Alienated Territories I
Program 1
Alienated Territories I
Brit Bunkley (NZ) – By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand, 2014, 5:37
Boris Eldagsen & Sabine Taeubner (Germany) – SuperHigh, 3013, 38:00
Jaime Ekkens (USA) – A Life With Asperger’s, 2013, 4:00
David Finkelstein (USA) – Epistolary Fusillades, 2010, 18:11
Francesca Fini (Italy) – Little Pills Blues, 2013, 5:10
Rick Fisher (Canada) – Arcadia, 2014, 4:49
Felice Hapetzeder (Sweden) – 366, 2014, 1:24
Istvan Horkay (Hungary) – Mother, 2014, 4:51
Mani Mehrvarz (Iran) – Wistful Affection For The Past, 2013, 3:06
Neil Ira Needleman (USA) – Freedom, 2013, 4:32
Heidi Kumao (USA) –Swollowed Whole, 2014, 3:53
Albano Ruela (Portugal) – What is in Your Bag II?, 2013, 6:06
Robert Quelven (France) – La Topologie des 9 Cercles – #6, 2013, 5:40
Jean-Michel Rolland (France) – The Race, 2013, 3:45
Mauricio Sanhueza (Peru) – Copycat, 2013, 8:12
Atom Samit (Spain) – I once thought the consequences of having a cat (or the life that the cat was not expected), 2013, 1:26
Cinzia Sarto (Italy) – Disquiet, 2013, 3:13
Swen-Erik Scheuerling (Germany) – Box NN, 2013, 4:44
Tina Willgren (Sweden) – (+), 2014, 4:13
vvitalny (Tusia Dabrowska & Clara Inés Schuhmacher) (USA) – In Peru, 2013, 3:05
Brit Bunkley (NZ)
By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand, 2014, 5:37
Two contrasting landscapes: the lush coastal hill country of the South West North Island of New Zealand and the American South West (interrupted by a brief interlude of satellite images of New Zealand and forest fires in the Los Alamos – Colorado Springs region). Environmental degradation and post-nuclear Armageddon are suggested by the enlarged mutated insects and mythic trope of bubbling blood. Los Alamos, the home of the Manhattan Project, Ancestral Pueblo ruins and a VLBA radio telescope, as well as Colorado Springs the home of the Garden of the Gods, have witnessed extensive forest fires in recent years. Climate change has significantly extended the wildfire season.*
*Soundtrack: “Little Rose” by The Black Twig Pickers, courtesy of Thrill Jockey
Brit Bunkley had international group exhibitions and screening include Sanctioned Array-Other2 Specify at the White Box gallery in NYC, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid at the Centre Pompidou and at the Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, Spain; The Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; FILE 2012 Brazil, and the Moscow Museum of Modern. Bunkley’s most recent solo exhibitions were the Wallace Arts Centre in Auckland and “No Phobia” and at Sanderson Contemporary Art in Auckland. He recently had a month long public screening at the Oslo Central Station Norway October 2013. His videos will be exhibited at the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair.
Boris Eldagsen & Sabine Taeubner (Germany)
SuperHigh, 3013, 38:00
Your ultimate reality show from the homeland of human experiments.Six candidates showcase their method of getting high without drugs.
And who will judge their efforts? A Jury on drugs!
Berlin-based German artist Boris Eldagsen has studied photography and visual arts at the Art Academy of Mainz, Prague and Hyderabad. His photomedia work has been shown internationally in institutions and festivals such as Fridericianum Kassel, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, CCP Melbourne, ACP Sydney, EMAF Osnabrück, Videonale Bonn, Edinburgh Art Festival, Athens Video Art Festival, Kuyre Istanbul, Media Forum Moscow, WRO Media Art Biennale Wroclaw, Biennale Le Havre and Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth.
Jaime Ekkens (USA)
A Life With Asperger’s, 2013, 4:00
“A Life with Asperger’s” is an animated documentary that explores the challenges of growing up and living with Asperger’s Syndrome. It is a voice over narrative that demonstrates that Asperger’s is not simply “being a little awkward”, rather it is about adapting to one’s limitations in the face of anxiety and isolation. The technique is a collage of photography, rotoscope, animated characters and live action footage.
Jaime Ekkens was born in South Korea and adopted by American parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Having received a BFA from Kendall Collage of Art and Design, she moved to New York City and successfully pursued her MFA in Computer Arts at The School of Visual Arts. She works freelance in motion graphics.
David Finkelstein (USA)
Epistolary Fusillades, 2010, 18:11
Shattered mind, shattered images, shattered culture. Fragmented messages bombard us from all directions, like a barrage of letters from every corner of the globe. Should the artist “hold the mirror ball” up to nature, and mesmerize the populace with fractured distractions? Is our decentralized culture doomed to incoherence? Or can the artist build new meanings through the technique of collage? Based on an improvisation.
DAVID FINKELSTEIN’s video work has been featured in numerous film festivals around the world and has won awards at twelve of them. In 2013, he was an invited artist at the Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, France. His first feature film premiered this year at New Filmmakers in New York. He has had solo screenings of his films in New York, North Carolina, Minnesota, Los Angeles and San Francisco. His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, Meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and other sources.
Francesca Fini (Italy)
Little Pills Blues, 2013, 5:10
The main object is a rabbit mask covered with newspaper clippings and fixed on the board by a complex weaving of red woolen thread. On the board are also attached paper clippings that compose a poem. The work is deeply connected to the performative action of creating the poem which is an integral part of the picture. The action has developed cutting out random words from newspaper headlines and then juxtaposing them completely decontextualized, according to the best Dada tradition, following free association of ideas but also the general sense that rose gradually from the text. The performative action witnessing the creation of the work in the form of a videoperformance is contained in the CD also attached to the board. The only sound in the videoperformance is the swish of the scissors and my voice reciting the poem that then switches back again from the analog plane (the paper) to the digital one (the sound mastered in the CD), so that visual art, sound, performative action and creative video documentation arte at the same time content and containers, in a sort of new interpretation of “gesamtkunstwerk”.
Francesca Fini is an Italian artist working with mixed media, video and performance art.
My live projects, always addressing social and political issues, are mixed with lo-fi technology, homemade interaction design devices, live audio and video. Primarily interested in video and live art, I also create artworks assembling performance art ‘relics’ or manipulating video stills. Among the Art events in which I took part in the last few years, I would mention the 2011 WRO Biennale in Poland, ADD Festival at MACRO Museum in Rome, the finals of Laguna International Art Prize in Venice, CINEMED Film Festival in Montpellier, Taormina Film Festival, Berlin Directors Lounge, IKONO TV Film Festival, FILE Electronic Language International Festival in Brazil, FONLAD Digital Art Festival, Cologne Off and Magmart Video Art Festival, which I won in 2010, 2012 and 2013.
Rick Fisher (Canada)
Arcadia, 2014, 4:49
Arcadia uncovers some unpleasant truths about idealized pastoral landscapes.
When not working at a full time job, helping raise his young children or researching genocide, Winnipeg based video artist Rick Fisher makes videos over extended periods of time. After undergraduate art school, he worked underground in a mine for ten years. He was then accepted into graduate school where he was expelled and sued for $103 million for conspiracy to destroy America’s largest private art school. He subsequently worked at video artist run centers on the Canadian prairies for twenty years. His artwork has manly elegance as he explores themes of humanity and darkness.
Felice Hapetzeder (Sweden)
366, 2014, 1:24
366 is the number of confirmed deaths drowned at Lampedusa, Italy as a 20 metre long fishing boat with refugees from Africa sunk on October 3rd 2013. The work 366 is an interpretation of the event, filmed in a bathtub with a toy coast guard boat. The sound track is made out of news flash reports on the events at Lampedusa, all reporters speaking at once and the sound fading down as the boat sinks. An allegory on how the media works in the aftermath of a disaster. The border politics of the European Union and Italy are discussed in the aftermath of the event as it is thought that many more could have been rescued. At the same time as politicians say that this should not happen again, it is actually happening every day.
Born in Stockholm 1973. Studied at Konstfack, University College of Arts Crafts and Design, art department, MFA in 2002. Postgraduate video project Royal Institute of Art 2002-03. Part of art group Local A. (with Jenny Berntsson since 2009). Exhibitions and screenings include Oberhausen Short Film Festival 2014, Norrköping Art Museum, Acting in the City 2013. 5th Cairo Video Festival, Medrar, Cairo 2013. The solo show Struck at Haninge konsthall 2012. Istanbul European Capital of Culture 2010. Uppsala Art Museum 2009. Istanbul Art Biennial, Nightcomers 2007. La ciudad y el Barrio, 2a parte, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires 2006. Blick New Nordic Cinema and Video 2001-2002.
Istvan Horkay (Hungary)
Mother, 2014, 4:51
Music Composed By Shiri Malckin , Voice and Story By Nina Maroccolo
MOTHER :: Music Composed By Shiri Malckin ::
Text And Voice By Nina Maroccolo ::
[Text from a novel “Annelies Marie Frank”, Empirìa Ed., Rome, Italy 2004]
***
“Did you know that a camel can endure fasting for a long time?”
We had to endure you instead when we were obliged to ration nonexistent food in the backroom. Yes, food that wasn’t there. Phantom food at daybreak, infinite light that was already setting in the morning. You became irritable and started weeping.
No God and Torah then! Prayers were no use.
Dad calmed you down with his gentleness, while I was bursting with rage…
In the backroom on Amsterdam, your mystic-domestic behaviour should have been combined with that of a camel in the desert, the bearer of charity, patience and devotion.
You imposed your triad on us: God, Torah, Israel, and you started praying, on and on … You said: “To get over every obstacle.”
Well, Mams, you were the first to fail.
You loved the urbanity of the house, hostile to nettles.
I was born wild Mams.
You bit into my mood and my endurance. You could have eaten such hardship.
It was edible Mams.
In Auschwitz we became patterns of tamed skin.
In Auschwitz we were swallowed up, orphaned daughters already.
In Auschwitz, different Mothers, you and I were different, Mams.
“Did you know that a camel can endure fasting for a long time?”
They took you away from the animal and spiritual kingdom without managing to get over the obstacle. Dad and Peter were with you.
Naked spirits.
You never understood how much I loved you until that day.
And you were my Daughter, Mams… Mother… Mother… Mother…
István Horkay (b. December 25, 1945 Budapest) is a Hungarian painter. After graduating from the School of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1964, Horkay was invited to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow -Poland, one of the Major Art and Cultural Centers of Eastern Europe, where he received his Master of Fine Arts. He continued his Studies at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Denmark. (1968) and did additional Post graduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. (1971) Horkay studied under the Internationally known Artist and Theater Director Tadeusz Kantor as well as Professors M. Wejman and J. Nowosielski. Palle Nielsen/Danmark/ He received Diplomas in Graphic Arts, Painting, and Film Animation.
Mani Mehrvarz (Iran)
Wistful Affection For The Past, 2013, 3:06
In this video I have tried to deliberate about our historical background and how our perception of it is shaped. Through this investigation I was interested in the question of how we define our historical memories with images and sounds. I have used my experiences both in music and visual poetry to reach a nostalgic feeling regarding the history. I personally believe yearning for the past and desire for the future are inseparable property of human mind. I try to provoke my viewers to rethink about their oral history concerning their life and urge them to have new vision about moments even in the future.
Mani Mehrvarz is a Multimedia artist, born and raised in Iran, and currently lives and works in Poland where he graduated with a MA degree in Intermedia Art. His main area of interest is the intersection of memory and history where narratives constitute radically social and political changes on it. Most of his recent works in realm of new media such as video art try to deliberate human’s historical background to reformulate the conception of reality. His works has been presented in Iran, Poland, US, Japan, Greece and Ireland since 2004.
Neil Ira Needleman (USA)
Freedom, 2013, 4:32
A subtle elegy to the excesses of capitalism. A delicate ode to overabundance. A sedate celebration of the moral imperative to buy. An understated tribute to those whose cups runneth over and over and over and over…
Neil Ira Needleman was born in Brooklyn, NY, toward the middle of the last century, and learned filmmaking in the alleys of Brooklyn. Somewhere along the way I got lost in a tunnel that led me into a career in advertising. I have now rededicated myself to tinkering with motion images. I hope there is still time to develop a sense of vision.
Heidi Kumao (USA)
Swollowed Whole, 2014, 3:53
“Swallowed Whole” is a somber, animated, experimental film about surviving extreme isolation and physical limitations as a result of traumatic injury. In this movie, I create a desolate and disorienting dreamscape as a metaphor for the deep netherworld I was thrust into when I broke my back in a sledding mishap. When I describe to people what it was like to be supine on the couch for 3.5 months, I have often used the image of being trapped under a frozen lake; I experienced everything by looking up from below. This sensation became the kernel from which I created this film.
Heidi Kumao uses a range of media and technologies to link physical behavior to psychological states. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in the USA, Europe, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada including solo shows at the Museu da Imagem e do Som (São Paulo), Museu de Arte Moderne (Buenos Aires) and Fundació Joan Miró. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields/Robotics, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Art Matters. She teaches in the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan.
Albano Ruela (Portugal)
What is in Your Bag II?, 2013, 6:06
photosophical essay
Albano Ruela: Solo & Collective Exhibitions of Visual Arts, between 1990 / till I die.
Robert Quelven (France)
La Topologie des 9 Cercles – #6, 2013, 5:40
La Topologie des 9 Cercles is a non-narrative and contemporary contemplation of Dante’s Inferno: a three-person audiovisual collaboration designed by Isabel Pérez del Pulgar, Roland Quelven and Rey Eisen echoing the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. 9 videos were made: five by Isabel Pérez del Pulgar and four by Roland Quelven. Rey Eisen has composed a musical accompaniment in 9 movements. The videos themselves are called the 9 “Circle-Segments.” These 9 Circle-Segments are independent, non-narrative pieces which vary in texture, composition and tone. However, they contain many common elements, and are not entirely unrelated, Of course, the 9 Circle-Segments do not comprise a literal adaptation of the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno, but rather, suggest a resonant echo of Dante to our contemporary world. Accordingly, each «Circle-Segment» does not correspond to a specific circle of Dante’s work. Nevertheless, references to writing in the book are pervasive in many segments: Images include calligraphy and ideograms whose visual appearance is detached from literal meaning but which combine to form a vast palimpsest. The 5 segments directed by Isabel Pérez del Pulgar feature the image of a woman as a recurring motif, a contemporary heir to her classical male counterparts whose souls endlessly traversed Dante’s Circles. In the four segments directed by Roland Quelven, the female imagery is more abstracted and fragmented, a kind of polymorphic creature caught in the Circles, a contemporary Erinye.
Performance / Isabel Pérez del Pulgar
Music / Rey Eisen
Video / Roland Quelven
Roland Quelven, born in 1967. Lives in Brittany. Graduated in mathematics, painter, video artists and sound collagist. He collaborates with various artists, is involved in several collaborative projects, and his works are screened in many international videoart festivals. In 2009 he created the multimedia project «Napolecitta or the fractals virtues of Detail»: digital and sound collages, flash animations in a website devoted to a description of an ancient imaginary city named Napolecitta (fusing Napoli and Cinecitta). Since 2010 the ancient city has become an encyclopedic and imaginary world also named Napolecitta. Most of the videoworks are numbered, gathered as a register, an imaginary official record, a combination of numbers, maps, writings, paintings, masterpieces of Art history, video footage, video materials recorded digitally assembled as palimpsests. All this seen through the prism of the Detail. The reality concentrates as the fragment stands out… seeing through the prism of the Detail, whether iconic or pictorial, produces always the same effect: an « invitation to travel inside ».
Jean-Michel Rolland (France)
The Race, 2013, 3:45
Rhythmed by the race of five horses shot in Marseille Borély, this video, tribute to Muybridge, doesn’t try to take the public into the universe of racetracks but rather to communicate them the frenzy felt during the break-neck speed of this painful race.
Jean-Michel Rolland is a French artist born in 1972. A musician and a painter for a long time, he melts his two passions – sound and image – in video art and audiovisual performances since 2010. At the origin of each of his creations, musicality plays a role as important as image does and each one influences the other by transmediality. The result is a series of experimental videos and performances where sound and image are so inseparable that the one without the other would lose its meaning.
Mauricio Sanhueza (Peru)
Copycat, 2013, 8:12
Throughout the centuries dreams have been to many cultures around the world the images that speak of the future. In modern times dreams have been seen as a connection to the unconscious. The character is pursuing the ultimate experience of freedom and glory but when he reaches the sun his wings begins to melt and falls in to reality.
Mauricio Sanhueza (Peru,1978), studied at the University of Lima from 1996 until 2000. He then continued his studies at the Lima visual arts school, Corriente Alterna, graduating in 2006 with top honors. In 2011 he obtain a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from San Marcos University. Since 2004 he has participated in several collective art exhibits and festivals in Peru and abroad. Mauricio’s videos have been screened at many international video-art and experimental short-film festivals and have won many awards.
Atom Samit (Spain)
I once thought the consequences of having a cat (or the life that the cat was not expected), 2013, 1:26
Found footage movie about cats, men and women… and the power of the creativity with the digital video and digital archive.
Licentiate in Audiovisual Studies and with an MA in Documentary, the essential work of Atom Samit (Spain) is focused on finding the essential moments in everyday life. And the work with the landscape, the objects in it, their history, and the forms it can appear. The landscape is the principal character of his films. His last short experimental documentary, Monuments on the moon, was screened in theaters and shown by television. His last work, Glogau AIR, is about the life in an artist-in-residence program in Berlin. Between these projects, Atom makes little works focused in the experimentation with digital video.
Cinzia Sarto (Italy)
Disquiet, 2013, 3:13
In a parallel reality a symbolic boat proceeds in its destruction of Nature, an allusion to the cruelty of war masked as a spectacular game. This performance by Paolo Buggiani is part of a series called “Metallic Creature”.
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.
Swen-Erik Scheuerling (Germany)
Box NN, 2013, 4:44
In ‚Kiste NN’ normative spacial relations are getting lost. The video shows the simple and squarish interior of a box, which is deformed by its clapping walls.
Swen-Erik Scheuerling : 2003-09 University of Fine Arts Hamburg (Fine Art / Diploma)
Tina Willgren (Sweden)
(+), 2014, 4:13
The starting point for the video was images of celebrities and suspected criminals hiding from paparazzi and press photographers. Despite the differences in societal status of the people portrayed, these images can be curiously similar. Sometimes the act of photographing comes forth as starkly offensive and intrusive on personal integrity. I am interested in the visceral reaction of hiding one’s identity in certain situations, and also in the equivocal character of the hidden figure as image. Is it a thing, a creature or a human being? Is it frightening, pitiful or performing?
Tina Willgren is a visual artist working primarily with video. She was born in Tierp, Sweden 1972, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden and received her MA degree at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm 2005. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: WPA Experimental Media Series, USA/”Bodied Spaces”, Gallery Art Claims Impulse, Berlin, Germany/”No, No, I hardly ever miss a show”, Zacheta, National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland.
vvitalny (Tusia Dabrowska & Clara Inés Schuhmacher) (USA)
In Peru, 2013, 3:05
“In Peru” draws on culturally specific references to describe a shared experience of isolation. From this perspective of exclusion, we take these symbols and reduce them to absurdity. The reconfigured images create a coherent and humorous visual narrative: our own world. The second in the “Other Kinds of Fun” Trio. Video by vvitalny. Music by vvitalny with Tomek Januchta & Daniel Edinberg. 2013.
Since 2010, vvitalny (aka Tusia Dabrowska + Clara Inés Schuhmacher) have created public works, sound installations and videos. Most recently, our work has been featured in: Peacock Contemporary Arts Center (Aberdeen, UK), Bideodromo Festival (Bilbao, Spain), Nizio Gallery (Warsaw, Poland), and the SITE Festival (Brooklyn).