Archives: Projects

MOTOVUN VIDEO MEETING 1976

Sanja Iveković, Dalibor Martinis, Goran Trbuljak, Claudio Ambrosini,
Michele Sambin, Luigi Viola, Živa Kraus, Zdravko Milić

Curated by Branka Benčić

July 19th – September 14th

Multimedia Centre LUKA
Istarska 30

Cinemaniac 2015 brings research and exhibition project about the anthological Motovun Video Encounter, an international video workshop with Croatian and Italian artists that took place in Motovun in 1976.

Nastavi čitati Cinemaniac 2015

PAPER MOVIES

Dalibor Barić, Michel Klöfkorn, Antun Motika, Ana Petrović, Marko Tadić, Boško Tokin

MMC Luka, 20/07/2014 – 10/08/2014

The exhibition Paper Movies represents a fragmentary trajectory of ‘paper movies’ through collage, sketch, found footage, video, animation and photography as part of a film experiment, an experiment ‘with film and around film’, space where boundaries of a medium are explored. The visual production of “works on paper” (and film works with paper) is an artistic practice that enables artists to experiment with film, while at the same time affirming a new, almost marginal artistic area stressing its research potential. The exhibition aims at pointing at the continuity of a form of film thinking which leans on the experience of historical avant-gardes, research practices of conceptual art, history, archive, recollections, in the context of the digital flow of images. Beyond the normative film production technology, they use various research approaches, modest cheap means, economical expression, notes, scribbles, and by means of other media – text, collage, photographs, videos, they refer to the world of film, film culture and film language.

By shifting the interest from the commercial, industrial film apparatus, the contemporary practice of film production points to the place of film experience drawing its continuity  from experiment, historical avant-gardes, neo-avant-garde, history, archives, memories, re-contextualization… in the context of a new digital flow of images, video, text. It speaks of the potential of film as a resource for its dispersion in media formats today opening up new horizons for artistic interventions.

Curator: Branka Benčić

THINK FILM

Cameron Gainer / Ellie Krakow / Vladislav Knežević / David Maljković / Dalibor Martinis / Mario Pfeifer / Sarah Wood

MMC Luka, 21/07/2013 – 06/08/2013

 

2013 exhibition project THINK FILM builds up on the idea of film/cinema as a complex and developed system of representation that questions the ways by which dominant paradigms are shaping the world and the view, re-working it’s codes and conventions, formative structures, historical narratives, tensions of time and space.

The exhibition rethinks film and cinema as complex cultural forms, critical methodology and social, ideological and technological apparatus. It presents works by artists that critically engage with the idea of film to reflect on different cultural, political, social and ideological realities by works that form relationships to the idea of cinema as social technology and cultural interface.

Works in the exhibition represent how contemporary art practices are informed by ways of cinema. Practices that engage with rearrangement of the archive underscoring the importance of the relationship with the past and rereading it.  What different artistic positions have in common is the legacy of cinema, a “cinematic way of thinking” as the mental process shaped by cinema – conceptually, institutionally and ideologically.

Curator: Branka Benčić

SLOBODAN ŠIJAN: Film Leaflet and Selected Works

MMC Luka

The visual production of “works on paper”, such as the Film Leaflet by Slobodan Šijan represents an art form where artists experiment with a cinematic manner of thinking and a wish to cover the fragmentary world of cinematic effects, notes and images. These are nonconventional works, intertextual in their nature, which, being departed from standard cinematic technology, and taking different research approaches, by means of different media, such as text, collage, photography and video, refer to the world of film, cinematic culture and language.

In the art of the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, “film by other means” represents the deconstruction of integral elements of film which become an independent area of film expression (photography, film strip, editing, screening).

The intention was to acquaint a wide audience with the experimental cinematic practice by Slobodan Šijan as well as with his vision of film and critical practice in his art. Šijan was a frequent and important guest of the Pula Film Festival during the eighties and he received several awards for his work on feature-length films at this festival.

The curators of the exhibition SLOBODAN ŠIJAN: Film Leaflet and Selected Works are Branka Benčić (independent curator, Pula/Zagreb) and Aleksandra Sekulić (CZKD, Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade).

Curated by Branka Benčić and Aleksandra Sekulić

CINEMANIAC X  – 10 years, looking back

MMC Luka

CINEMANIAC X, is a small, dynamic “retrospective” representing a dedication to cinema – through a selection of works shaped around cinema references, cinema as part of the popular culture, and besides artworks it is including diverse documentation material.

Today, the space between visual arts and traditional cinematography is so saturated with crossovers and hybrid genres that it is impossible to discern clear boundaries between them. While some artists work with existing material through appropriation (found footage / used as cinema ready-made), others research the endless possibilities of film and installation, coping with codes and structures of the media (its narrative, dramaturgical and editing structure…) and showing such works before all in galleries. In the context of such artistic practices, modern art seems to become a parallel history as well as the future of moving images, and the space in which to research the possibilities, boundaries and dispositions of film images as well as new cinematographic forms.

Curated by Branka Benčić

The InVisible MAFAF

Gallery Aneks, MMC Luka – 18/07/2010 – 06/08/2010

 

The 9th Cinemaniac festival is dedicated to MAFAF – the Inter cine club Alternative Amateur and Artist Film Festival, which ran from 1965 to 1990 in Pula as an annual prelude to the Yugoslav Feature Film Festival. Two decades later, aided by available documents and archive material, we want to try and make the festival’s invisible history visible, in order to best contextualise it, reassess its real significance and rehabilitate the memory of an important event where the sheer number of applicants and their works made it the biggest event dedicated to alternative and non-professional filmmaking in Yugoslavia. In his preface to the 1990 catalogue Vladimir Anđelković foresaw what was to become reality by writing about video stepping in through the front door and taking its rightful place alongside film. Twelve years on, Cinemaniac brought MAFAF forcefully into the 21^st century by retaining a flair for researching practices in moving images, and inviting to Pula a number of the erstwhile MAFAF participants along with a new generation of visual artists. Today MAFAF is pretty much under the public radar, the festival being next to forgotten, or just about ignored, in many respects. Surely, no worthwhile recontextualisation and critical scrutiny is possible without taking into account institutional actors and the wider public context. The InVisible MAFAF is a research platform, a project to be realised in stages and several recognisable presentation formats. Our aim is not to hold on to simple historical reconstructions: we want to provide room for a subjective critical reinterpretation which would be shorn of eulogy and myth, by putting available fragments on a map which is temporary and unstable, inviting a second look by the wider contextual eye.

“ARCHITECTURE AND FILM, SUBJECTIVE SPACES”

Artists: Jonas Dahlberg, Ra di Martino, Ursula Mayer, Damir Očko

MMC Luka – 19/07/2009 – 10/08/2009

Cinemaniac is a sidebar program of the Pula Film Festival since 2002. The exhibition presents innovations and ideas concerning the presentation of moving images – works of film and video in the gallery context, where the infrastructure of the film festival provides a contextual and organizational platform as well as collaborative model. The exhibition works as an active context that enables the presentation of works of art. It is a meeting place that integrates social, cultural, technological, media, and aesthetic aspects, a meeting point for art, artists, institutions, and the audience. It investigates the relationship between film and visual arts by presenting recent Croatian and international production, as well as anthological videos, experimental films and multimedia installations.
Playing with the tensions between the dimensions of time and space, film codes and conventions create the view and the world, object and  illusion, whereas alternative, experimental and artist’ film explores and deconstructs internal laws and relations towards outer formative structures. This year’s cinemaniac exhibition tries to point to a specific relation between the moving images (film, video) and architecture, and the meanings they produce, as it is formed around the manners in which specific films, film motifs or sequences, represent a suggestive, psychological and symbolic quality of architecture. It  is in fact the interplay of (modern) architecture and film (cinematographic representation). The space here  is perceived as one of the basic means of expression and as the place where the meanings are structured , whereas film language, with its means of expression and syntactic principles, enables special understanding of both space and reality. The space is thus the scene of a specific dramatic happening, a historic event or a life setting presentation and it becomes the object of an autonomous visual experiment.
In the exhibited works by four artists –  View Through a Park by Jonas Dahlberg, August 2008 by Ra di Martino, Interiors by Ursula Mayer and The Boy with a Magic Horn by Damir Očko – presented spaces represent performance scenes for open narrative forms – places where camera movements, ambiance, architectural structures, music and dialogue meet with the protagonists. Relations between architectural structures and the possibility of social interaction, irrespective of whether a human being – a fictional character is present or not, can be discerned. In the scenes with or without dialogue, just like in spaces void of people and their physical presence, the presence of a subject is coded through the view, by means of a camera’s technical characteristic – the lens – the intruder, a watching eye. The camera becomes an illusion mechanism for the creation of a renaissance space, a movement compatible with human eye and the presentation ideology that revolves around the perception of a subject. The darkness of the cinema auditorium or the setting of a dimmed gallery space play with the voyeuristic imagination of the audience and accentuate the illusion of sneaking into a private world.

Curator: Branka Benčić

Babette Mangolte , Aneks Gallery

Ana Hušman / Dora Katanić,  MMC Gallery

MMC Luka – 20/07/2008 – 10/08/2008

Cinemania[c] 2008 unfolds as two part project occupying two separate exhibition spaces at the same venue MMC Luka, Pula.

It includes a solo exhibition presenting for the first time the works by Babette Mangolte (Aneks Gallery) in Croatia. The second space The MMC Gallery hosts double solo show by two Croatian female artists of the younger generation – Ana Hušman and Dora Katanić. Their work is informed by aspect of  social norms and cultural codes.

 Babette Mangolte – films and photography

Babette Mangolte was born and raised in France. As a cinematographer, director and photographer, she has been present in the contemporary art, film, dance, theatre and performance scene since the 1970s. In the course of her move to New York City Mangolte started directing films based on experimental narrative in her first features What Maisie Knew (1975), The Camera: Je, La Camera: I (1977) and in the two short films (NOW) and Richard Serra Film Portrait (1976). In the following decades she continued with conceptual documentaries in e.g. Sky in Location (1982) and Les Modeles de Pickpocket (2003).

From the beginning of her practice on, Babette Mangolte did groundbreaking camera work in her collaborations with film director Chantal Akerman and performance artist Yvonne Rainer. In 1978 she directed the legendary dance performance film Watermotor (1978) shooting the solo of New York dancer Trisha Brown with a special dramatization of filmic time.

In her photographic work of the 1970s Mangolte focused on an intellectually and artistically invested style of performance documentation, interacting through her still camera with such characteristic and varying artists such as Richard Foreman and Robert Whitman coming from experimental theater and (minimal) performance protagonists Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and many others. The collaborative spirit of the time is further reflected in the incident that Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass and other personalities of the Soho scene of these days appeared as actors in Mangolte’s own debut What Maisie Knew, portraying scenes of “conceptual intimacy”.

Mangolte’s work has widely been contextualized within the framework of institutional exhibitions presenting New York’s dance, performance, and theatre scene and it is precisely her “anthological” photographs that enabled generations to familiarize themselves with the work of the aforementioned artists. Her film work has been presented in numerous international film festivals and museum’s film programs, e.g. at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. A new film installation of the artist recently premiered at the Berlin Biennial 5.

The exhibition by Babette Mangolte as part of  cinemania[c] at the 55^th Pula Film Festival is the first presentation of the works of Babette Mangolte in Croatia. The exhibition includes her early films and photographs from the mid-1970s in which she explores the relationship between photography and film, as well as space, film language and subjectivity construction.

The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Anke Kempkes and New York gallery BROADWAY 1602,  representing the archive and work of Babette Mangolte.

One Song a Day Takes Mischief Away painting cycle by Dora Katanić parts from the text on which the script for the film with the same name was based, and which is part of our popular culture and film heritage.

Ana Hušman’s installation includes some of the movie props used during the shooting of the film Lunch and creates an atmosphere of a bourgeois saloon – living room. Furthermore, the use of humour and criticism for the interpretation of etiquette in the film ironizes rules for good manners.

Curator: Branka Benčić