STILL FROM POLYMOID BY CYBERFEST 2012 PARTICIPANT TINA WILLGREN
«Way Up», video program curated by Viktoria Ilyushkina
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In this work the artist continues her research about the relation between music and language, investigating the behavioural dynamics in the verbal comunication. Using two interlocutors, one aggressive and the other calm, she underlines the duality of attitude in the interaction between two subjects. The work is composed by two specular videos in which the two subjects overturn their own part, by tributing in a mutual way interchangeable their proper role. The strong relation between music and language in its emotional expressivity is established by the piece of Chopin, which if in a way it hides the content of the dialogue, in another it highlights the emotional aspect globally shared. The projection was conceived to be entirely visible from the Garibaldi alley in Venice, (Giardini of the Biennale) the whole façade of the greenhouse functioned as a screen.
Still from Hommage To Chopin by Maria Theresa Sartori -
It is the beginning of the 20th century and three children are posing for a family photo. The children are young pioneers in a colony of Christian immigrants in Jerusalem. This is the point of departure for a digital transformation in which the lower part of my face replaces that of the children, in a reversal of time and meaning crystalized in a non-time and non-meaning. The sense of incommunicableness is obtained by juxtaposing fragments of phrases found on the Internet, in a mash-up that unravels into a contemporary senseless dialogue that reveals how a word not listened to is, consciously or not, violence in its pure state. And therefore the universe concealed in this photo, the epic of human dreams and illusions, in the family album of the search for a lost innocence by these ancient pioneers, is translated into a form of violence that throughout history has brought extreme consequences. When there is only the word, one's own, the mouth becomes a weapon. Nonetheless, the invitation to listen is recuperated in the end, in a sort of message of hope that I consign to the world of these three unknowing ancestors.
Stills from Liszt by Francesca Fini -
«By capturing this distressing and claustrophobic scene, Jermolaewa turns a seemingly commonplace aspect of everyday life into a revealing moment with multiple meanings. On the one hand, she makes the viewer a witness to cruelty. On the other, she draws attention to the rats’ physical and social structures and their similitude to those of humans. Perhaps the rats in this work are used to exalt aspects of our own identity, since we live in a modern society but are hardwired with an animal consciousness. The Way Up might be considered, then, as a choreography of survival attempts of the day-to-day variety in our not-so-human environment.»
Claudia Arozqueta in Artforum.com: CRITICS' PICKS 2009
Still from The Way Up by Anna Ermolaewa -
The idea for The Polymoids emerged when visiting vacant urban areas in Stockholm. In the middle of town, surrounded by a hectic city life there exist spots that seem to have escaped city planning. There is an abandoned railway track and pillar landscapes under bridges. Having a very special atmosphere about them, something spooky and unpredictable, distinctly different from the surrounding city emerges. Walking in these areas is like exploring unknown territories, one does not know what will show up behind the next corner. Lots of waste is lying around, sometimes carried away by the wind, and it feels as though a very special type of flora and fauna could develop here, where dead matter comes to life. I think about the video as a kind of a nature documentary, which take this special biotope as its theme.
Still from Polymoid by Tina Willgren -
Bas-Bas juxtaposes two main players in the ritualized self-flagellation that is observed during the Lenten Season in the small towns in the Philippines. The singers, mostly womenfolk, recite the agony and death of Christ while the men draw blood in return for favors or the forgiveness of sins.
Still from Bas-Bas by Joaquin Palencia -
Synchronisation has been compiled from free associations and small impossibilities. The slow tempo and spatial soundtrack give the film a compelling atmosphere and inner logic. Buildings from the Soviet era make the scenes monumental and suggestive.
Stills from Synchronisation by Rimas Sakalauskas -
There is a picture of a room on the video, that has a black circle/ hole on the wall. Person is throwing black objects and clothes in to the hole. For a moment it seems like the items are disappearing in to the darkness, but instead pulled by the gravity, dropping on the floor.
Spatial constructions often open up fully only from a specific angle of viewing, their three-dimensionality flattening into a picture and revealing the hidden narrative of the piece. My purpose is to invite viewers to enter a safe and obvious illusion.
Still from Black Hole by Heini Aho -
A spectacle of grandiose spaces, monumental halls and majestic architecture. Overpowering architectural constructions disintegrate, deform and transform into a flowing stream of lava, creating new distorted spaces as building blocks of a new order.
Still from Defenestrator by Pink Twins -
A guide named Nashi narrates the audience jorney in an uncanny forest.What are the creatures that live there, living beings or robots? Artist proclaims that that nature should adapt to technology in order to survive.
Stills from A Forest Within A Forest by AUJIK -
«I was inspired to create this video during Pope Benedict's visit to Berlin, his address to the Jewish Community, his speeches the Reichstag and the Olympic Stadium on September 22, 2011. It's filmed with a mirror installation without any computer-aided processing.»
Loudwig van Ludens
Stills from Heil Gott by Loudwig van Ludens -
This prison break story combines animation, puppetry and live action. The parallel worlds and scales collide as Masa, a guinea pig yearning for freedom, and his owner go about implementing their own plans. In his nest, the technologically surprisingly advanced and creative pet plots his convoluted getaway plans, which always run into the impenetrable wall of his owner’s love. This movie features electric gadgets, bodybuilding, Steve McQueen and surprisingly long monologues spoken in guinea pig language
Still from Masa by Anssi Kasitonni -
A girl and “The Reflektor“ are washed ashore a beach. Strangely attracted by “The Flags” and uncanny sounds, she starts exploring the island she stranded on. When she picks «The Fruits“ from “The Tree“ of sound she is instantly transposed to a mysterious house — “The Transformer“. This is when she becomes aware of her transformation: she is now the keeper of the sound crown, she has become the fruits electric girl.
Still from The Fruits Electric by Isle Of LoxMarks the beginning of the travel mysteries. The coming out, of the black one. Walking on water. Mirror, mirror on the wall. FACE. Wall on the mirror, mirror. Water on the Walking. One blacks out of the coming. Mysteries travel to the beginning, marks „The Face“.
Still from The Face by Isle Of Lox -
The word and the image in this video take the from of a self-developing structure, an ironic avant-garde utopia, through the debris of which one could find the light path of peace.
The tragic events of the last days of the fortress make it a symbol of Jewish heroism and not least a symbol of any struggle for freedom and independence.
Still from Masada by TOTART -
Shoot the Moon is a video animation produced as a narrative naive story. This work is a part of long series of videos, where Hakeem b tries to create images with various ways of production: motion captured, keylighted, realtime or processed. The artist is interested in questions regarding production of the images in the 21 century: its composition, geometry, timing and spacing. Shoot the Moon was his first step towards the abstraction in the works.
Stills from Shoot the Moon by Hakeem b
«Cross-Over», special program on Brazil video art curated by Miguel Petchkovsky Morais (Brasil–Netherland)
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The main character in the video pushes a scaffolding-on-wheels unit through town in search of alternate routes of access into different constructed spaces. Instead of using doors, the established transitional space for crossing between public and private domains, he reaches toward a higher point of access into the interior of the building. In the process, he appropriates and displaces the normality of the situation. In spite of the visceral physicality these actions, or rather because of it, they convey through metonymy a deeper subjective transformation that occurs when one advances into the terrain of alterity.
Still from Breaking Into Business by Alex Villar -
Pool sets out to pair memory to place, drawing on the ancient mnemonic devices of the “Method of Loci.” A central image is of the Portland dancer and choreographer, Linda K. Johnson, submerged underwater, looking directly back at the viewer as she contracts, glides, tumbles,and hovers in a watery amnion of blue. Interspersed are images of a full moon; a book that has caught fire; salmon swimming upstream; a burning house; botanical frescoes from the House of Livia in Rome; and the words «Ars Memoriae.» Such memories are often punctuated or exacerbate by trauma, and these have intensely personal meaning for the artist, as her own home burned down when she was a child.
Still from Pool by Fernanda d'Agostino -
THE MINDSCAPES series is a set of videos, plexiglas prints, an interactive installation, and a live image performance where the idea of landscape is explored in relation of brain activity. Rather than seek a literalness, the research uses computer algorithms to speculate about the processes, flows and relationships between the devices and systems conform us, and influence how we perceive the world, build awareness and articulate memoirs.
“We see with the eyes, but we see with brain as well, and see with the brain is often call imagination, and we are familiar with the landscapes about our imagination, our inscapes we live with them all our lives”...
Oliver Sacks
Still from THE MINDSCAPES SUITE by Fernado Velazquez -
Like water running down a window the body swims and moves on the surface of life symbolised by a wall of stones. Put Yourself Together is a series composed of photography and video that was started in 2009. I position myself in private ephemeral performances that represent Sisyphean situations related to desires, fears, fantasies and struggle.
Still from A Drop in a Bucket by Carolina Redondo -
Somewhere Over The Rainbow is a video performance where a woman is singing a song which gives title for the work of art, theme song of the movie “The Wizard of Oz” with Judy Garland as a main charater. In the beginnig she is shown only in a close-up shot, but when she is finished with singing the camera is zooming out long shot showing us the performer on paper airplane with proportional size to her, who is running with the plane taking the flight until it is colliding with the camera. This video is telling three fases as an immigrate person. First process is “taking decisions”, with illusion and hope in spite of insecurity, facing with future situations, that is why the performer is singing the song of Dorothy who wanted to “search for a better life at the end of the rainbow”, escaping from the moment she was facing, metaphor of the immigrate person’s tought. The second phase is travelling and going away from her territory and facing up positive and negative experiences, which means a fight entering a different society, that is why the performer is leaving on an airplane. The third one is the result of the journey, where the occurences can be evaluated and that gives the real situation of the immigrante, that she can stay if she has accomplished positive results in a lapse of time or the exodus, the return is starting, something which is seen currently with the big amount of immigrants who are due to return, specially in case of “Latinoamérica”; because the “Hollywood dream” sold by the U.S.A. from 1910 with the Hollywood movies and the idea about Europe as the land of promise and success, has changed radically becuse of the economic crisis which resists.
Therefore, the action of the video finishes when the performer crashes into the camera, metaphor of the immigrant in a difficult situation holding up in these countries.
Stills from Somewhere Over The Rainbow by Angie Bonino -
First Essay On Waiting is a video about existence, the passing of time, duration and disappearance, as a woman waits.
Still from First Essay On Waiting by Rachel Rosalen -
SKADA reveals a day in the life of a man who lives in a staircase. He searches for his true identity going through each step of the staircase experiencing different states of self. The staircase-home is the place where he wonders how his life would be if he was not himself.
Still from SKADA by Sergio Ulhoa -
(venice) requiem is a video that trail traces of memories ever lived. Starting from a trip to the artist's ancestors birth towns this piece searches for intimacy between his experience and subjectivity and the viewer’s through the creation of a space, icons and objects as promoters of remembering and feeling. Venice as motherland of Cesar Meneghetti’s ancestors and at same time the set of the Venice Art Biennale. Artist was invited by Irma Arestizàbal, curator of the Latin American Pavillion to make a video-oeuvre to be presented as a happening in the inauguration of her Pavilion on June the 5th 2009, but she died 2 weeks before the inauguration. The video-oeuvre become a tribute to her in a venetian set.
(venice) requiem by Cesar Meneghetti -
Way is a poetic exploration of the liminal spaces experienced between location and destination.
Stills from Way by Matt Rappaport
Video program will be screened at Creative space TKACHI (Obvodny Canal, 60).
