Author: Cinemaniac

May 23, 8.30PM / Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

Artists Cinema presents three films by American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 – 1978): Conical Intersect (1975), Splitting (1974) and Bingo Ninths (1974) – a key to understanding the artist’s practice of “building cuts”, sculptural transformation of abandoned buildings, articulated as “anarchitecture”” and “non-u-ments.” Film works by Gordon Matta-Clark are in dialogue with urban planning and development, public art, its transformative potential and critical and social role. Term anarchitecture coined by Matta-Clark, a combination of architecture and anarchy, refers to “a mental battle with the discourse of architecture,” a radical act of destruction / deconstruction of architectural structure.

Three films approach the issues of deconstruction and intervening in buildings scheduled for demolition. Splitting is the first “cutting” while Conical Intersect represent a documentation of a cutting performed for the Paris Biennale in 1975, in the urban fabric of Paris, near the constriction site of Centre Georges Pompidou, while the process of work is inspired by “expanded cinema”, one of the first abstract film installation with projector – Line Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall.

On this occasion Artists’ Cinema becomes a cinematic installation which exposes the film apparatus (screen and projector),while films by Gordon Matta-Clark engage into dialogue with the building of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Program
Conical intersect, 1975 / 16 mm / 19′ 00
Splitting + Bingo ninths, 1974 / 16 mm / 24′ 00

ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a program activity of the Museum of Contemporary Art established in 2012, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program presents recent film/video works outside the context of production of entertainment and spectacle as well as historical perspectives and developments. It completes the programmatic conception of the Museum and complement the presentation of this hybrid form. It will intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way we will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving images.

Project Manager: Tihomir Milovac / Curator: Branka Benčić

 

The works by Ibro Hasanović present places whose meaning is being articulated in the fissures between the past, the present, and the future. They are meeting points of various references, narratives and texts, taken from the domains of film, art, and literature, such as Tarkovsky, Godard, Sidran or Caspar David Friedrich. The images and stories that Ibro’s films bring to us are immersive and poetic, and special attention is paid to soundscape forming, while the artist uses visual codes and cinematic language to explore complex relations between the individual and society.

The program will show three recent films by Ibro Hasanović: A short story (2011), Piccolo Greenland (2012) and Spectre (2012).

The landscape in A short story represents a space whose territory and destiny has been intertwined for centuries; a (construed) glacier in Piccolo Greenland, and a (real) ship, Galeb, in Spectre, represent almost mythical places in which the author relates a premonition of a certain situation. The meaning of these places is deeply ingrained in the collective memory, and they become topoi of artistic interest, of describing the ineffable, of articulating a visual language as a transfer vehicle between the subconscious and the images; and, the moving pictures draw us into a space of relations between reality and fiction.

In A short story the narrator relates a series of events that happened in the recent past, and some premonitions of the future, mediated by oral tradition. The act of narration and the performative monologue of the narrator present a frame of reference and the central place around which the narrative of the work formss, while the cyclical repetition of mythical elements reveals the patterns that participate in forming and regulating the social and natural order, with codes inscribed into the collective memory.

In Piccolo Greenland we re-read the relation between man and nature, where poetic scenes of cold, frozen landscape, in the spirit of romanticism, present a frame for individual struggle and engagement, oriented toward reaching a specific goal, while in the binary pair of nature and culture we recognize a melancholic scene.

The last film, Spectre, is the only one that is devoid of human presence. It takes its form by camera moving through the inner spaces of the navy ship, Galeb, anchored in the port of Rijeka. The “ghosts” of Galeb, as spectres of the system, take the emptied social and ideological place as their referential field.
Program

A short story / Kratka priča, 16 mm, converted to HD, 10:20 min, 2011.
Piccolo Greenland, $K converted to HD, 6:22 min, 2012.
Spectre / Bauk, HD video, 7:30 min, 2012.
After the screening, a conversation with the artist is scheduled.
Ibro Hasanović (1981) lives and works in Bruxelles, He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo and at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France. The central themes of his works – films, videos, photographs and installations are individual and collective memories. He showed his works at Turku Art Museum, Finland (2012); Open Space – Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Vienna; SPACE Gallery, Bratislava, Galleria A+A, Venice, 52. Oktobarski salon, Belgrade; Panorama 13, Le Fresnoy; Brot Kunsthall, Vienna, Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, Ljubljana; Galerija P74, Ljubljana (2010), Galleria d’Arte Moderna Palazzo Forti, Verona; Galerija Galženica, Velika Gorica (2009); SPAPORT Banja Luka (2008); and Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, South Korea (2006).

www.ibrohasanovic.com

March 21, 7 PM, Gorgona hall, Museum of Contemporary art, Zagreb

The artistic practice by Croatian artist Zaltko Kopljar regardless the medium in which it is produced – performance, photography and film/video establishes a hybrid field of complex existential positions and different media engaging the presence of the artist himself as the strategy of performance. His work questions the relations of power, as relations between the individual and the institution, body, and world.

Four film/video works gathered into the program From K series form a cross-section  of the artist’s film/video production over the last 3 years.

K17 (2012) opens the program and marks the author’s return to New York, the city where in 2003 the artist produced a series of photographs as photography based performance in urban space – K9 Compassion. Meanwhile a change in the global financial landscape transforming institutions of (financial) power. New York from the K17 is a place of different circumstances, and the image of the world. K14 (2010) is located in a newly built urban environment on the periphery only partially inhabited. The new architecture represents a blank space and is mapped by a narrative about loneliness and disappearance. K15 (2012) establishes itself as a re-enactment, the transposition of the documentary material available on You Toube, which brings the famous gesture of kneeling showing Willy Brandt in Warsaw, and it is associated with a number of Kopljar’s performance ​​gestures of kneeling as an act of an individual. The program ends with a short film, K16 (2012), where a central place is a scene of digging a hole. There is no end in sight to the digging,  a hole, an abyss, the absurdity, futility,  the incompleteness are main issues around which the narrative is formed and meaning of the work produced. In his works Zlatko Kopljar ​​appears in person, dressed in white, reflective suit. Moving through space and situations, slowly, as a solitary witness, bystander, passer by.

The program will include 4 recent films by Zlatko Kopljar produced between 2010 and 2012. It is the first screening of K15, K16, K17 in Croatia.

Program

K17, HD video, 10′ 49” (2012)

K14, HD video, 12′ 5″ (2010)

K15, HD video, 4′ 21” (2012)

K16, HD video, 10′ 42” (2012)

http://www.msu.hr/#/hr/19883/

Zlatko Kopljar (1962) is a visual artist. He has exhibited at Sao Paulo Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, The Kitchen – New York, etc. His work are in collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Museum of Modern Art Zagreb, Filip Trade collection, etc. He graduated painting in 1991 with professor Carmelo Zotti from Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, Italy and currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia. www.kopljar.net

ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a program activity of the MSU established in 2012, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program presents recent film/video works outside the context of production of entertainment and spectacle. It completes the programmatic conception of the MSU are complementing the presentation of this hybrid form. It will intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way we will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving images.

Project Manager: Tihomir Milovac / Curator: Branka Benčić

In recent years, Damir Očko realized an especially interesting body of work that comprises of six films: The Boy with a Magic Horn (2007), End of the World (2007), The Age of Happiness (2009), The Moon Shall Never Take My Voice (2010), We saw nothing but the uniform blue of the sky (2012), and the last one, Spring (2012).

Očko’s artistic production, which besides the film works encompasses series of visual and graphic elements, such as collages, typographic music sheets, concrete poetry, and artist’s books, is structured around film as its central place; film is conceived as a construction that gathers and generates several formal elements, so as to produce meaning, associations, and emotions. We “read” Damir Očko’s works as complex and layered orchestrations, meeting places of various narratives and texts, pointing to their multi-layered riches. Očko emphasizes that it is precisely in multi-layeredness, in structure of surgical precision, where the essence of his work is to be found. The artist often puts the viewers in the role of explorers, ready to absorb the layers of meaning, either rationally or intuitively and suggestively, as new systems of knowledge articulation.

The author’s interest in music, in sounds, in the “apparatus” of human voice and speech, and in their poetic and politic potential – these are the leading preoccupations of Damir Očko, and they are especially pronounced in the selected films. In these works, Očko elaborates complex cinematic relations, employs layered dramaturgic processes and uses them to create visually impressive works of specific kinesthetic qualities. A specific choreography of protagonists’ movements, darkness that engulfs them, their actions, their movements and the language of cinematic means of expression – all this additionally enhances the meaning that progressively reveals itself through interaction of all the elements, as the film draws us into its associative space of relations between reality and fiction.

Program:

Spring, 4k converted to HD; color, sound, 19.58 min, 2012.

We saw nothing but the Uniform blue of the sky, 4k converted to HD; bw/color, 12 min; 2012.

The Moon shall never take my Voice, HD video, color, sound; 19.16 min, 2010.

The program encompasses films that were included in Očko’s solo exhibition The Kingdom of Glottis, held from October 2012 to February 2013 in Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Damir Očko realized the following solo exhibitions: The Kingdom of Glottis, Palais de Tokyo (2012), The Body Score, Yvon Lambert, Paris (2013), On Ulterior Scale, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf (2011) and MMC Luka, Pula (2012); he also had solo shows in Tiziana di Caro Gallery (Salerno), Kunstverein Leipzig, Kunsthalle München. He participated in collective exhibitions in the MSU Zagreb; Villa Romana, Florence; Kunsthalle Wien; HIAP Helsinki, and in festivals: Videoformes Clermont Ferrand, 25FPS, Zagreb; Videobrasil; and in residences (Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, Dublin; Academie Schllos Solitude, KulturKontakt, Vienna.)
ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a program activity of the MSU that begun in 2012, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program will present recent film/video works outside the context of social production of entertainment and spectacle. It will complete the programmatic conception of the MSU and complement the presentation of this hybrid form. We will intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way we will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving pictures.

Project Manager: Tihomir Milovac

Curator: Branka Benčić

Various studies of movements, situations, and body states in motion through the skate culture and street subculture, using slow motion, meditative scenes, and temporal counterpoints – these are the central features of Shaun Gladwell’s videos. In his works, movements that originated in sports often appear choreographed. The program opens with the Storm Sequence video, with which Gladwell “exploded” on the art scene. It shows a slow motion of a skateboard performance during a storm on a sea shore; motion appears to dissolve in time. It was among the most visible works in the 2007 Venice Biennial, within the central exhibition by Robert Storr. It is followed by Tangara, another scene of a body “in weightlessness”; Apologies, the half-hour series with which Gladwell represented Australia in the 2009 Venice Biennial, will conclude the program. In the Australian Pavilion, he showed this series of videos and installations, based on the specific Australian landscape, its mythology, and Mad Max as an icon of Australian cinema and popular culture. The selection also includes several new works, Pacific Undertow and Midnight Traceur, as well as a video that was recorded in Afghanistan. The selected works are assembled in two groups, presenting two characteristic categories of space – urban spaces, and desert. The scenes often show the protagonist (usually the artist himself) isolated and lost in a landscape.

Shaun Gladwell is one of the most promising Australian artists of younger generation. His main medium is video. He graduated from Sydney University’s Sydney College of the Arts, and graduated with a Masters degree from the University of New South Wales’ College of Fine Arts, and from Goldsmiths in London. At the 53rdVenice Biennale in 2009, he represented Australia. His works were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Sydney, in Istanbul, at festivals such as Experimenta (Bangkok) and Videobrasil (Sao Paolo). Last year, the ACMI (Australian Center for the Moving Image) in Melbourne organized his big monographic exhibition. He is currently based in London.

The artist will be present at the projection, and take part in the conversation afterwards. Shaun Gladwell will talk about the art of moving pictures and their showing in the gallery and cinema context, as well as about his recent work in film direction.

PROGRAM

Storm Sequence, 2000 (8 min)

Tangara, 2003 (segment, 3 min)

Afghanistan, (8 min)

Pacific Undertow Sequence, 2010 (segment, 3 min)

Midnight traceur(segment, 5 min)

Interceptor Surf Sequence(segment, single-channel, 4 min)

Apologies, 1-6 (27 min)

ARTISTS’ CINEMA is a new program activity of the MSU, aimed at introducing contemporary artists and their cinematic works, created at the meeting point of contemporary art and cinema, of film and visual arts. The program will present recent film/video works outside the context of social production of entertainment and spectacle. It will complete the programmatic conception of the MSU and complement the presentation of this hybrid form. We will intensify the dialog and exchange on the cultural scene of the city, connecting artists, curators, and critics with the public; in this way we will contribute to an active internationalization of the art scene engaged in the media of moving pictures.

Project manager: Tihomir Milovac

Curator: Branka Benčić