Category Archives: Program

Program 2018: Are You Team Aniston Or Are You Team Jolie?

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Screening in Höja on Thursday 19 July, and it’s an Election Special! Come by and help us make sense of this thing? We can talk about pizzas and personal voting, about hope found in demographics, about morality in the face of material reality.

Among the films shown will be Team Jolie by Hannah Black.

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Hannah Black, Team Jolie, 2014 (still). Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa.

In the video Team Jolie we get to consider a number of statements which at first seem like arguments pro and con the two actresses Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie – not just regarding which of the two is a better soul mate for Brad Pitt but also everything concerning what they mean and stand for as icons. Are you Team Aniston or are you Team Jolie?

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Hannah Black, Team Jolie, 2014 (still). Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa.

Rather than recounting a sexist media narrative, Team Jolie becomes both a poetic reflection and a theoretical analysis, point by point and line by line. Quoting from the script of the film:

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

I wanted to like her but I couldn’t. I could not stand her desire to be liked. I punished her minutely by withholding my affection as if this could do anything but affirm her power. Her achievement was the mirror of an indescribable failure. Even though when it became clear that although she was a machine for producing affection, she too had failed to be loved, I was not sure that I could forgive her the ease that she had previously been.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

Because pain is for everyone, she represented the fierce enjoyment of pain with whatever necessary emptiness in present social conditions. Someone who once really made me suffer or who was the premise for suffering I somehow may have wanted sent me some lines from Marx where Marx seems to suggest that in communism we might experience pain and pleasure differently. I was pleased to see a solution to the problem of who in communism would work in the sewers—perhaps even the smell of shit will be experienced differently then. Perhaps, like animals, we will no longer be alienated from what Benjamin calls “the most lost forgotten land of our own bodies.”

 

 

 

Program 2018: Tutorial: How To Make A Short Video About Extinction, by David Blandy

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As part of the program on May 18 in Kristianstad we’ll be screening Tutorial: How To Make A Short Video About Extinction, by David Blandy.

Extinction still 8David Blandy, Tutorial: How To Make A Short Video About Extinction. Courtesy the artist.

“Tutorial: How to make a short video about Extinction” (2014) is a step by step tutorial showing you how to make a short video about extinction, using just the internet and video editing software.

David Blandy is an artist who works with the moving image in the digital world, from YouTube tutorials, music videos, television series, anime and the narrative sections of computer games; highlighting our relationship with popular culture and investigating what makes us who we are.

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David Blandy, Tutorial: How To Make A Short Video About Extinction. Courtesy the artist.

David Blandy (b. 1976) has exhibited at venues nationally and worldwide such as Bloomberg Space, London, UK; Art Tower Mito, Tokyo, Japan; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland; Tate Modern, London; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; Random Acts on Channel Four; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. He co-wrote the graphic novel Out of Nothing, published by Nobrow Press. He is represented by Seventeen Gallery and his films are distributed by LUX.

www.davidblandy.co.uk

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David Blandy, Tutorial: How To Make A Short Video About Extinction. Courtesy the artist.

 

 

 

Program 2018: How To Civilize A Waterfall, By Hanna Ljungh

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As part of the program on May 18 in Kristianstad we’ll be screening How to Civilize a Waterfall by Hanna Ljungh.

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Hanna Ljungh, How to Civilize a Waterfall, (still). Courtesy the artist.

“In the video How to Civilize a Waterfall, artist Hanna Ljungh performs an authoritative confrontation with nature, an indifferent and independent force. Inspired by the dramatic expressiveness of hard rock music, Ljungh challenges a waterfall and tries to persuade it to turn into a hydroelectric power plant. The text used in the video is based on the information about hydroelectric power distributed by one of Sweden’s largest power companies. The work reveals humanity’s comical and paradoxical relationship with nature.”  – more info over at the artist’s website

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Hanna Ljungh, How to Civilize a Waterfall, (still). Courtesy the artist.

 

 

Program 2018: The Fall Of Communism, By Hannah Black

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As part of the program on May 18 in Kristianstad we’ll be screening The Fall Of Communism by Hannah Black.

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Hannah Black, Fall Of Communism, 2015 (still). Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa.

Quoting the Open Source website:

“The Fall of Communism is a video initially made for the Whitney Independent Study Programme in New York. The work is a body falling into a hole into the ground and transforming into different people, expressed as remembered moments of different lives, as it falls deeper in towards the centre of the earth, but based very loosely on the life of Whitney Houston — her famous long notes become the cry of someone falling.”

Quoting Mousse Magazine:

“In The Fall of Communism (2015), the melismatic first syllables of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” chorus are aggressively chopped up as the camera plummets forever into a sinkhole that becomes a wet bodily passage that becomes a furry wormhole. We never get beyond that broken ‘and I’.”

Quoting Hannah Black from her Vimeo page:

“A person falling into the centre of the earth/of their body becomes another person and that person becomes another person and so on as they fall. Everyone becomes everyone else, it’s utopia or a disaster, or just everyday Life.”

We will be screening more works by Hannah Black this summer. Check the blog for more info!

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Hannah Black, Fall Of Communism, 2015 (still). Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa.

Hannah Black is an artist and writer from the UK, living and working in New York. Her work has been recently exhibited at Centre D’Art Contemporain (Geneva), mumok (Vienna) and Chisenhale (London) and in a number of galleries including Real Fine Arts (New York), Arcadia Missa (London), Château Shatto (Los Angeles) and W139 (Amsterdam). Readings and performances have taken place at the New Museum, Interstate Projects and Cage (New York) the Whitechapel, the Showroom, and Cafe Oto (London). Her writing has been published in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Harpers and frieze d/e, among other magazines. She is the author of two little books: Dark Pool Party (Dominica/Arcadia Missa, 2016) and Life (a collaboration with Juliana Huxtable (mumok, 2017).

 

 

It’s A Date!

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Screening coming up, on Wednesday July 19. It’ll be at our main facility in Höja. Facebook-page got details. We would love to have you all over for film and popcorn!

Local daily newspaper already ran an article in anticipation of the event. It’s illustrated with old photos from our premiere in 2012, when we was young an full of beans. Here, in Swedish.

 

Summer Prog (7)

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This summer we’re doing a couple of screenings at our main facility in Höja. The program will include art videos and films from Lebanon, Yugoslavia, France, Turkey, and Krabstadt, from the early 1970’s up to the present. If you want to receive up-to-date emails about our activities, like info on screening dates, you can sign up here (Swedish) or here (English).

Now here’s an introduction to Whaled Women, by Ewa Einhorn and Jeuno Je Kim.

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SchlopSchlop (SS) and KK are two annoying women who work at the Office of Developement in Krabstadt, a small town located in an undefined Arctic region where the Nordic countries have sent their Unwanteds.

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One day a group of Whaled Women are stranded on Krabstadt’s shores,
after fleeing their sunken island. It is up to SS and KK to handle the situation. The Whaled Women are placed in Krabstadt’s Refugee Program that focuses on integration through work. However, things don’t work out as planned and when a group of Norwegian whale hunters are called in to the rescue, the inhabitants of Krabstadt have to face some tough decisions.

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Whaled Women is the first in a series of short films to take place in Krabstadt.

Krabstadt is an edgy animated series that reflects current topics and events. Situated in the overlap between sitcom, animation and the fine arts, the project uses the potential of animation to be subversive, innovative and complex, while appealing to a broad audience.

Whaled Women was made in 2013, 9 min. Sweden

 

Summer Prog (5)

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Continuing the presentation of our program for the summer, we’d like to introduce World Brain by Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin.

world brain web site

website of World Brain

World Brain is a film with chapters spread out over a website, “like a carpet map”. World Brain also includes numerous links to texts, images and filmclips which exist independently of the film and outside of the site, connecting the film to the communal brain of the web.

The film sways between documentary, fiction and a how-to guide, and is made up mostly of found footage. The main protagonists are scientists who’ve dropped out, moved into the woods, and are trying to set up an organically functioning world brain, connecting living matter in a way similar to how the www connects images, thoughts and information.

“World Brain treats the architecture of data centers, the collective intelligence of kittens, high-frequency trading, the law of the jungle in the Wikipedia era, and the adjusting of transhuman rats…” – quoting the press kit of the film

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film still from World Brain

We’ll be screening an uncanny and disturbing section from the film, in which a telemarketer tries to convince a customer that ‘it’ is not a robot which simply responds to the customer according to ‘its’ programming.

According to a spokesperson for the association of Swedish telemarketers, SWEDMA, robots do have been used to make calls in the USA but never in Sweden, since it goes against “the ethical rules of the telemarketing industry”. They are however sometimes used as operators which can take, log and record calls from customers, providing replies based on word recognition.

still from World Brain

film still from World Brain

The film has sometimes been shown in an installation replicating the campsite of the scientists in the forrest – check out this review of World Brain, from Swedish Daily newspaper Sydsvenskan – but we’re keen on seeing what an outdoor setting can do for the viewing experience.

For more info, and to see the whole film (including links), visit the site of World Brain here.

 

 

Summer Prog (4)

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This summer we’re doing a couple of screenings at our main facility in Höja. The program will include art videos and films from Lebanon, Yugoslavia, France, Turkey, from the early 1970’s up to the present. We’ll continue introducing them here on the blog over the next week, so check back for more details. If you want to receive up-to-date emails about our activities, like info on screening dates, you can sign up here (Swedish) or here (English).

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Photography: © CHROMA

Space Refugee by Halil Altindere is a film about the former Syrian cosmonaut Muhammed Ahmed Faris, who in 1987 with the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz TM-3 went on a seven-day journey to the space station Mir. Today the former hero of the USSR and supporter of the democratic opposition movement against Assad lives as a refugee in Istanbul.

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Photography: © CHROMA

“When in 2000 al-Assad died and his son Bashar succeeded him, Faris was the head of the Syrian Air Force Academy and a military advisor. To The Guardian, Faris describes both father and son as enemies of the people, who ruled by maintaining their population as uneducated and divided as possible. In 2011, when the revolution in Syria broke out, he marched in Damascus, calling for reform; the next year he defected to Turkey, becoming one of the five million Syrian refugees to leave the country.” – quoting Orit Gat, Art Agenda.

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Photography: © CHROMA

The film is both a documentary about the life of Muhammed Ahmed Faris, and a proposal of outer space as a haven for displaced refugees. “I hope we can rebuild cities for them in space, where there is freedom and dignity and where there is no tyranny, no injustice” says Faris in the film. This idea is then explored through interviews with scientists discussing the practicalities of establishing a colony on Mars, illustrated with footage of Martian-looking landscapes and underground halls from the Cappadoccia region of Turkey.

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Photography: © CHROMA

The film Space Refugee has previously been shown as part of an installation presented in a heroic Socialist Realist style, reminiscent of an old-fashioned space museum. The installation included a virtual reality video, which placed the viewers immersed in an alien landscape on Mars, as colonisers or refugees. More info on the exhibition presented at n.b.k. in Berlin can be found here>>

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Photography: © CHROMA

Summer Prog (3)

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The Yugoslav Black Wave of films from the 1960s and early 1970s were characterised by their critical examination of Yugoslav society. Notable works from the Black Wave include the early works of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik. This summer, we’ll be screening his Black Film (1971).

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Still from Black Film, by Želimir Žilnik

The film opens with the director addressing the camera directly, speaking of how one of his earlier films about the situation of homeless people seems to have had no discernible effect on the problem. In what appears to be a spur of the moment decision, he gathers a group of homeless men and takes them to his apartment, which seems to surprise his wife and child.

“One night Zilnik picks up 10 homeless men from the streets of Novi Sad and brings them home. While they enjoy the hospitality of his family, Zilnik tries to “solve the homeless problem’” – bringing along the film camera, as a witness. He talks to different social services, common citizens, even the police. Everybody close their eyes in front of the “problem”.

This film depicts the misery of abstract humanism. It is a reckoning with anarcho-liberalism, with false avant-gardism, with social demagogy, with left-wing fraction.　
The author sees this film as an example of filmmaker’s exploitation of others’ misfortune, believing as they do that, they belong to a higher social class than the victims.” – quoted from the press kit of the film

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Still from Black Film, by Želimir Žilnik

More info on the films of Želimir Žilnik can be found here>>

 

Black Film is accompanied by a manifesto:

MANIFESTO > BLACK FILM

YOU ARE WATCHING:

THE CLASS STRUCTURE OF YUGOSLAV SOCIETY

LUMPENPROLETARIAT AND “HUMANIST INTELLIGENTSIA”

TECHNOLOGY OF THE PURPOSEFUL ABUSE OF THE POOR

IN THE FILM A LESSON OF THE HUNGRY, DIRTY, STINKING,

GIVEN TO THE ZILNIK FAMILY

THE CHILD IS TO BE SHOWN WHAT LIFE IS ABOUT.

 

IN THE LAND THAT IS IN DOUBT WITH ITS OWN NAME,

ITS OWN HAND AND ITS OWN POWER

IN THE MOMENT WHEN THE BARE NECESSITIES

/ BREAD, MILK AND DOLLAR / BECOME MORE EXPENSIVE BY THE DAY,

THE FILM CASE OCCASIONALLY ENJOYS THIS TREATMENT OF THE SUFFERINGS

OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE PEASANTS.

THAT GIVES IT – THIS PART OF THE MIDDLE CLASS STRUCTURE –

AN ILLUSION OF COMMITMENT AND SYMPATHY.

 

ONE SHOULD MAKE BULLSHIT OUT OF EVERYTING INCLUDING ONESELF!

ONE SHOULD START WITH THE DECONSTRUCTION OF ONE’S OWN MARRIAGE BED!

WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE IF THE POOR HAD DRIVEN US ALL INTO THE ASSHOLE?

FORTUNATELY, THAT WON’T HAPPEN.

 

FILM MUST BECOME CRITICAL OF SOCIETY.

I MUST WRESTLE AGAINST TWO ENEMIES: AGAINST MY OWN MIDDLE CLAS

NATURE WHICH TURNS THIS COMMITMENT INTO AN ALIBI AND BUSINESS AND

AGAINST THOSE WHO MANIPULATE, WHO OWN THE POWER AND THE CAPITAL,

WHO BENEFIT FROM THE SILENCE.

THAT’S WHY I FUCK ABOUT MY FEELING OF GUILT.

 

FILM – WEAPON OR SHIT?

 

 

 

Summer Prog (2)

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We continue the presentation of films to be shown this summer. Check the blog for regular updates on the where’s and the when’s, plus more info on the films to be shown.

A couple of years ago we had the pleasure of screening a video work by Lebanese  artist Rabih Mroué, With Soul With Blood. Since then we’ve attended a couple of his performances – Riding on a Cloud and The Pixelated Revolution, both at Inkonst in Malmö, as well as last year’s extraordinary retrospective at HAU in Berlin. It’s all been most engaging. This summer, we’ll be screening another of his videos, called Shooting Images.

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still from Shooting Images by photographer Pascheit Spanned (2012)

“Shooting Images by Rabih Mroué shows a performative reenactment of existing videos uploaded onto websites such as YouTube in which we see what a person is recording with his mobile phone: a Syrian regime sniper aiming his rifle at the civilian and shooting. The cameraman’s death becomes apparent when the phone, through which we witness the scene, is roughly slammed to the ground. Investigating the images produced outside of official regime media during the Syrian civil war, ongoing since 2011, Mroué became intrigued by these disturbing videos that portray the questionable reciprocal intimacy that exists in the brief moment of eye contact between the sniper and civilian when the rifle’s sight line aligns with the lens of the mobile phone.”

– quoted from Gwen Parry, Former West website

The term shot-reverse shot is used to describe an editing technique of classical Hollywood continuity in films. It features singular images of faces that are assumed by the viewer of the film to be looking at each other, taking turns talking to each other, although they are not shown together in the same image frame. The shot-reverse shot emphasizes the linear, the chronological, and the logical. In Shooting Images we see literal version of the shot-reverse shot being deconstructed.

“I had been struck by one sentence:

“The Syrian protestors are recording their own deaths”.

I found a lot of material, but one group of videos grabbed me in particular, in which we witness a cameraman being shot by a sniper or simply by one of the regime’s soldier forces.

These videos show the moments of eye contact between sniper and cameraman, when the gun’s line of sight and the camera’s lens meet.”

– quoted from the script of the film