Alienated Identities
Program 5
Alienated Identities
Apotropia (Italy) – K, 2012, 4:00
Lisa Birke (Canada) – Red Carpet, 2013, 9:59
Katina Bitsicas (USA) – Autonomous Autopsy, 2014, 4:26
Catherine Del Buono (USA), How to Not Get Raped, 2014, 3:09
Anna Garner (USA) – Squential Internactions, 2013, 1:54
Giulia Giannola (Italy) – Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor, 2012, 04:58
Matt Gibson (USA) – The Turtle, 2013, 2:00
Claire Gustavson (USA) – Putting on a Show!, 2014, 5:06
Levi Hanes (Ireland) – Shapes on Grey, 2014, 3:14
Yu_Hang Huang (Taiwan) – Identity Correlation, 2009, 5:41
Sara Holwerda (USA) – Chair Dance, 2012, 6:26
Magnus Irvin (UK) – Cake, 2013, 2:48
Francesca Leoni (italy) – D (mov#2), 2013, 3:15
Johanna Reich (Germany) – Phoenix, 2012, 3:20
Victor Ripoll, (Spain) – Don’t Move, 2014, 2.34
Carlo Sampiero (Italy/USA) – TAMBOURINE BUTTOCKS, 2012, 2:10
Cinzia Sarto (Italy) – Forbidden Fruit, 2009, 4.40
Zaoli Zhong (China) – We Are Walking All on the Same Road, 2014, 12, 06
Weigang Song (China) – Walling Dissensus, 2014, 5:01
Alexandar Tokin (Serbia) – She Is I, 2013, 9:17
Apotropia (Italy)
K, 2012, 4:00
K is a video performance shot during the 2012 winter solstice.
The color violet is at one end of the spectrum of visible light just before the invisible ultraviolet.
APOTROPIA is a duo formed in 2002 in Rome, Italy, consisting of Antonella Mignone and Cristiano Panepuccia. Their work explores the interconnections between performing arts and all forms of audiovisual expressions.
Lisa Birke (Canada)
Red Carpet, 2013, 9:59
Red carpet is a durational performance-for-video that follows a glamorous female figure in a black glittering gown and three inch heels, teetering down a seemingly endless red carpet — a carpet that cuts its way through an ever-changing landscape. The figure in red carpet is at once present in the landscape but is also simply moving through it in her enactment of forced poise. Our heroine arrives at a conclusion that is tragi-comic—gendered, mediated, stoic and flawed—thus, essentially human.
Lisa Birke is a multi-disciplinary Canadian artist who situates between the tradition of painting, digital video and performance art. At once visceral and absurd, the works probe notions of gender and sexuality while revealing tropes and challenging the social expectations placed upon woman. She asks whether the female can feel at home in nature, myth and on screen, realms where she is so often laid to rest. Lisa Birke earned an MFA with distinction from the University of Waterloo (2013). Her work has been exhibited across Canada and at film and video festivals internationally.
Katina Bitsicas (USA)
Autonomous Autopsy, 2014, 4:26
Anonymous Autopsy is an examination of the criminal mind as well as a reminder of the numerous bodies we push through the system. In this work, video of a mock autopsy on an anonymous body is paired with the audio of a spoken letter from David K. Sparre, a death row inmate, convicted of stabbing a woman he met off of Craigslist 89 times. This letter written to his ex-girlfriend details his desire to stab another human. This piece investigates the mind of a psychopath and how they lack empathy. This lack of empathy is then paired with the lack of empathy society shows to the bodies shoved through these morgues and prison systems.
Katina Bitsicas is a new media artist who utilizes video, photography, and performance in her art works. Her works explore the effects of crime, traumatic personal events, and architectural containments on the human psyche. Shown both nationally and internationally, Katina has exhibited in multiple galleries, museums and festivals including Videoart Festival Miden in Kalamata, Greece, AIVA Festival in Finspång, Sweden, La Corte Gallery of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy, the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Grand Rapids, MI, and Whitdel Arts in Detroit, MI. Katina currently resides in Tampa, FL and is a M.F.A. candidate at the University of South Florida.
Catherine Del Buono (USA)
How to Not Get Raped, 2014, 3:09
This satirical video was inspired by advice posted on college websites that tell women how to avoid being raped. It speaks to the absurdity of placing responsibility and blame on the victim.
Brooklyn-based video artist Cat Del Buono began drawing and filming at an early age. She received a BA from Boston College, MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and attended the graduate film program at NYU. Her works have been shown in galleries, museums, and festivals including New York, London, Serbia, Sweden, and Hong Kong. Awards include Awesome Foundaiton Winner, Winner of the Baang & Burne New Works Grant, Best in Show at The Art Place Wynwood Miami, a NYFA grant, an SVA Alumni Association award, as well as residencies at ArtCenter Miami Beach and Gallery La Pan Barcelona.
Anna Garner (USA)
Sequential Internactions, 2013, 1:54
This piece is part of a series titled Proof and Permutations, in which I work through discomfort and physical challenges, considering what it means to seek rites of passage and personal transformation through self-inflicted distresses. I engage myself as an individual in pursuit of understanding, betterment, and accomplishment, examining the states experienced toward these ends. These genuine internal ambitions are skewed toward stagnation in the repetition of compulsions, conflicts, and neuroses that potentially obstruct true progress. The actions I carry out simultaneously help and hinder, assert and take away power.
Anna Garner( b. 1982) examines assumptions about autonomy, personal space and comfort. Her practice encompasses performance, video and photography. Focusing on physical challenges that invite speculation about the artist’s motivations works center her ability to overcome aggravations, perturbations, or physical trials. Her art has been featured in exhibitions and video festivals both nationally and internationally and her video, Sequential Interactions, received a Bronze Prize at the 2013 Vidoholica Festival in Bulgaria. Garner earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA in 2005. She currently lives in Tucson, AZ where she is an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona.
Giulia Giannola (Italy)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor, 2012, 04:58
The workers are absorbed by the work of the assembly line. Everyone has his task, but together they make a single action. The factory produces nothing. At the end of the assembly line, seeds are counted with a rhyme, born in Great Britain before the industrial revolution, when the categorization of labor and social status started to be defined. This rhyme accompanied a children game children that counting seeds until the last one, were guessing their job. In this scenario the repetitve proccess in which the workers are trapped creates an athmosphere of springing back time and suspended time.
Giulia Giannola (b. 1985 in Naples) is an Italian artist. After finishing her Bachelor degree in Venice at the IUAV University, she moves to Berlin where she graduated as Meisterschülerin in Installation and Multimedia at the Universität der Künste, with Prof. Christiane Möbus. In her performances and videos she creates choreographies, staged situations and actions in public spaces. Her works have been schown at:“Times and Lines” Saarandisches Künstlerhaus, Saarbrucken;Meisterschülerpreis des Präsidenten der UdK Berlin, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin; Shiryaevo Biennial “Screen: Between Europe and Asia”, Regional Museum of Samara, Russia;Meridian|Urban”, HKW, Berlin; Phaenomenale 2010, Science and art festival, Kunstverein Wolfsburg.
Matt Gibson (USA)
The Turtle, 2013, 2:00
The Turtle is a journey of the body and the mind, in dialogue with nature, art, fashion, and music. The Turtle seeks to capture that
element most fundamental to the human soul. The Turtle’s journey is simultaneously death and rebirth; the void that is that moment between
existence and nonexistence. The Turtle invites us to share a part of ourselves, and if we do, it shares back with us a new part we may not have
previously known. The Turtle’s pain is our pain, but The Turtle’s victory is our victory. The Turtle, simply put, is life.
As a director, Matt Gibson seeks to create works that challenge people’s preconceived notions about film as an art form, yet remain enough grounded in the tradition of the visual medium as it has evolved over the last century to serve as a counterpoint to other contemporary offerings.
Claire Gustavson (USA)
Putting on a Show!, 2014, 5:06
‘putting on a show!’ is a non-competitive dog show. The performance space borrows from fashion, athletics, and mass-produced furniture to facilitate a more complex discussion of aesthetics and control. The framework of the dog show is a surface structure that is part fantasy and part struggle.
Claire Gustavson works primarily in video and sculpture. She likes dogs, pastels and shopping at IKEA.
Levi Hanes (Ireland)
Shapes on Grey, 2014, 3:14
My arms appear around a grey screen and blindly select primary colored clip-art cut-out shapes from below the screen. Holding the shapes to the screen, I attempt to identify the symbols by declaring their name to the camera. After a series of pairings, my arms retract and the video ends.
Levi Hanes was born in the United States in 1977. Hanes is an artist and currently an Irish Research Scholar at Huston School of Film & Digital Media National University Galway, Ireland researching comedy in contemporary art practice for a practiced-based Ph.D. From 2009-2010 he served as a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. Hanes completed his MFA with Distinction at the Glasgow School of Art in 2008, with a prior honors degree in Fine Art Painting, English minor from Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene in 2001.
Yu_Hang Huang (Taiwan)
Identity Correlation, 2009, 5:41
I used photographs and the video to document the process in which I wore various sculptures in different locations and searched for a place to fit in. These wearable sculptures are made with foam and in various styles of houses including Chinese, modern, country as well as art museum. They represented my identities in different contexts and also served as personal shelters to preserve my culture. This project suggests the ongoing process of transforming oneself to become part of surroundings.
Huang’s art practice focuses on the relationships of cultural identities, subjectivity, displacement and our surroundings in cross-cultures context.
Huang was awarded annual Asian Artist Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center in USA in 2009. She has received numerous grants from Taipei City, New Taipei City cultural Affairs as well as Taiwan Ministry of Culture and Canada Council for the Arts since 2011. Her work has been exhibited internationally including USA, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada and Europe. Huang is a board member of Taiwan Women’s Art Association. She currently lives and works in Taipei.
Sara Holwerda (USA)
Chair Dance, 2012, 6:26
As an element of cabaret, burlesque and striptease performances, the chair signifies the body of the male spectator. Through movement, the female performer models an idealized and sexualized relationship with the chair. My work challenges these expectations by complicating the relationship between the female performer and her prop. Using movement, I expand the performative, narrative and symbolic capacity of the female body. The choreography, motivated by my personal history with violence and spectacle, includes movements from stage combat, self-defense, YouTube instructional videos, and turn-of-the century Parisian apache (a dramatized street fight between her and two or more men).
Sara Holwerda grew up in a rural town in Michigan named after theplant that killed Socrates. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy
of Art and a BFA from University of Michigan. She lives and works inChicago.
Holwerda has shown her work across the United States. Recently, hersolo exhibition “And is Herself Created” opened at The SculptureCenter in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has also been included in theRapid Pulse International Performance Festival at Defibrillator Performance Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, and in the Moving Image Art Screening Series at the Armory in Pasadena California.
Magnus Irvin (UK)
Cake, 2013, 2:48
Francesca Leoni (italy)
D (mov#2), 2013, 3:15
Water, air , fire, earth. Those are the fourth elements of nature, but also the elements we are made off. D. is the 4th letter of the alphabet. “D” as destiny, as desire, as different, as donna (woman in Italian). This is a video performance of a woman confronting herself with the 4 elements interpreted as: water (feelings), earth (memories), wind ( society), fire (passion). This is a symbolic performance of how experiences and society that leave marks on her body and soul in different ways. The red line, a constant in most of my performances represents the blood, the energy, the ties with other people, an energy that needs to explored in order to achieve transformation.
Francesca Leoni was born in Italy but grew up in Brazil. After high school she moved to the US where she graduated in Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. During college she started her first Theatre and performance studies being a part of theatre productions and short films. Back in Italy she started working with video productions and kept on studying theatre and performance. In particular she studied film with the Italian film director Marco Bellocchio. And its graduating in performance at Teatro de Los Sentidos with the international group guided by Enrique Vargas. Putting together video and performance was always her objective. This is why she created with Davide Mastrangelo a video performance project Con.Tatto.
Johanna Reich (Germany)
Phoenix, 2012, 3:20
The artist dressed in black is covering a white wall with fiery paint. With her hand raised high the brush seems to transform into a torch. The protagonist keeps on painting until a flaming pattern of lines is formed. Then she pauses for an instant and starts to undress herself. Under her black clothes her body consists of flames: she melts with the flames on the wall and disappears.
Johanna Reich is a video artist working also in the fields of performance and photography. Her recent projects question modern technology and the use of digital produced images. Johanna Reich received national and international awards and scholarships like the Nam June Paik Award (2006), the Excellence Prize (Japan Media Arts Festival, 2007, Tokyo), the Media Art Award NRW, (2009) and the GWK Art Award (2010). In 2010 she was resident at Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral and Fabrica de Pensule Cluj, ColectivA, Romania, in 2011 she was rewarded with the Konrad-von-Soest Preis. 2012 she received the scholarship „Präsenz vor Ort“.
Victor Ripoll, (Spain)
Don’t Move, 2014, 2.34
One minute, just a minute of your time. Stop, stand to look around you. One minute, a second, a life. Reflect, turn, share, love, look and let yourself look. A man, an advertisement, an action and you walk near me.
Víctor Ripoll born and lives in Madrid. He studied Communication at UCM then specialized in production by the Madrid Film School (ECAM). During his studies began working in the production department of several films. Develop your career as a production assistant in film, TV and advertising. Since 2010 has been making a series of video art and photographs defined as feelings (mixture of video art, performance, reflecting the hidden face that haunts us inexorably).
Carlo Sampiero (Italy/USA)
TAMBOURINE BUTTOCKS, 2012, 2:10
In Brazilian slang, the phrase is used to describe attractive buttocks by referring to them as a tambourine. While the ass is a universally recognized symbol of sexual allure, the film blurs lines between gender and race, reducing each participant to the utilitarian role of a musical instrument. Traditional sexual roles are also eliminated. This “body concert” is a metaphorical representation of the “tambourine,“ which has no gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation but is defined perfect simply from the sound that it makes.
Carlo Sampietro is an Italian mixed media artist based in New York City.His working heighten public awareness by visually demonstrating cultural issues. His first major series The Street is in The House is a body of work that transmutes elements of urban life into objets d’art, he dismantles established value structures and elements of social control. Sampietro’s investigation into facets of the urban condition continues with PopDogs, a gargantuan edifice – a popcorn machine that spews plastic dogs at an alarming rate – a symbolic parallel to canine overpopulation in urban centers as the catastrophic result of human ignorance and the immutability of desire. In his latest video art Bunda Pandeiro, he explores the rules of gender and race in the contemporary world.
Cinzia Sarto (Italy)
Forbidden Fruit, 2009, 4.40
Hastening shadows obscure the wavering sky, a body barges into an other. a man and woman fall like fruit from a tree, they wonder in a landscape where the beaten path has been erased by the snow, trudging toward the possibility of an embrace.
I was always interested in counterculture, mostly on those individuals that have been able to find some personal freedom within their life, as a consequence I resent all that promotes the role of individuals as consumers. This has made me a stranger in my own country and a traveller for years. Video is the tool I use to unravel my own expectation while walking.
Zaoli Zhong (China)
We Are Walking All on the Same Road, 2014, 12, 06
This is a short video dance that compared the lives of two generations in China. It’s based on my grandfather’s diary in a particular political context in 1960s and my experience of living in 21st century in this video. I was engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people’s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine people’s fates. Whether we are happier than old generation.
I presented those questions in my work and showed my experience of my grandfather’s diary in my video by creating a new experiment: I combined reading, dancing and performance following the content of the diary. Reading was the first step to experience his life. Choreography was the second step to transfer the events into art expression, and the working with camera was the third step to present my understanding of the history and my life in the progress of experiencing the diary.
Zaoli Zhong graduated from Beijing Dance Academy, which is the best dance academy in China. She has been a professional dancer since 1997. During the past 15 years, she has been trying to explore the relationship between conversations of body language and movements from one person to another in the dancing world.
Since 2004, she has turned her attentions to dance on the screen instead of traditional dancing performance in the theater. Combining the dancing language and screening language, she has found the different approaches for the dance on screen on different purposes.
Since 2011, she has been studying in the video art MFA program in Syracuse University, USA. Continuing the dance on the screen and exploring a new field, she experienced the functions of dancing being in the different fields, such as film, painting, animation, web as well as technology.
Weigang Song (China)
Walling Dissensus, 2014, 5:01
Walling Dissensus investigates a political criticality between different performative acts staged in a fictional space. Different identities are performed from soccer players, referees to police guards; and different situations are staged from police marching, soccer players walling to police striking rebels. A critical space is thus created concerning violence, political dissensus, repressing protests and sportsmanship through aesthetic experience.
Weigang Song is a Chinese artist based in Syracuse, New York. Rooted in social research and political studies, Weigang’s video and performance works display his personal readings of global contemporary issues, pointing to the complex relations between art and politics, culture and aesthetics.
Alexandar Tokin (Serbia)
She Is I, 2013, 9:17
The film is inspired by love verses from the poem „The Gardener“ by Rabindranath Tagore.
Aleksandar Tokin is an expirienced cameraman at the Serbian Broadcast Television (RTS). He graduated in 1998. from „Dunav Film“ film school in Belgrade.