools characteristic to autoethnography, Jokšė tells stories in which personal experiences and past events related to contemplations of love, intimacy, relations and friendship intertwine with imaginative reflections. Often works in mediums like video, and performative text, investigates questions concerning parallel histories, compassion, entangled relations, queerness and language.

Film “Monisme”

Riar Rizaldi
Indonesia / Qatar, 115’, 2023

Repressed by the state-sponsored violence, a mystic is determined to stay in his land in the foothill of Mount Merapi. Nothing can change his determination to stay on his land and keep practicing his belief of being one with the mountain. On the other side of the mountain, a volcanologist keeps insisting that the end of the world is near. Although he is criticized heavily by his female assistant by questioning his worldview, this volcanologist insists that the only reality is a scientific one. Gaining knowledge from the earth-sensing technology, he declares that mitigation is the only way for humanity to survive from a colossal eruption of Merapi that he predicts. Not far from where volcanologists conducted their research in Merapi, the sand mining industry blooms. One miner, while documented by a filmmaker, contemplates the impact of sand mining and extraction economy for the community, the mountain, and his own psyche. In Merapi, everything is connected by the presence of paramilitaries. A form of state apparatus. Formed in a spirit of collective filmmaking and between factual and fictional, future and past, material and incorporeal, scientific and magic, Monisme reflects the intermingled relationships between people in Mount Merapi: from a mystic who believes that Merapi is a God who gives him life and death, a volcanologist who sees Merapi as a threat to human existence, to a sand miner who treats Merapi as a source of livelihood because it provides him with resources to extract. Monisme trips to the place where actuality is intertwined with myth and legend.

Bio:

VIDEOGRAMS’23: WAYS TO REMEMBER

An archive is not merely a repository of official records; it is an expansive realm of images, sounds, documents and other tangible remnants that shape the collective memory. By delving into its layers, the contemporary art scene has evolved into an active space of continuous ‘excavation’, adapting its form and searching for ways to redefine itself. Artists and curators who consider archival material as their primary source of creativity, are the architects of this space, aiming to expand the archive beyond the confines of document repositories, transforming it into a dynamic instrument that generates alternative knowledge and new ways of remembrance. This approach entails more than just the attempt to undertake archival work that serves the functions of a repository, searches for narratives and fills gaps. It also strives to challenge the illusion of completes in official archives, and question and destabilise their authority. By distancing the archive from the conventional perception of a document repository and incorporating various forms of cultural production, hundreds of artists and curators have endeavoured to create an alternative memory, using the archive as raw material, deconstructing, reworking and manipulating it to create something new and enable fresh perspectives. Ultimately, the artists are not only ‘unearthing’ material, but are themselves creating different ways of preserving memory, assembling personal archives that document the present, especially that which falls outside the purview of official institutions and the media.

This year, the artist film and moving image festival VIDEOGRAMS invites you to reflect on archival art practices in Lithuania and abroad. The festival’s curators propose that we direct our focus toward the phenomenon of the archive as something that operates in relation to contemporary realities, explore the dynamics of power and authority that are at work in archives, and take a closer look at how the archive is defined in contemporary art. VIDEOGRAMS will serve as a platform for a variety of formats, including lectures, talks, work-in-progress presentations, film screenings, and an exhibition. By bringing together seasoned curators, artists, and scholars, the event aspires to not only reflect on recent or emerging moving image projects, but also to foster the development of future artistic practices.