Even the journey to work can be adventurous, let alone the mysteries of an office or the rollercoaster rides on the stock exchange – and those who still have a job and time for their body at the end of the day can count themselves lucky.
- Dennis Feser: "Melancholia"
This year, around 2400 film and video entries were registered for international selection. The film and video committee has created an interesting and lively programme from around 250 selected works, according to content-related and formal framework criteria. Many of this year’s artists deal with the search for their family and geographic roots. Political and social themes are also the object of artistic reflection. Here, earnestness and vitriolic satire often roughly balance each other out: but it’s up to you to find out in the cinema which way it swings.
- Clorinde Durand: "Naufrage"
- Bea DeVisser: "Mamma Superfreak"
- Jim Finn: "The Juche Idea"
All this can be marvelled in in the programme“Men at Work”. The programme reveals social, personal and general societal conflicts. How one’s own demands can fail is expressed in the work “Resonance” by Karel De Cock from Belgium and in Clorinde Durand’s “Naufrage the absolutely normal everyday office routines gets completely out of control. The programme “Femmes totales” shows perceptions of women: of girls, mothers, divas and dykes who refind themselves in and as images. A look behind the scenes of female multitasking.
The programme “Arts Ltd.” demonstrates that art is work, which needs to be structured – after all, artists want to live from it. All in all, there is a strong tendency this year towards the performative, to the playful act and the interpretation of narrative substances. The work by Bea DeVisser is exceptionally good. In “Mamma Superfreak” she stages a free adaptation of one of the monologues written by Dario Fo, by the well-known Dutch actress Viviane De Muynck. In an ambience of a warehouse filled with white sacks, the protagonist swaggers loudmouthed about the non-existent relationship to husband and child, and her escape to the alternative of the underground of squatters and punks, who are more like a family to her than her own brood. In the programme “Ideology and Agitation”, functional and documentary elements are blended together.
- Gustav Deutsch: "A Girl and a gun"
- Kim Gok: "Exhausted"
- Max Philipp Schmid: "Der Imitator"
In “Marie Koszmary”, the documenta XI artist Yael Bartana stages a rally by a demagogue who calls upon the Jews to return to Poland. The satire is only revealed when it is discovered that the agitator is portrayed by the currently most important Polish left-wing politician. Several old acquaintances can also be found in the programme, such as Michael Snow who, in “Puccini conservato” dares to conduct the experimental visual interpretation of an aria. Or Corinna Schnitt, who sets philosophical texts by Habermas and Adorno in the context of a picture tableau in her work “About a World”. In “A Girl and a Gun”, Gustav Deutsch whisks us away to the dawn of cinema, by again structuring found footage up to the beginning of the 1930s into a feature-length opus.
Of course we can’t go without sex and crime, whereby it is more a matter of the combination of sex/violence/boredom and dependence: in “Exhausted”, Kim Gok from Korea has created a post-industrial milieu study showing the dependent relationship between victim and perpetrator in coarse grain S-8 images. With little dialogue, he reveals the other side of the shiny/happy lifestyle of the Tiger State, South Korea. In “Holland”, Thijs Gloger, just turned 23, has made a wonderfully staged life study of young Dutch people in the northern Netherlands, showing in well composed images the misery of this middleclass everyday boredom, miles away from the centres of entertainment and diversion.
The Festivals “Film Experience”, Amsterdam, the “L’Alternativa Independent Film Festival”, Barcelona, the “Cork Film Festival”, Cork, the “Festival International Signes de Nuit”, Paris and the European Media Art Festival have formed a cooperation which aims to prolong a “Cinéma de différence”, a Cinéma that unites complexity, enigmatism, fondness of experimenting and differen-tial work with lust, which rebels against standards and norms knowing that merely non-repetitive audiovisual languages only have a small chance to capture reality and make it perceptible.
// 22 to 25 April in the Lagerhalle
// 23 to 25 April in the Zimmertheater
Katja Albers, *1975 in Hamburg. Studied History of Art and Literature in Tübingen und Berlin. 1999 - 2001 collaborated in exhibition projects at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, including ›Rewind to the Future‹, exhibition in the Video Forum in co-operation with the Bonner Kunstverein.She has been assistant curator in the Video Forum of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein since 2003. She has been lecturing at the UDK in Berlin since 2004 (experimental mediadesign). Since 2008 freelanced curator based in Dresden.
Nadine Bors, *1973, Den Haag, The Netherlands. Museologist, has been director of Media Art Friesland Foundation since 2006, where she started working in 2000. Foundation operates as an international institute for media art that organises several festivals, events and projects throughout the year to serve a wide ranch of target groups. She was previously involved in the Mondriaan Foundation Amsterdam. From 1997 to 1999 she worked at the Dutch Institute for Media Art/Montevideo in Amsterdam preserving projects and database design for videos and installations. She has also written several articles on these topics. In 2008 she was pronounced Best Cultural Entrepreneur of the province of Friesland.
Katrin Mundt, freelance curator and writer. Has carried out projects for the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Hartware Medienkunstverein/Dortmund, plug.in/Basel, Argos Centre for Art and Media/Brussels, among others. Exhibitions: Weder Entweder Noch Oder (Neither Either Nor Or) (Württembergischer Kunstverein, 2008), Landschaft (Entfernung) (Landscape (Distance)) (Württembergischer Kunstverein, 2007), Selbstorganisation (Self-organisation) (plug.in, 2006). Several thematic film programmes and organisation of expanded cinema events (in collaboration with Mark Webber) since 2003
Ralf Sausmikat, *1956. Studied media sciences, 1986 graduated as Magister Artium. 1981 International Experimentalfilm Workshop e.V. (Founding Member). Since 1988 artistic director of EMAF for exhibition, film, video, retrospectives. Consulting expert for the Goethe-Institute Internationes, Munich for the programmse German Experimental film of the 80' and 90's. 2003 curator of ›Turbulent Screen‹ an exhibition and cinema project on structural approaches in film and video, for the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art, Oldenburg.