ARTISTTALK » politics

Amelia Andersdotter (se)

neja — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 13:38:22 +0000

Post-democracy is the state wherein which much political power and many le-
gislative, including interpretative, competences are moved away from directly
elected representatives of the people, to a global level where diplomatic repre-
sentatives of representatives of governments make very detailed requirements
on how the legislation in the signatory states of the trade agreements should
look and behave. Coupled with the development of trade agreement conflict
resolution systems, such as arbitration courts to resolve disputes between the
contracting parties, which give indicating guidelines not only on how the parties
have conformed with obligations relation to gradual reduction of tariffs, but also
on the nature of legislative or administrative measures permitted in the signa-
tory states, this poses a significant democratic deficit. The writing and the inter-
pretation of law, effectively, reside outside of the parliamentary system and
much power is transferred to the executive of each nation.

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.

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.