Biennale de l'image en mouvement 2015
The Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement, one of the oldest and most important events in Europe for the presentation of artist films, video installations and multimedia works, was relaunched in 2014 by the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. The curator Andrea Bellini, in collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yann Chateigné, has commissioned and produced 22 works by young international artists. The Teatrino hosts a selection of 9 of these films in the presence of directors.
Program of the screenings:
Happy Birthday !!!, UK, 2014, 6’
Ed Atkins
Born in 1982, Ed Atkins is one of the most prominent artists of his generation. His work reflects on the unprecedented potential of today’s digital culture and its consequences for our embodied lives. His videos show talking heads, body parts, fragments of music, and graphic text animations. Atkins’s video installation for the BIM 2014, Happy Birthday!!!, starts with a drawing by Pierre Klossowski (the elder brother of Balthus) and proceeds into a meditation on hospitality and intimacy via parasitism, metastasis, sadomasochism, grace, and numbers. The video uses a wide range of contemporary image-production and display technologies. A new surrogate for the artist’s captured performances (named Pierre) speaks solely in numbers, digits strung together into more or less meaningful configurations
Frammento 53, Italy/Switzerland, 2011/2015, 71'
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli & Federico Lodoli
A feature-length film on war, conceived in its necessary and universal dimension, faced both as an actual and archetypical event. The phenomenon has been investigated on the field in Liberia, a country of peculiar, radical and unsettled conflicts, presenting sceneries, personalities and events ascribable to the situation that Tribbioli and Lodoli aim to evoke. The film develops through a set of first-person accounts collected from a group of eminent warriors. Seven self-contained portraits, presented one after the other, are introduced by a voice-off statement from the authors.
Il Capo, Italy, 2010, 15'
San Siro, Italy 2014, 26'
Séance, Italy, 2014, 30'
Yuri Ancarani
Born in 1972 in Ravenna Yuri Ancarani is a video artist and filmmaker. His works come from a continuous mingling of documentary cinema and contemporary art. His work has been shown at national and international museums such as the 55th Biennale di Venezia, the MAXXI in Rome and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Il Capo is an episode of the series The Malady of Iron, which is also composed by Da Vinci and Piattaforma Luna. Set in the marble quarries of Monte Bettogli, Carrara, “Il Capo” (The Chief) manages, coordinates and guides quarrymen and heavy-duty machines using a language consisting solely of gestures and signs. Conducting his dangerous and sublime orchestra against the backdrop of the sheer slopes and peaks of the Apian Alps, the Chief works surrounded by an overwhelming noise, which creates a paradoxical silence. San Siro is the anatomy of a stadium. Cable men, laborers, policemen, stewards, gardeners, TV technicians and supporters compose the backstage of the relentless ritual of football, staging an hypnotic still life made of rains and nocturnal mists. Séance is a meeting between the psychologist Albània Tomassini and the architect and photographer Carlo Mollino, who died in 1972. Fulvio Ferrari, tenant of Casa Mollino, serves dinner to the two guests, one is visible, the other is invisible. Séance was part of the exhibition “Shit and Die” curated by Maurizio Cattelan for Artissima 2014.
Workshop with Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli & Federico Lodoli
Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli is a visual artist, who graduated in Philosophy. His practice is mainly project-oriented, developing from theoretical elements and researches, and then acted in a wide range of media, resulting in performances, installations and films. Federico Lodoli is a researcher in Philosophy currently writing his PhD. Since 2007, he has been working on several feature-length documentaries.
Fish Plane, Heart Clock, Canada, 2014, 60'
Arvo Leo
Born in 1981, Arvo Leo grew up in Roberts Creek, Canada and numerous places around New Zealand. He currently lives and works in Vancouver. Fish Plane, Heart Clock features the work of Inuit hunter-turned-artist Pudlo Pudlat (1916-1992). For many years, Pudlo Pudlat lived a traditional semi-nomadic life on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Eventually, in his forties, after a hunting injury, he moved to the settlement of Cape Dorset where he began making drawings with materials provided by the newly established West Baffin Eskimo Co-op, the first Inuit printmaking studio. Over the next thirty years, Pudlo would produce over 4000 drawings and paintings with graphite, felt markers, colored pencils, and acrylics, many of which have never been exhibited.
Fort Buchanan, France, 2014, 65'
Benjamin Crotty
Benjamin Crotty’s debut feature Fort Buchanan is a virtuoso hybrid, blending queer cinema and American soap operas with the traditions of French arthouse cinema. The film follows who is struggling to cope in the fictional US Army base of the title in the Alsace region of France. His husband Frank is stationed in Djibouti leaving him caught between the demands of their wayward adolescent daughter Roxy and the advances of the promiscuous wives also stationed at the base. American-born, Paris-based writer-director Benjamin Crotty’s beautifully crafted film is finely balanced between absurdity and sincerity. Structured over the four seasons, Fort Buchanan recasts the military melodrama as an arena to explore sexual and racial politics, reflecting both narrative and cultural presumptions slipping between domestic struggles and foreign conflicts.
Workshop with Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli & Federico Lodoli
La Disparition des Aïtus, Switzerland, 2014, 35’
Pauline Julier
Born in 1981, Pauline Julier lives and works in Geneva. She has exhibited widely as a filmmaker, primarily showing her work in museums and art contexts around the world. La Disparition des Aïtus is a poetic essay about Tuvalu, a micro-state in the South Pacific that is threatened by rising sea levels. The first section offers an analogy between the vanishing of the country itself and of its inhabitants’ imaginaries. The next section presents a metaphoric fable about the electrical modernization of the country conceived in collaboration with a group of Tuvaluans. The final chapter deals with scientific information relating to the ocean seen both as a threat and as an opportunity.
Nuvem, Portugal, 2011, 30’
Nuvem negra, Portugal, 2014, 19’
Basil Da Cunha
Born in 1985, Basil Da Cunha is a Portuguese filmmaker. Since 2010, Basil Da Cunha creates his films in the Reboleira Township in Lisbon; its inhabitants play the main characters. In 2011, his film Nuvem was selected by the Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes. Nuvem Negra, Da Cunha’s film for the BIM 2014, describes the end of a world, that of the favela Reboleira. The favella is threatened by a proposed highway construction. Jumping between strands of documentary that reveal the history of the neighborhood, and narratives that are enacted through its various inhabitants, the film continues to explore the permeability of fact and fiction in contemporary cinema, and captures a vulnerable way of life that is likely to soon disappear.
In collaboration with
Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève
www.centre.ch