ARTISTTALK » political art

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.

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.

Eyal Sivan (IL)

neja — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:01:53 +0000

In the interview, Sivan talks about his background, how he started making documentary films, he discusses his films Route 181 and Jaffa – An Orange’s Clockwork and his new projects. But apart from talking about his films and his work, Sivan shares a reflection on the current state of the world, its conflicts and wars and the potential of art to resolve them.

"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."

See the presentation of his project Montage Interdit (Forbidden Montage) at Issue Zero, an online platform exploring contemporary modes of developing, producing, and distributing documentary in and across networked environments.