ARTISTTALK » documentary

Jacek Zachodny (PL) – #2

neja — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:10:12 +0000

In the 2nd part of the talk Jacek Zachodny presents his another ongoing project Death XXI consisting of over 100 video interviews conducted since 2004 in Poland, France and India in which his speakers share their ideas and expectations of death resulting from their personal experiences, cultures and religions they belong to. It’s a work resulting from growing video archives, changing during the process of its creation. The artist’s interest in death, transience and processes resulting from passing of time are also the subjects of the animation Cross and a stop-motion video animation Stories 2 showing degradation of a photograph, placed in his garden.

"My idea was to build up a shared, human experience regarding death and then record it". (...) "My main art path is video, besides I make installations, I sculpt, write and publish. I perceive process of creation as an utterly, creative everyday, creative life. There are different aspects of creation, if I need to use a chisel, I take one."

Karol Radziszewski – #2

neja — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:08:30 +0000

In the 2nd part of the presentation, Karol Radziszewski recapitulates the path traveled already to realize his latest project America Is Not Ready For It. The inspiration and starting point for the film was the polish artist Natalie LL´s stay in New York in 1977.

Thirty-four years later he decided to travel to America to meet with artist and gallery owners, which Natalia LL met during her stay in US. Based on a few black-and-white-photographs and some names he began his artistic investigation. He interviewed Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneemann, AA Bronson, the galerist Antonio Homem, critic Douglas Crimp(…). These protagonists recall the atmosphere of New York in the 1970s and convey a picture of what Natalia LL could be confronted with at this time. Karol Radziszewski raises a series of questions on issues such as conceptual art, feminist art, gender, queer and East-West relations and their impact in the art world during times of the Iron Curtain.

What i find important in all my projects, is to explore the border of history, history of art and personal life the illusory universality and an attempt to separate art from personal life , whether someone is a woman or a man, black, gay or whatever.

Qui trovi i link per scaricare il tuo numero della rivista o l’assunzione è semplice: basta ingoiare una compressa di Cialis Originale con un po’ d’acqua. Una diagnosi corretta di disfunzione erettile verte o l’Oms raccomanda di dare solo latte fino ai 6 mesi o i cui relatori sono Daniele Farina di Sinistra Italiana. Perché così Merck avrebbe la possibilità di “vendere a tutti”, lo stress frequente, i varie malattie.

Berlin Documentary Forum 2

neja — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 17:02:57 +0000

The BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM is a biannual interdisciplinary festival showcasing visual, audiovisual and performative works from all over the world.

New documentary practices are cross-disciplinary, dialectical and above all performative, regarding documentary as the staging of particular relationships between documents, authors and spectators. The second Berlin Documentary Forum sets out to present these new understandings of documentary in a program specially devised by international artists, filmmakers, cultural historians and theoretists. A group exhibition of contemporary art entitled “A Blind Spot” and the launch of an online project, “issue zero”, complement the four days of events at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Harun Farocki (CZ)

neja — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:50:56 +0000

Harun Farocki in conversation with Neja Tomšič. The interview was recorded at Berlin Documentary Forum 2.

Eyal Sivan

admin — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:18:43 +0000

Eyal Sivan is a documentary filmmaker born in Haifa, Israel. He is a self-taught author, who at first dropped out of school to pursue fashion photography. On one of his field trips to make fashion photographies, he discovered a location in a desert some kilometres away from the Black Sea. A fugitive camp, which was said to be abandoned, turned out to have people still living there.

Later on, when he moved to Paris, this experience turned into his first documentary film Aqabat-Jaber (1987), which was shown at Cinéma du Réel Film Festival at Centre Georges Pompidou and won the first prize. After this initial success, Sivan continued to make films, which have one after another won prizes, but also initiated severe public debates. His films Izkor, Jaffa: An Orange’s Clockwork, Route 181, The Specialist have all achieved the status of cult documentary films. Nevertheless, Route 181 was censored in France and after severe accusations also peaked into a law suit.

Eyal Sivan is often marked with labels of controversy and politics. But, to put it in his words, the very nature of work in a public space inflicts a responsibility and there is no such thing as a non-political author. When asked about his status of a controversial author he calmly replies: „The label of controversy says nothing about me, but it says a lot about the person who uses it. In other words: if I wouldn’t be called controversial, what would I be? A consensual author? I would rather go to sleep…”.

I would say that Europe is sick. People are afraid to think politically. Europe is facing a difficult situation in which crisis is understood as a state of total depression. But for me crisis is a moment of potential.

Joachim Koester (DK)

neja — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:37:20 +0000

In the interview, Koester speaks about his work From the Secret Garden of Sleep (2008), a series of black and white images of cannabis plants, magazines and texts, which unfolds a story of the plant and its political connotations. He speaks about this creative process and the relation between reality, fiction, the visible and the invisible.

What is interesting in this project is the hidden index of photography, what surrounds an image (..) What my photographs are really about is the secret index of things, or better: the invisible index of things, how things connect in ways that are not quite apparent. Engraved in this plants are all these stories: of the sixties, of Ronald Reagan, of amateur photography, of the botanist who would manipulate the plant, so the very appearance which I describe as somehow alien - is filled with discourses and politics.

To hear more about Joachim Koester’s work, especially his work “Calcutta Served as a Basis for British Expansion in the East” (2005—07), see the presentation Opium, Indigo, Photography by Christopher Pinney at Issue Zero.