Disruptions

Saturday, August 21th, 2021, 21:00

Screening venue
SummerKino at HeK
Curator: Chantal Molleur

FILM PROGRAM

Surveillance, transformation, alteration, automation and genetic mutation are some of the complex thematic included in our 3rd SummerKino film program. The six artists and filmmakers mirror today's many challenges, ripping through the many layers of inter-dependency and envisioning new content for change.

In The Falling Sky, Peggy Ahwesh warn us of a cautionary tale where human foibles are increasingly out of alignment with the forces of nature. Jozef Robakowski is witness to political and social transformations in From My Window. New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse & Emilija Škarnulytė) offer alternative values and a critical look at an altered landscapes by industries, trading, nations, and power in their video Pleasure Prospects. In Adham Faramawy video Skin Flick, they "borrows from the language of advertising copy the slick and slimy promises of hydration, youth, the flow of life and capital lubed up with pumpkin spice and sandalwood." 1 Riar Rizaldi's film Kasiterit looks at a solar-powered AI tracing her material ancestry.

Disruptions; ‘an act or instance of the order of things being disturbed’.2 A synonym of disruptions; revolutions, another one; upheavals. Rapid transformation happens in crises and upheavals.3 We are in the middle of another crises, kindness, resilience and convergence are helpful ways to deal with crisis and its side-effects.

1. Caspar Heinemann, 2019
2. Merriam Webster, 2021
3. https://www.resilience.org, 2021

The Falling Sky, 2017, 10 mins, USA
By Peggy Ahwesh

Repurposing footage lifted from an animated news outlet on YouTube, The Falling Sky is a cautionary tale about human foibles increasingly out of alignment with the forces of nature. The video offers a poetic tour through our dense cultural landscape, driven by the gods of the tumultuous sky.

Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, sync-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include: women, sexuality and feminism; genre; reenactment; artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Créteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.

From My Window, 1978 – 1999, 19 mins, Poland
By Józef Robakowski

In 1978, Robakowski moved into a new flat in a newly-built high rise in the center of Łódź. That’s when he began filming the people and events he could see from his kitchen window. The film was made on the basis of a dozen or more hours of footage shot during 1978–1999. The artist filmed the front yard of his block of flats in a part of Łódź called “Manhattan”—a cluster of tall, cement housing buildings vaguely resembling New York’s skyscrapers. The images are accompanied by the artist’s commentary, which brings the viewer closer to his neighbors and family, including his then-wife, Małgorzata Potocka. The film comments on the gradual yet profound political and social transformations that took place in Poland over these two decades.

Józef Robakowski is a Polish artist and filmmaker associated with the avant-garde film movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Robakowski is the author of films, photographic series, installations, drawings, objects, conceptual projects, theoretician and academy professor. In Toruń, he co-founded the artistic collectives Oko (1960), Zero-61 (1961-69), and Krąg (1965-67), and was a member of the 'Pętla' Student Cine Club (1960-66). In Łódź, he co-organised the Workshop of Film Form (from 1970), and the 'Stacja Ł' Television Creative Group (1991-92), which undertook experimental work in connecting film picture and sound, permanently entering the Polish arena of conceptual and postconceptual art of the 70s. He teaches at the National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in Łódź.

Pleasure Prospects, 2019, 16 mins 30, Norway
By New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse & Emilija Škarnulytė)

NMC is the largest and least productive mining company in the world. The company provides counter-prospecting operations and geo-trauma healing therapies. Pleasure Prospects follows the process of NMC acquiring mineral prospecting licenses for alternative values and takes a critical look at “perforated landscapes,” altered by extractive industries, trading, nations, and power.

New Mineral Collective is a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth´s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as; desire, body mining and acts of counter prospecting.

Skin Flick, video, 13 minutes 30 seconds, Adham Faramawy, 2019, UK

Adham Faramawy’s work… "borrows from the language of advertising copy the slick and slimy promises of hydration, youth, the flow of life and capital lubed up with pumpkin spice and sandalwood. Here, the application of substances onto the skin is not a straightforward act of agency on the part of the user, but a symbiotic relationship where everything we put inside our body is its own body with its own agenda, sold to us by the hopes and rejections of other bodies, of lovers and pharmacists. The transhumanist possibility of eternal effervescent youth and happiness shimmers as the silicon oasis on the horizon, the cream that is not a cream, the promise that this could all be easier, faster, softer, harder, more luxurious. Before we know it, we are slipping past each other, so thoroughly oiled up that any pause for connection is impossible, any attempts to hold on to one another leave one or both parties crumpled on the floor, licking disinfectant off their wounds.” Caspar Heinemann, 2019

Adham Faramawy is an artist based in London. Their work spans media including moving image, sculptural installation and print to discuss issues of materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment, questioning ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities.

Kasiterit, 2019, 18 mins, Hong Kong
By by Riar Rizaldi

One-third of the global tin supply is extracted from Bangka island in Indonesia. Tin is the most impacted mineral by the upcoming technological development, which includes artificial intelligence and technology for renewable energy. Natasha is a solar-powered A.I. voice, and in this film, they trace their genealogy and the truth of their origin; from the capital liquidity to labour dynamic. With their feminised voice—as quite often performed by other AI-powered voice assistants produced by tech-companies, Natasha narrates the emergence of tin in Bangka island and their existence from the perspective of tropical anthropology of nature, value theory, philosophy of time, genetic mutation, geopolitics, and automation.

Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. Born in Indonesia and currently based in Hong Kong. His main focus is on the relationship between capital and technology, extractivism, and theoretical fiction.