Metai: Archive

Opening film: ‘Sawt Syria’

19:00 Screening of ‘Sawt Syria’

20:00 Discussion with Co-Directors Juline Hadaya and Yamen Mekdad, moderated by journalist Karolis Vyšniauskas

21:00 Beirut Groove Collective DJ set

‘Sawt Syria’ (dir. Yamen Mekdad, Juline Hadaya, 2024, 58 min)

Sadaa Sound Syndicate presents ‘Sawt Syria’, a two-part essay film that delves into the inner worlds of the alternative music scene in Syria and its exilic diaspora in Europe. Through intimate conversational encounters with 14 artists and archival footage from underground raves to daily city life – this film explores electronic music-making and the dance floor as a connector and forger of a singular Syrian experience, as well as a marker for musicians and audiences to mount a politics of difference: from the Syrian state, from previous generations, and, increasingly, from fellow Syrians living markedly different lives in various regions of the Levant, in camps across the Middle East, and in exile across Europe.

Artist featured: Bu Kolthoum, Hello Psychaleppo, Noise Diva, LazerGazer, C1 Collective, Rizan Said, Tamman, Ebn Howari, Jundi Majhul, Abu Muhammed, Boshoco, Stash, Yara M, MH-D, Saadé and Walshi. 

 

Directors’ bios

Yamen Mekdad is a Syrian  artist, film maker and community organizer based in London. His practice is an experimentation in radical collaboration with a focus on the relationship between sound and geography as well as the political possibility of sound. His interests in field recording, archiving, radio and grassroots organizing led him to co-found the collectives: Sawt of the Earth, Makkam, and Sadaa Sound Syndicate. He is a frequent contributor to a number of radio stations, including Root, Balami, NTS and AlHara. Yamen is also curator and producer of Syrian Cassette Archives and the Syrian Arts and Culture Festival (SACF). 

Juline Hadaya is a London-based multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker. Using sound, moving-image, text and sculpture, her practice explores themes of representation, lineal memory, post-trauma psychology as well as psychosocial shifts within our internet age. Juline has also performed sonic works and dj sets at Cafe Oto and Ormside Projects in London. 

Sadaa Sound Syndicate is a cross-border group of self-organized Syrians who are attuned to the agential possibilities of sound. Founded in 2021, it groups together sound enthusiasts, researchers, DJs and producers. Manifesto.

Closing Film: ‘Human Surge 3’

‘Human Surge 3’ (dir. Eduardo Williams, 2023, 121 min)

Different groups of friends wander in a rainy, windy, dark world. They spend time together, trying to get away from their depressing jobs, meandering constantly towards the mystery of new possibilities. 

A spiral connection of countries and people we don’t usually see related. My ideas were transformed by each person who shared their own fantasies and reality. We follow them in a special way that might make us feel human, machines and aliens. The film proposes different questions and lots of doubts. And what can doubts be? Modest dynamite. (Eduardo Williams)

 

Director’s bio

Eduardo Williams (1987) is a filmmaker and artist whose works explore a fluid mode of observation, looking for shared relations and spontaneous adventures within physical and virtual networks. His first feature, El auge del humano (Human Surge), won the Pardo d’oro at Filmmakers of the Present at the 69th Locarno Film Festival.

Colectiva editorial Des-bordes: Ecologies of the Interstices

‘Ecologies of the Interstices’ brings together four South American filmmakers whose proposals are closely linked to forms of work and rest that are out of step with the current capitalist system without necessarily being outside of it. From documentary to fiction, the three proposals in this programme show economies and ecologies operating from the interstices in rupture with the hegemonic notion of work.

 

About the Curators

Colectiva editorial Des-bordes is constituted from the editorial practice concerning the digital publication of the same name, a reflective and transversal platform within the framework of the Network Red Conceptualismos del Sur and in conjunction with pasafronteras publishing house. Des-bordes proposes to generate intersections between critical analysis and committed research in the fields of politics, visual cultures and artistic practices. We are motivated by the intention to provoke more persistent traffic between thinking and doing, where disagreement and friction have as much place as the complicity of writing. In this sense, we base our work on research processes, collective readings, debates and discussions convening specific collaborations. Since 2023 the Collective is conformed by: Lucía Bianchi, Graciela Carnevale, Fernanda Carvajal, Angélica Muñoz, Cristina Ribas and Mabel Tapia.

 

‘Gambote’ (dir. Sofía Bensadon, 2021, 24 min)

Why are we used to looking at the sky so much? Irineo asks his wife Rosa. They look at it with concern as long as they can remember. When they lived on the countryside, they cared for the well-being of their fields and crops. Now, living on the outskirts of the city, they care for the bricks they produce. Neither rain, nor frost are wanted on the hills and valleys of the city of La Paz, Bolivia.

The clay mountains of Chuquiago Valley are transformed into brick every day. Grinding the clay, tampering, molding, drying, and burning of the bricks are some of the activities that Irineo and Rosa do once and again all year long., a never-ending cycle. While working they ponder about their lives and routines, seeking to meet the truth revealed in the practice of their trade.

Director’s bio

Sofia Bensadon is based in Argentina, where she got a degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology. Photographer and documentary filmmaker. She has been widely recognised in her field already, receiving an array of Awards and training scholarships. With an ecological approach, she investigates the gestures of work over time and the modes of the procurement of liveli-hood through craft and manual work, which is clearly evidenced in the story of Gambote. The film situates skilled practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the elements of their surroundings.

 

‘The Day of the Godmothers’ (dir. Wanda López Trelles, 2012-2013, 24 min)

A single day in the year, the Thursday prior to the start of the carnival, is the feast day dedicated to the women. They are brought together by a common purpose: release their desires, instincts, ideals, and let them flow to be comadres of a life cycle to regenerate, which all are part of.

Director’s bio

Wanda López Trelles is an Image and Sound Designer – Master in Multimedia Convergence (UBA). She carries out multidisciplinary artistic research and creation projects from a gender and human rights perspective: films, performance interventions, residencies. She directs and produces films of her own authorship and for social organizations. She is a member of the MUA (Audiovisual Women of Argentina) Deconstruir la Mirada research group. She is a 1st assistant director. Photographer. Professor. She co-directs Proyecto Corporalidad Expandida and the FICCE international corporeal-themed film festival.

 

The Hairdressers (dir. Maite Alberdi Soto, Israel Pimentel Bustamante, 2007, 25 min)

Ana Luisa has been getting up early for 60 years to open the hairdressing salon located in the living room of her house. Tato has been getting up even earlier for 40 years to go to the neighborhood Brasil and run Ana Luisa’s hairdressing salon. Hairstyles and haircuts, that’s all that’s left to offer. The hairdresser’s is their refuge in the middle of a neighborhood that has become too young for their eyes. Among those who visit them is Aurora, a niece, who offers Ana Luisa an opportunity to try to reactivate the business.

Directors’ bios

Maite Alberdi is a Chilean director and producer nominated for the Academy Awards® for her films “El Agente Topo” and “La Memoria Infinita.” She recently directed the Netflix feature film “El Lugar de la Otra,” her first fiction film. Her filmography also includes the documentaries “El Salvavidas,” “La Once,” and “Los Niños.” Maite has developed a particular style characterized by the intimate portrayal of small worlds, and her recognized seal has led her to become one of the most important voices in Latin American documentary. In 2023, she received the Visionaries Tribute Award at DOC NYC, the most important documentary festival in the North American industry, and in 2024 she received the Sundance Vanguard Nonfiction Award.

Israel Pimentel is film and television director, part of the collective MAFI – Mapa Fílmico de un País, with whom he has developed different collaborative documentary projects throughout Chile. As part of this organization, he participated as Content Director of the 2014 film “PROPAGANDA” (a follow-up to the backroom of the 2013 presidential campaigns in Chile) and was Co-Director of the 2019 collective documentary film DIOS together with Josefina Buschman and Christopher Murray (The chronicle of Pope Francis’ visit to Chile). Both films premiered and were awarded at Visións du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland. “Las Peluqueras” was his title project with Maite Alberdi, with whom he also collaborated as Assistant Director for her film ‘El Salvavidas’.

Work in progress: ‘Baltic UXO’

‘Baltic UXO’ (dir. Alexander Belinski, Agnė Dovydaitytė)

1,6 million tons of unexploded military munition (UXO) were dumped into the Baltic and Northern Seas after the Second World War. A brooding and meditative cinematic journey observes the effects this has on nature and people around the Baltic. Work in progress presentation will be held in English.

 

Directors’ bios: 

Cinematographer and director Alexander Belinski is a Ukrainian-born British citizen currently living and working in Lithuania. Together with the co-director Agne Dovydaityte (Lithuania) they have graduated from the BA Journalism course in London and moved to Lithuania in 2018 to finish their debut documentary The Sun Sets in the East, which premiered in Ji.Hlava. 

Baltic UXO is their second film. It was presented in a number of workshops and pitches, including Ex. Oriente, Karlovy Vary Works in Progress, Berlinale Talents Doc Station, won the main prize in Docu Talents from the East, and more.

VIDEOGRAMS’24

The 5th edition of Videograms—a video art, artists’ films, and moving image festival in Vilnius—is focused on reawakening the traditions of international solidarity that were once alive in our elusive “Eastern Europe” region. With independence seen, smelled, and tasted, we approach it out of free will, need, and desire, not through state-imposed geopolitical internationalisms. We see hope in horizontal, bottom-up initiatives that thread through the world freely and away from diplomatic spectacles of care. With this in mind, we open a new chapter in the Videograms festival, where we aim to present video art from the global peripheries and position ourselves in relation to it.

Videograms ’24 will open with a focus on music and its ever-present power during “the time of the monsters”*: the film Sawt Syria by Yamen Makdad and Juline Hadaya, about the vibrant underground music scenes within Syria and its widespread diaspora, will be followed by a live, vinyl-only DJ session by Beirut Groove Collective. Further, the program will explore solidarity through distinct thematic lines of land and labor, with a multitude of interpretations orbiting them. From the Baltic Sea in Baltic UXO to the Levant’s soil in the short film program by our guest curator, Beirut Cinematheque, via the rebellious mountains of Rojava in Marwa Arsanios’ films—there lies the land that people fought for, loved, left, came back to, and continue to do so. The land leads us to labor, where we learn from Latin American perspectives on work, leisure, and rights in the short film selection by another guest curator, Colectiva editorial Des-bordes. We go on to speculate what to do in a world where the neoliberal system saps our meaningful time through boring jobs, addiction to screens, and consumerism, in Human Surge 3—a genre-, border-, and reality-bending closing film by Eduardo Williams.

* Antonio Francesco Gramsci: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’

Discussion: ‘Poppies and Daffodils. Antizionist Jewish Solidarity and its Absence’

The ongoing war waged against the Palestinian people has ignited solidarity movements worldwide, including in Lithuania. Placing the poppy—a symbol of Palestinian resistance and indignity—side by side the daffodil—a symbol of Jewish rebellion and resilience—the discussion will focus on Jewish practices of solidarity with Palestinians, while also opening reflection on their absence, erasure, and repression.

Noah Brehmer, a theorist and organizer living in Vilnius and Mila Burchart, a curator and translator of Baltic, Slavic and Jewish languages, will discuss these issues from a Jewish antizionist perspective. The discussion will be facilitated by Kamal Ahamada, an educator and independent lecturer, whose research focuses on decolonial and critical race theories. Discussion will be held in English.

Photo: Vilna Bundists marching in Szczecin on May 1st, 1947

Film: ‘Who is Afraid of Ideology?’

‘Who is Afraid of Ideology?’ (part 1-4, dir. Marwa Arsanios, 2017-2022, 122 min)

Each part in the Who Is Afraid of Ideology? focuses on alternative social formations and histories of popular resistance in different places. Part I (2017) and Part 2 (2019) emerged from the artist’s research into the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement and Jinwar, a women-only village in the north of Syria. Part 3: Micro Resistencias (2020) centers on Indigenous farmers in Colombia who preserve native seeds from extinction. With Part 4: Reverse Shot (2022) – the video on view in the Art Institute galleries – the artist took a new and speculative direction. Set in a quarry in the mountains of northern Lebanon, Reverse Shot follows Arsanios and several collaborators as they attempt to extricate a parcel of land from the construct of ownership. The video documents the group’s efforts to change the legal status of the quarry into a common land belonging to the community. Arsanios used a range of visual techniques – from fantastical animation to worm’s-eye-view camera work – to explore the history and future of the land.

 

Director’s bio

Artist, researcher, and filmmaker Marwa Arsanios was born in 1978 in Washington, D.C. She has been the subject of multiple solo exhibitions, including Notes for a Choreography, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2015); Hammer Projects: Marwa Arsanios, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Marwa Arsanios: A Letter Inside a Letter, Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati, OH (2021); and Marwa Arsanios: Matter of Alliances, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023). She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern, London, UK (2010); Here and Elsewhere, The New Museum, New York, NY (2014); Temporal, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2019); and All That We Have in Common, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, Macedonia (2021). Arsanios currently lives and works between Berlin and Beirut.

Film programme curated by Cinematheque Beirut

In a conversation with the Egyptian journal Mada Masr, the author of How to Love a Homeland, Oxana Timofeeva, was asked: “How does one love a homeland without being a fascist and without being a nationalist?” Timofeeva replied: “There is no universal answer to this question. For the given moment, I would say that to love a homeland means to take the risk of telling the truth.”

Composed of four films, this program explores the following themes suggested by Videograms: land, communities, and ecology. When the Cinematheque Beirut team began discussing the program, it felt impossible to talk about land here without thinking about Palestine—its soil and its histories. In the films surrounding us, some recent and others not so recent, we find Palestine invoked repeatedly in various discourses on land. Today, the Palestinian flag has once again become a banner of internationalism, a symbol of the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. The selection of films presented invites us not to view land within delimitations. Land, in these films, is also a landscape which, in its materiality, visuality, and mythology, is vaster than all of us. (Cinematheque Beirut)

 

About Cinematheque Beirut

Cinematheque Beirut is an ambitious project launched in 2018 by the Metropolis Cinema Association dedicated to researching, conserving, and disseminating heritage and contemporary Lebanese film. Through the creation of tools, content and platforms that are accessible to as many people as possible, the project objective is to highlight the rich diversity of this heritage. By focusing on research and documentation, Cinematheque Beirut is destined to bring together professionals, students, local and international journalists,  researchers as well as film enthusiasts from different horizons in an environment conducive to the creation and study of cinema.

Mahdi Awada is a preservation and archive coordinator at the Cinematheque Beirut. He is a Beirut based artist holding a BA in studio arts from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and is currently pursuing his masters studies in their Art History and Curating Program. His research and artistic practice has revolved around the intersections of communication, language, and spatiality, exploring how these elements contribute to a sense of intimate belonging. His current artistic endeavors encompass painting, photography, and video, with a focus on expanding these fields through deeper examinations of their ontology. Awada incorporates the digital and virtual realms into his work, uncovering how language is encoded into the very fabric of spaces. 

Anaïs Farine is a research consultant at the Cinematheque Beirut. She holds a Ph.D from the University of La Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. Her Ph.D thesis focused on the so-called “Euro- Mediterranean dialogue” and its Filmic Imaginary (1995 – 2017). Since 2016, Anaïs Farine has been investigating the collective practices in the making and discussion of films of the Arab Alternative Movement with a focus on the history of the Arab Ciné Club in Beirut. Her writings have been published in Cinematheque Beirut, Troubles dans les collections, Ettijahat, Débordements, Africultures, and The Funambulist Magazine, among others. She is a member of the organizing committee of the Festival Ciné-Palestine (Paris-Marseille).

 

‘Those Who Watch’ (dir. Hassan el Chami, 4 min)

‘Those Who Watch’ borrows the eyes, faces and gazes of secondary characters in commercial films, watching hangings and executions of victims and martyrs, and treats them in a way that reveals their perversion and lust.

 

Director’s bio:

Born in Lebanon, Hassane Chami is a French-based film essayist and writer.
 After working as a documentary film producer for multiple years, he decided to dedicate himself to making film essays and experimental videos.
His work uses found footage, sounds, data and archives. He uses images to critique image-as-ideology and deconstruct it; and to present utopian poetic imagery that can dream of different futures. Hassane has been a contributing writer in the Lebanese-based Rehla Magazine since 2020. His writings deal with film and image analysis in relation to ideological, social and cultural phenomena. His visual work participates in several experimental festivals and is programmed in art magazines.

 

‘We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction’ (dir. Inas Halabi, 2019, 12 min)

‘We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction’ (2019-2020) grapples with invisible subterranean violence, exploring the material effects of radiation, both physically and metaphorically, and the potential burial of nuclear waste in the south of the West Bank. Radioactivity, invisible but deadly, serves as a synecdoche for a more ungraspable invisibility—the systemic networks of power and control in the region—and becomes a meditation on how to account for the ungraspable.

 

Director’s bio:

Inas Halabi (b.1988, Palestine) is an artist/filmmaker whose practice examines how social and political forms of power are manifested and the impact of overlooked or suppressed histories on contemporary life. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Galway Film Fleadh (2024), Reel Palestine Film Festival (2024), Luleå Biennial (2024), Toronto Palestine Film Festival (2023), Sharjah Film Platform (2023), Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (2023), de Appel Amsterdam (2023). She lives and works between Palestine and the Netherlands.

 

‘South Lebanon: Story of a Village Under Siege’ (dir. Jocelyne Saab, 1976, 13 min)

In 1976, Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab traveled to the south of Lebanon to document the Israeli attacks on the Lebanese villages of Kufr Shuba and Hanine for French TV. She avoids filming the Palestinian resistance, focusing instead on the military dynamics at work in the context of the Lebanese civil war. By exposing the complicity of the Phalangists and the Israeli army, she denounces the lies of the Lebanese parties and the injustice of the violence perpetrated against Lebanese civilians in the south of the country. Though one of her earliest films, South Lebanon is reflective of Saab’s distinct filmmaking style – inquisitive, personal, unafraid of asking probing questions and taking bold positions. Her report served to shift the narrative by underlining to a European audience that the Israeli army was not only targeting Palestinians but also knowingly destroying Lebanese villages.

 

Director’s bio:

Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was a pioneering Lebanese journalist and filmmaker who fearlessly documented the realities of war and conflict in the Middle East. She began her career as a war correspondent, covering conflicts in Lebanon, Egypt, and Libya. In 1975, she turned to filmmaking, directing documentaries and fictional films that explored the human cost of war and displacement. Her work often focused on marginalized voices and challenged conventional narratives, earning her international recognition and awards. Saab’s films are a powerful testament to her courage, compassion, and commitment to social justice.

 

‘A Night We Held Between’ (dir. Noor Abed, 2024, 30 min)

The film centers around “Song for The Fighters,” which was found at the sonic archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a labyrinth of sounds and sites, the film conjures history as a permanent present tense, a collective and imaginative act.

The film was shot in ancient sites in Palestine – caves, carved holes, underground passages, and wild valleys – the land becomes our main character. It traverses beyond the first layer of visibility to reveal a vast, hidden world similar to the one we know. Throughout the film, scenes intertwine rituals and narratives of community and resistance into everyday representations of social life in Palestine, thus emphasizing the role of collective rhythmic movement and the potential impact that shared feelings can evoke in creating and sustaining a community.

 

Director’s bio:

Noor Abed (1988, Palestine) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She works at the intersection of performance, media and film. Through a process of image making, her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, IDFA Pavilion Shorts, Amsterdam, Alchemy film & Arts Festival, UK, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Lagos Biennale, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, and Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam, among others. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational collective in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed was a curatorial assistant in documenta fifteen, kassel 2021-22, and an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24. She was awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.

Opening party: Beirut Groove Collective DJ set

London-based collective of vinyl DJs, crate diggers, music obsessives and artists started in 2009, as an underground funk and soul party in the living room of community space Zico House in West Beirut. The party soon evolved into its present day strictly-vinyl format, expanding musically to showcase some of the pioneering records and diverse music scenes that came out of Beirut – a cosmopolitan hub for music – and the wider region in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

For over a decade, the BGC has thrown one of the SWANA region’s most popular underground clubnights in Beirut. The collective has helped shape Lebanon’s alternative clubbing culture, throwing regular parties in basement clubs, abandoned beachside villas and warehouse spaces in the forgotten fringes of Beirut. Six years ago, the BGC evolved into a weekly clubnight in Beirut and in 2021, the collective brought their clubnights to London with monthly residencies in grassroots venues across the city, as well as guest appearances at festivals, clubs and community spaces around the world.

The BGC combines the DJ efforts of its co-founder Ernesto Chahoud, DJ, compiler, record collector and radio host (NTS, We Want Sounds, BBE); music researcher, writer, DJ and radio host Natalie Shooter, (Radio Alhara). The BGC was named in New York Magazine, as one of the ‘Top 15’ parties around the world and has been featured everywhere from The Guardian, Time Out London and Monocle Magazine to ARTE, the BBC and Vice Magazine.

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:

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.

Videograms’22: Looking at the Eastern Europe Through the Eyes of Others

In 2022, VIDEOGRAMS, a festival of artists’ films and moving images, travels back and forth across the heterogeneous, controversial, and highly diverse region of Eastern Europe and its definitions of identity. As Russia launched an open and brutal military invasion of Ukraine on 24th February, ideas about the sovereignty of our region and its authenticity that stress the need to evaluate, analyze and delve into the historical past and develop critical thinking have complemented to the original anxiety and concern. As it turns out, the nuanced reality of the region remains unknown not only to people who do not live here but also to ourselves. Freedom of thought becomes inconceivable without access to various historical sources and uninhibited documentation of the present, the ability to gather in groups, enjoy and share not only high culture but also the very streets that act as a medium for self-expression and non-conformism.

VIDEOGRAMS offers a poetic and critical look focusing on the cracks and amnesias of collective memory. It raises issues related to becoming a part of collective memory, the individual’s participation, their significance in these processes, and the resulting potential for creativity. This year’s festival program invites a critical discussion about the region’s socialist past and its many-sided heritage. It also looks for ways to advocate for the complexity of phenomena in these antagonistic times and seeks mutual understanding with the help of moving images. Most of the films in this year’s festival examine the Eastern European region as seen from its borderlands, fringes, by its close and far neighbours, or through  the cultural influences of the so-called former West.. At the same time, we invite the audience to perceive Eastern Europe as an integral part of global, all-encompassing economic and sociopolitical systems.

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.

Group exhibition “Sleeplessness”

On 24 November at 7 pm the group exhibition “Sleeplessness” will open artists’ films and moving images festival VIDEOGRAMS’22. The exhibition is displayed in viewing rooms, curated by Meno avilys Cinematheque (corner of A. Goštauto and A. Vienuolio streets, Vilnius). The exhibition “Sleeplessness” is the first part of this year’s VIDEOGRAMS’ edition and will last for all festival dates – until December 11th.

In the exhibition, visitors will see works by artists Tom Kobialka, Peter Wächtler, and Sallamari Rantala, which focus on archaic consumerism and the visual expression of economic systems and how it becomes part of a personal archive. This nighttime story brings together a vampire who spends his days in a castle tower and dreams about a warm blanket, heroes created by the largest Australian bank, which taught children about entrepreneurship, reliefs made of sand, and American marshmallows roasted over a fire.

The curator Gerda Paliušytė crafted the mood of the “Sleeplessness” together with the artist Gediminas G. Akstinas while thinking about an evening at the camping site when the night shadows and the fear they cause become oddly charming and even cozy in a familiar and safe environment.

In 2022, VIDEOGRAMS, a festival of artists’ films and moving images, travels back and forth across the heterogeneous, controversial, and highly diverse region of Eastern Europe and its definitions of identity. In the festival’s program, the Eastern European region is perceived not only as a local narrative or something that thrives in the socialist past but also as a participant in financial capitalism and patriarchy—abstract and surreal economic and social systems that enable each other. This theme is further developed in the exhibition “Sleeplessness”.

The viewing rooms, curated by the Meno Avilys, are located at the uninhabited apartment at A. Goštauto st. 2, the same building as Meno Avilys, its Cinematheque and the Skalvija Cinema Centre.

INFORMATION FOR VISITORS | The exhibition is on display until December 11th, Thursday–Sunday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Before visiting, please call +370 604 76 298 or write gerda.paliusyte@menoavilys.lt.

 

Organized by Videograms and Meno Avilys
Artists: Tom Kobialka, Sallamari Rantala, Peter Wächtler
Curator: Gerda Paliušytė
Architect: Gediminas G. Akstinas
Graphic designer: Marke Voida
Editor and translator: Aistis Žekevičius
Supported by: Vilnius Municipality, The Lithuanian Film Centre
The activities of Meno Avilys are funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Film “Budinok / Das Haus”

Tatjana Kononenko, Matilda Mester
Germany, 93′, 2019

Presented by Tatjana Kononenko and Monika Lipšic

In Kharkiv in 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 biggest realized constructivist buildings and a poster child for the 1920s avant-garde movement, the film, created in 2019, depicts Derzhprom as a time machine, an immovable object with its set system in an otherwise dynamic geopolitical situation. In the context of today’s war, when Kharkiv is one of the most devastated cities in Ukraine, the film speaks yet another language, thus becoming the document of a time of peace in people’s lives in Eastern Europe, a palimpsest in many ways the reading of which will be accompanied by one of the film directors, Tatjana Kononenko. The film premiere took place during the pandemic, so this will be the first and special screening of the director together with the audience.

Tatjana Kononenko was born in Kirovograd, Ukraine, in 1980. She currently lives and works between Berlin and Nicosia. Until 2019 she was enrolled in the film directing program at the German National Film Academy (DFFB) and a fellow of the Elsa Neumann Program of the Berlin Senate for especially promising artists. Tatjana Kononenko has been working with video and photography in projects often dealing with issues of memory and history. Budinok is her first full-length film. Currently, Kononenko is preparing her first feature film, Tales in the Darkness. It is a personal portrait of four generations of women dealing with traces of the traumatic events of 1933 in the present. Tales in the Darkness just received the Wim Wenders Development Prize. 

Matilda Mester was 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 (directed by Anna Sofie Hartmann) which premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and 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. She just had a premiere at CPH:DOX with her first full-length film, Nakskov 1:50.

Film “On A Clear Day You Can See the Revolution From Here”

Emma Charles, Ben Evans James
UK / Kazakhstan, 65′ 2020

The film brings into focus contemporary processes of nation building and myth-making in Kazakhstan through the remnants of Soviet technological infrastructures that haunt the country’s landscape. Shot on 16mm, the camera is drawn across the landscape taking in locations that include mineral mines, the Eurasian Steppe, the STS decommissioned nuclear site and the newly constructed city of Nur-Sultan. “On A Clear Day…” provides a meditative faux observational film about the continual process of construction involved in nationhood and national identity.

Emma Charles is a London-based artist and filmmaker. Working with experimental approaches to moving image and sound, her research based practice navigates the field of non-fiction while engaging with recurring themes of technology, capitalism and landscape. Playing with the blurred lines between documentary and fiction, her work often reveals the artificiality of both the filmic environment and our lived experience.

Ben Evans James is a curator at transmediale festival, Berlin. Co-founder and curator at the artist run centre South Kiosk, London. Researcher and filmmaker at Film is an Architecture. PhD candidate in film curation and exhibition design funded by AHRC. Senior Lecturer at The Bartlett, UCL and Falmouth University. He is based between Europe and Canada.




Work-in-progress presentation with Simona Žemaitytė

This year, at VIDEOGRAMS, we also invite you to meet director Simona Žemaitytė at a very special work-in-progress presentation of her new film. In May 2022, Žemaitytė started filming a many-time national weightlifting champion from Ukraine, who temporarily left his country with his family for Lithuania when the bombing of the Irpin city began. Simona Žemaitytė raises questions about alternative forms of resistance, internal and external struggles, discipline, and masculinity. Today, the hero of the upcoming film has returned to Ukraine, where he continues to train Ukrainian children in a city badly affected by the war and prepares himself for future sports events.

Simona Žemaitytė’s works won awards at the 15th Tallinn Triennal and the Sheffield DocFest. Her films were displayed at the Kaunas Biennal, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the Cinémathèque Française, Kasa Gallery and Galata Perform (Istanbul), BAFTA and RichMix (London), CAC, Vartai, Titanikas and Kairė-Dešinė galleries (Vilnius), the “CreArte” exhibition (Pardubice, Linz, and Genoa), Centrala Space (Birmingham). She taught at the Royal Holloway College and the UCL in London. She is currently studying for a Ph.D. in Fine Arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA) and teaches at the Department of Sculpture at VAA

Film “Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body”

Marta Popivoda
Serbia / France / Germany, 62′ 2013

According to the director of the film, Marta Popivoda, her essay film is a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation-states. “Experience of the dissolution of the state, and today’s “wild” capitalist reestablishment of the class system in Serbia are my reasons for going back through the media images and tracing the way one social system changed by performing itself in public space.” Assembling and exploring a vast and rich archive of mediated images of a variety of collective formations in public space in former Yugoslavia, the film deals with the question of how ideology performs itself in public space through mass performances. Marta Popivoda collected and analyzed film and video footage from the period of Yugoslavia (1945 – 2000), focusing on state performances (youth work actions, May Day parades, celebrations of the Youth Day among others) as well as counter-demonstrations (’68, student and civic demonstrations in the ‘90s, 5th October revolution among others). Going back through the images, the film traces how communist ideology was gradually exhausted through the changing relations between the people, ideology, and the state.



Film “5 Dreamers and a Horse”

Vahagn Khachatryan, Aren Malakyan
Armenia / Germany, 82′ 2022

Melania, in her mid-sixties, works as a lift operator in a Yerevan hospital and longs for a late career as a cosmonaut. In a way, she seems to be an anachronistic remnant of the Soviet age. The deep country, still ruled by ancient traditions and ideas of happiness, is represented by the farmer Karen, who is looking for the best of all possible wives. And Amasia and Sona are part of a new generation awaiting the demonstrations and hopes of the revolution. What unites these characters is the dream of a self-determined life – a near-impossibility in a country where the government tries to control everything and everyone.

Vahagn Khachatryan was born in Yerevan, in 1991. He moved to China at the age of 17, and from 2008-2014 studied Filmmaking at the Beijing Film Academy, and started shooting documentaries. From 2014 to 2016 he was part of the DOC Nomads Program, and studied at the ULHT Lusófona University in Portugal, the SZFE University of Theatre and Film Arts in Hungary and the LUCA School of Arts / College Sint Lucas in Belgium.

Aren Malakyan was admitted to the Department of Film Art of Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinema. In 2013, he presented his film “Love Confession in Japanese Style” in Sofia Student Films Festival, Bulgaria, and won in the nomination of Best Film Editing. In 2013, Aren participated in the Polish documentary project “From Sunrise to Sunset” and within the scope of that project he directed the film “Grandpa and Grandma”.



Riedlenčių filmų programa

Peržiūra sudaryta iš pačių riedlentininkų kurtų „skeitų video“, kurie veikia kaip mokymo priemonės ir įkvėpimo šaltiniai bei nuo pat „skeitinimo“ atsiradimo padeda plisti šiai kultūrai visame pasaulyje, įskaitant ir Rytų Europą. Šie video atskleidžia ne tik gyvą ir nuolat kuriamą riedlentininkų santykį su miestų erdvėmis bei taip atveriamas naujas riedlenčių sporto ir pačių erdvių galimybes, bet ir kintančias mados, muzikos bei kinematografijos tendencijas – visa tai, kas yra neatsiejama nuo riedlenčių kultūros.

Visuose peržiūrai atrinktuose video nuotaika kuriama kūrybiškai naudojant įvairias judančių vaizdų kūrimo priemones – efektus, montažą, garso takelį ar siužetą. Keli iš šių kūrinių jau yra tapę pasauline ar vietine žanro klasika: amerikiečio Spike’o Jonze „Video Dienos“ (1991) ar estų Ats Luik ir kt. „Lõuend” (2003). „Lõuend” skamba populiari devinto ir dešimto dešimtmečio estų muzika, o vizualiniai intarpai primena eksperimentinius lo-fi kokybės JAV skeiterių video, kurtus 10 dešimtmečio pradžioje, pavyzdžiui, legendinį riedlenčių kompanijos Alien Workshop video „Memory Screen“ (1991). „Memory Screen“, kuris šiuo metu yra viešai pasiekiamas YouTube paskyroje, yra vienas iš  tų „skeitų video“, kurie dėl savo meninės formos, ilgų su „skeitinimu“ tiesiogiai nesusijusių elementų (situacijų, vaizdo efektų) peržiūrų metu glumino ir kai kuriuos riedlentininkus – tą auditoriją, kuriai šie filmai ir buvo skirti. Estetikos santykis su funkcija, jų tarpusavio ribos ir klausimas, kiek jos sąlygoja „skeitų video“ cirkuliavimą skirtingose industrijų ir kultūros srityse (riedlenčių sporto ir subkultūros, meno pasaulio, kino), buvo pagrindiniai atspirties taškai kuriant ir šią peržiūrą.

Naujesnis estų kūrėjo Antti Sinitsyn video „SPB“ (2018) buvo atrinktas peržiūrai ir dėl savo kinematografijos, ir dėl Vakarų bei sovietinės kultūros ženklų persimaišymo, ir kaip „Lõuend” tąsa. Sauliaus Petrošiaus filmas „One Night” kiek „išmuša“ iš tradicinio „skeitų video“ žanro ir žiūrisi labiau kaip savarankiškas filmas. Taip atsitinka todėl, kad šiame filme už riedlenčių triukus svarbesnis pats pasakojimas ir vasariškos Vilniaus nakties atmosfera. Šią liniją pratęsia ir „Filmas apie Pablo“ (2021), kuriame pagrindinis dėmesys, skirtas įtakingam riedlentininkui Pablo Ramirezui (1993–2019), San Fransisko riedlentininkų bendruomenės nariui, prieš kelerius metus žuvusiam „skeitinimo“ metu. Jo draugo filmų kūrėjo Lucos Balserio sukurtas jautrus trumpanetražis filmas atskleidžia Pablo gyvenimo, kuriame betarpiškai dalyvavo ir „skeitinimas“, džiaugsmą. Pablo Ramirezo (skeiterių bendruomenėje dar žinomo kaip „P-Splifff“) istorija ir visa San Fransisko skeiterių scena garsėja savo beprotiškais triukais stačiomis ir važinėjimui riedlente absoliučiai netinkamomis San Fransisko kalvomis. Iki Pablo ir kitų šio miesto riedlentininkų toks „skeitinimas“ niekada nebuvo praktikuojamas. Pablo ir jo bendraminčių ideologija atskleidžia, kad riedlenčių kultūra ir šiandien gali būti performatyvi, rizikinga bei tampriai suaugusi su urbanistine aplinka.

Seansą pristatys architektė-riedlentininkė Karolina Galvydytė, šiuo metu Žirmūnuose projektuojamo skulptūrų ir riedlenčių parko vadovė.

Film “Holgut”

Liesbeth De Ceulaer
Belgium, 75 min’ 2021

The Siberian permafrost is melting. Ancient bones rise up from the ground and wild animals seem to have disappeared. Three Yakutians venture into the vast wilderness on different quests. Villager Roman and city boy Kyym hunt for a rare reindeer while not so far away, scientist Semyon scourges the permafrost for a viable cell of the mammoth, which he needs to clone the extinct animal. In the midst of an ongoing mass-extinction of fauna and flora, of a Siberian Ivory Rush, and at the dawn of de-extinction, a contemporary myth unfolds. While Roman, Kyym and Semyon close in on their goals, both the frozen earth that they walk on and reality itself melt into another state. Holgut boldly combines elements of fiction and documentary and manoeuvres effortlessly from captivating reality to visual poetry. Down the mammoth-hole, science fiction seems to become reality and reality seems to become myth.

Liesbeth De Ceulaer is a Belgian independent filmmaker based in Brussels, whose films explore the tense and complex relationship between man and his environment. These cinematic explorations lead to captivating worlds, in which documentary and fiction are in continuous exchange.

“Porosity”

This year’s festival theme Porosity and the film programmes invites us to explore how we define ourselves and the creation of inner and outer worlds, and discusses the boundaries between them. Videograms 2021 moves from Kaunas to Vilnius, with programming events scattered across November, December and January, different cities and virtual spaces. The first event is the exhibition “Porosity” (curated by Monika Lipšic and Viktorija Šiaulytė) at the cultural venue Sodas2123, open to the public from 18 November to 4 December. The exhibition focuses on the relationship between the living environment/architecture and the inner world of a human/inhabitant.

Later, during thematic screenings at the Skalvija Cinema Center on 8-12 December, the programme What We Left Unfinished (curated by Karolis Žukas) will present archival films by Courtney Stephens, Tomasz Wolski, Mariam Ghani and others, exploring private and public memories. On 15-19 December, a three-part video programme (curated by Gerda Paliušytė) presented in the same cinema space will commemorate the philosophy, work and trajectories of thought of Lauren Berlant (1957-2021). In this programme, the gaze turns to the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only limits or disappoints, but also empowers. The programme will showcase a wide range of work by artists and filmmakers representing various generations and a broad geographical spectrum. Featured artists include Myanmar artist Moe Satt, British artist Josiane M.H. Pozi, Indian documentary filmmaker Malati Rao and others. The viewers of the Coming of Age screening will also have the possibility to join the presentation of a new film by artist Daiva Tubutytė, with the participation of the artist herself.

 

Film programme “And Europe Will Be Stunned. Trilogy”

by Yael Bartana

And Europe Will Be Stunned is a trilogy by artist Yael Bartana, presented at the Polish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. The trilogy is an example of film practice that expands beyond and comes back to the screen, balancing fact, artistic intervention, and fiction, as the three films center around The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), initiated by the artist together with other colleagues, and calling for the 3,300,000 Jews to return to Poland. Today, Bartana’s trilogy seems prescient in the way it tackles the hauntedness of both history and the future.

According to Polish curator and art critic Joanna Mytkowska, “We do not really know whether the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland is a genuine party (…) or whether it is a political hallucination. It is in films, after all, that fiction constantly mixes with reality, the living with ghosts, and facts with fables. This is a process akin to the activity of the collective unconscious, where imaginings and fantasies can be forged into actions.” (The Return of the Stranger, 2012)

Yael Bartana (‬born in Israel in ‬1970) employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. ‬Over the past twenty years, she has dealt with some of the dark dreams of the collective unconscious and reactivated the collective imagination‭, ‬dissected group identities, and‭ (‬an‭-)‬aesthetic means of persuasion‭. ‬In her films‭, ‬installations‭, ‬photographs‭, ‬staged performances, and public monuments Yael Bartana investigates subjects such as national identity‭, ‬trauma‭, ‬and displacement‭, ‬often through ceremonies‭, ‬memorials‭, ‬public rituals, and collective gatherings‭.‬ Her work has been exhibited worldwide‭ ‬and is represented in the collections of many museums‭, ‬including the Museum of Modern Art‭, ‬New York‭; ‬the Tate Modern‭, ‬London‭; ‬and the Centre Pompidou‭, ‬Paris‭. ‬She currently lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam‭.

Programme of skaters’ videos

The screening consists of skate videos created by skateboarders themselves, which act as an educational tool and source of inspiration. Since the inception of skateboarding, such videos have helped spread the skateboarding culture throughout the world, including Eastern Europe. These videos reveal not only the lively, constantly developing relationship between skateboarders and urban spaces, which opens new opportunities for skateboarding and the cityscapes themselves, but also the changing trends of fashion, music, and cinematography – everything that is inseparable from this culture.

In all the videos selected for the screening, the mood is invoked by the creative use of various means of producing moving images – effects, montage, soundtrack, or plot. Several of these works have already become global or local classics of the genre: Video Days (1991) by the American director Spike Jonze or Lõuend (2003) by the Estonian director Ats Luik and other filmmakers. Lõuend features popular Estonian music from the 1980s and 1990s, and the visual cutaways remind the experimental, low-fi quality US skater videos of the early 1990s. For instance, the legendary Alien Workshop promotional video Memory Screen (1991). Memory Screen, which is currently available on YouTube, is one of those skate videos that, owing to its artistic form and long sequences of elements not directly related to skateboarding (situations, video effects), confused even some skateboarders during its initial release – the audience for which these films were intended. The relationship between aesthetics and function, the boundaries between them, and the question of how much they determine the circulation of skate videos in different industries and cultural areas (skate sports and skating subculture, the art world, cinema) were the main starting points for the putting together of this screening as well.

The more recent video SPB (2018) by the Estonian artist Antti Sinitsyn was selected for the screening for its cinematography and intermingling of Western and Soviet cultural symbols and as a follow-up to Löwend. Saulius Petrošius’ film One Night somewhat “breaks out” of the traditional “skate video” genre and looks more like a stand-alone film. It happens because, in this film, the story and the atmosphere of a summer night in Vilnius are more significant than skateboarding tricks. This line also is pursued by A Day in the Life of Pablo (2021), which focuses on the influential skateboarder Pablo Ramirez (1993–2019), a member of the San Francisco skateboarding community who died a few years ago while skating. This sensitive short film, created by his friend, filmmaker Luca Balser, reveals the joy of Pablo’s life, in which skating was also directly involved. Pablo Ramirez (aka “P-Splifff” in the skater community) and the entire San Francisco skate scene is famous for their breathtaking stunts on the steep hills of San Francisco, entirely unsuitable for skating. Before Pablo and other skateboarders in this city, this kind of approach was never practiced. The ideology of Pablo and his associates reveals that skateboarding culture today can still be performative, risky, and closely connected with the urban environment.

The screening is presented by the architect-skateboarder Karolina Galvydytė, the manager of a sculpture and skateboard park currently being designed in Žirmūnai.



Film programme “Coming of age”

The architecture of the inner world and its accompanying narratives unfold in the three-part programme (curator Gerda Paliušytė) inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (1957-2021) philosophy and trajectories of thought. Berlant paid particular attention to affect, the plane of intimacy and feelings and its relationship to power structures; to that which can smother, or on the contrary – to disrupt repetition and resist control. Berlant was also highly critical of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, repressive system, encouraging to search for a commonality that enables creativity and allows to reject normativity, preconceived “knowledge” and trivial system-imposed habits. The festival programme is divided into three interconnected parts and keywords: studying-relearning, desire-love and coming of age. The programme focuses on the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only empowers, but can also limit or disappoint.

 

 

Film programme “Studying-relearning”

The architecture of the inner world and its accompanying narratives unfold in the three-part programme (curator Gerda Paliušytė) inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (1957-2021) philosophy and trajectories of thought. Berlant paid particular attention to affect, the plane of intimacy and feelings and its relationship to power structures; to that which can smother, or on the contrary – to disrupt repetition and resist control. Berlant was also highly critical of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, repressive system, encouraging to search for a commonality that enables creativity and allows to reject normativity, preconceived “knowledge” and trivial system-imposed habits. The festival programme is divided into three interconnected parts and keywords: studying-relearning, desire-love and coming of age. The programme focuses on the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only empowers, but can also limit or disappoint.

Film programme “Desire-Love”

The architecture of the inner world and its accompanying narratives unfold in the three-part programme (curator Gerda Paliušytė) inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (1957-2021) philosophy and trajectories of thought. Berlant paid particular attention to affect, the plane of intimacy and feelings and its relationship to power structures; to that which can smother, or on the contrary – to disrupt repetition and resist control. Berlant was also highly critical of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, repressive system, encouraging to search for a commonality that enables creativity and allows to reject normativity, preconceived “knowledge” and trivial system-imposed habits. The festival programme is divided into three interconnected parts and keywords: studying-relearning, desire-love and coming of age. The programme focuses on the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only empowers, but can also limit or disappoint.

Film programme “Coming of age”

The architecture of the inner world and its accompanying narratives unfold in the three-part programme (curator Gerda Paliušytė) inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (1957-2021) philosophy and trajectories of thought. Berlant paid particular attention to affect, the plane of intimacy and feelings and its relationship to power structures; to that which can smother, or on the contrary – to disrupt repetition and resist control. Berlant was also highly critical of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, repressive system, encouraging to search for a commonality that enables creativity and allows to reject normativity, preconceived “knowledge” and trivial system-imposed habits. The festival programme is divided into three interconnected parts and keywords: studying-relearning, desire-love and coming of age. The programme focuses on the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only empowers, but can also limit or disappoint.

Exhibition “Porosity“

Videograms. Porosity is a video space that reflects on the relationship between architectural forms and inner (human) worlds. Porosity here is a way of measuring the void, the emptiness, both physical and personal; yet it also may denote the permeability of both architectural partitions and social boundaries.

The distinction between public and private worlds is an invention of modernity, when architecture takes on the task of creating the inner world of an individual, which results not only in different typologies of interior spaces, but also in the emergence of a particular “topography” of the inner world. The book Interiors and Interiority (ed. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen; De Gruyter, 2016) draws attention to Walter Benjamin’s take on the subject of the bourgeois class that was emerging at the time and who was the inhabitant of modern architectures: these interior spaces were instrumental in establishing the subject’s relationship with the outside world, withdrawing from it, or gaining control over it. Almost half a century later, the second-wave feminism questioned the naturalised demarcation of the private and the political and claimed that personal is political.

Porosity started by thinking about artistic engagement with the instability of the distinction between inner and outer worlds, seeking to register imprints of the personal on different architectural surfaces. In the exhibition, the works by Sam Williams, Laura Grace Ford, Robin Vanbesien, Shirin Sabahi and Daniel Schwarz open up different perspectives on the subject of porosity in relation to architecture, urban and social structures.

Interior spaces also become the environment for a special relationship between moving images and the viewer which keeps unfolding throughout the pandemic. Without the collectivity of cinema, the consumption of moving images became a very individualised, intimate practice. The “Videograms” duvet cover set displayed in the video room space was developed both as an artist edition and a functional design object as a collaboration by artist Vladas Suncovas, graphic designer Marek Voida and curators Monika Lipšic and Viktorija Šiaulytė. It was conceived precisely as a cover for an individualised consumption of films. At the same time, the print of diagrams on its surface may work like a map of the genealogy of ideas and innovations that represent the desire to be teleported to cinematic, virtual or imaginary worlds.

The pandemic period has also motivated the creation of the website www.videograms.lt together with graphic designer Marek Voida, featuring an Online Room – a space to present artworks in an expanded and discursive format. Anastasia Sosunova’s When all this is over, let’s meet up! (2021, co-produced by Swallow and Videograms) is available on https://videograms.lt as an extension of Porosity.

Film programme “What We Left Unfinished”

In the What We Left Unfinished programme (curator Karolis Žukas), we will move from private and public spaces to private and public memories. Since the invention of the camera, a vast treasure trove of images has been created in an attempt to represent reality, to narrate our emotions and to create evidence and legacy of public and private history.

By observing archival material, we can grasp how images of the past define our personal and collective memory and how emotional reactions or cultural/gender identities shape our perception of memories. As we are not sure whether what we see in these images is always “reality”, archival filmmaking becomes an attempt to investigate and discover the errors in these images that reflect our world. What comes after is the process of rearranging them, discovering new narratives and finding ways to tell history from our own point of view. It is also a continuation of the humanist tradition, a process of reinterpreting the present, a break in chronology and a time for reflection in order to better understand the present and move forward.  The archaeology of images of the past does not only reveal our shared history and societal changes, but also suggests possible trajectories for the future.

 

Film programme “What We Left Unfinished”

 

8 December, Wednesday:

5:30 p.m. Film “What We Left Unfinished”

7:10 p.m. Film “An Ordinary Country”

 

9 December, Thursday:

5:00 p.m. Film “Before the Dying of the Light”

6:40 p.m. Films “Terra Femme” and “All Other Things Equal”

 

10 December, Friday:

7:50 p.m. Film “An Ordinary Country”

9:00 p.m. Film “War and Peace”

 

11 December, Saturday:

5:30 p.m. Film “Before the Dying of the Light”

7:00 p.m. Film “What We Left Unfinished”

 

12 December, Sunday:

4:10 p.m. Films “Terra Femme” and “All Other Things Equal”

More information about the films – https://videograms.lt/en/programs/

 

Film “What We Left Unfinished”

Film “What We Left Unfinished” is a part of film programme “What We Left Unifinished“, presented on 8-12 December at Skalvija Cinema Center. During this programme that researches archival films, we will move on to personal and public memories.

Curatated by Karolis Žukas.

Film programme “What We Left Unfinished” – War and Peace

This film is a part of film programme “What We Left Unifinished”, presented on 8-12 December at Skalvija Cinema Center. During this programme that researches archival films, we will move on to personal and public memories.

Curated by Karolis Žukas.

Film “What We Left Unfinished”

Film “What We Left Unfinished” is a part of film programme “What We Left Unifinished“, presented on 8-12 December at Skalvija Cinema Center. During this programme that researches archival films, we will move on to personal and public memories.

Curated by Karolis Žukas.

Film programme “Studying-relearning”

The architecture of the inner world and its accompanying narratives unfold in the three-part programme (curator Gerda Paliušytė) inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (1957-2021) philosophy and trajectories of thought. Berlant paid particular attention to affect, the plane of intimacy and feelings and its relationship to power structures; to that which can smother, or on the contrary – to disrupt repetition and resist control. Berlant was also highly critical of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, repressive system, encouraging to search for a commonality that enables creativity and allows to reject normativity, preconceived “knowledge” and trivial system-imposed habits. The festival programme is divided into three interconnected parts and keywords: studying-relearning, desire-love and coming of age. The programme focuses on the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only empowers, but can also limit or disappoint.

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?

Film programme “Desire-Love”

The architecture of the inner world and its accompanying narratives unfold in the three-part programme (curator Gerda Paliušytė) inspired by Lauren Berlant’s (1957-2021) philosophy and trajectories of thought. Berlant paid particular attention to affect, the plane of intimacy and feelings and its relationship to power structures; to that which can smother, or on the contrary – to disrupt repetition and resist control. Berlant was also highly critical of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing, repressive system, encouraging to search for a commonality that enables creativity and allows to reject normativity, preconceived “knowledge” and trivial system-imposed habits. The festival programme is divided into three interconnected parts and keywords: studying-relearning, desire-love and coming of age. The programme focuses on the ability to feel, observe, learn, love, fantasise and desire in a complex world of overlapping artificial realities and regimes – a world that not only empowers, but can also limit or disappoint.

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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