Video in Progress 6: Saj smo vsi ljudje / We Are People After All

We Are People After All

Maryam Kashkoolinia, Iran
Mal-e man ast / That’s Mine!, 2015
HD, 6’15”, color, sound
Language: No dialogue

Contemplative village life, work in the field and children’s games all from the perspective of a landmine. Left in the bush in a war long ago, it awaits its victim with fatal patience.

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Maryam Kashkoolinia (1967) holds a BA in Graphics and an MA in Animation. She has 12 years’ experience in poster and book cover design. Following In Our Home (2007), her third film, Tunnel, participated in many international and national film festivals. Her first film, In Memory… (2005), a short animation about the survivors of the great Bam earthquake, won awards at many Iranian festivals.

Adel Abidin, Iraq/Finland
Common Vocabulary, 2006
PAL, 4′, color, sound
Language: Arabic, English subtitles

Common Vocabulary presents the most common Iraqi vocabulary among children in Baghdad nowadays, vocabulary such as; Death, occupation, abduction, genocide, mass graves, water shortages, no electricity. A seven-year-old girl from Iraqi origins learns how to pronounce the terms in a video tutorial. The video was originally presented as a looped single-channel video installation accompanied with 8 different flash cards with printed words of the new vocabulary.

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Adel Abidin was born in Baghdad (1973) and currently resides between Helsinki and Amman. He received a B.A. in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad (2000) and an M.F.A from the Academy of Fine Arts in Time and Space Art in Helsinki (2005). Since his representation of Finland at the Nordic Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), his work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide including: Van- haerents Art Collection, Brussels (2015), 56th Venice Biennale in the Iranian Pavilion (2015), The Glasstress-Goti- ka, 56th Venice Biennale, International Exhibition, Palazzo Franchetti (2015), 5th Guangzhou Triennial, The Guang- dong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2015), The Pera Museum, Istanbul (2015), Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada (2015), Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014) and many more.
Abidin has been selected for the Finland Prize for Arts in 2015, Received a Five Years Grant from The Art Council of Finland (2012-2017) and in 2011 He was a nominee for the Ars Fennica Prize in Finland.
www.adelabidin.com

Toni Poljanec & Tina Glavič Novak, Slovenia
Kdo je ta človek? / Hope and Despair (shorter version), 2016
HD, 14’27”, color, sound
Producer: Hupa Brajdič produkcija

Language: English, Slovene subtitles

In August 2015, Slovenian filmmakers Toni Poljanec and Tina Glavič Novak headed to Lesbos where they made the documentary video composed of numerous interviews with refugees who have endured the traumatic ordeal of traveling from Turkey on overcrowded inflatable boats. When they reach the shores of European Union the prospect of hope soon turns to despair. Their new reality are overcrowded and underfed refugee camps. The promised golden spoon has never been further away.

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Tina Glavič Novak and Toni Poljanec are members of Hupa Brajdič Production, a group that focuses on documentary films.
Tina Glavič Novak is a sociologist and a project leader within Hupa Brajdič production. She is mostly interested in documentary movie making, especially in its creative approach.
Toni Poljanec is working in video and film. He is co-founder of Hupa Brajdič production. He studied cultural studies and is mostly interested in marginalized themes such as refugees, prisoners or artists.
Some of their works are Grenkoba nasmeha (Biter Smile), Zaodrje (Backstage), A to je kulturologija (Is this Cultural Studies). The films were screened at Kinodvor, RTV Slovenia, DOKMA festival of documentery film, Luksuz festival poceni filma, Subart festival and elsewhere.

Marko Tadić, Croatia
Borne by the Birds, 2013
HD, 13’28”, color, sound
Language: English

Borne By the Birds is fictional biography of a man that had lived for 400 years and in fact a subtle critique of our recent past, mainly the 20th century. We see how our protagonist influences the world around him and vice versa. Through the animations rhythm we see how things come to be and how they disappear back into nothingness. On the other hand we follow a more personal and humane story that involves the main character here, his wish for eternal life and when achieved his wish of salvation. A short narration here is a pensive introspection of the protagonist who becomes a witness to worldly misfortunes from a different point of view, a sort of a step back from society into a neutral realm of universal understanding.

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Marko Tadić studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence. His artistic practice is in drawing, installation and animation. Winner of numerous art prizes (2015. the Vladimir Nazor award for the best exhibition, 2012. award for the best design at the festival of Croatian animation FHAF, 2010. third award at the exhibition T-HT@MSU In Zagreb and in
2008. the Radoslav Putar Award for best young contemporary artist.) Participated in many residential programs in Helsinki, New York, Los Angeles, Frankfurt Am Main and Vienna. Collaborated with the Art Academy in Zagreb at workshops for students as tutor for the workshop of Artist Books, Field recordings and Radio Dramas. His films have been shown on many international animation film festivals and experimental film festivals. His works have been exhibited on many solo and group exhibitions around the world. At the moment he is finishing a new film and preparing an exhibition at the Laura Bulian Gallery in Milan.
markotadic.blogspot.si

Zanny Begg, Australia & Oliver Ressler, Austria
The Right of Passage, 2013
HD, 19′, color, sound
Language: English

The Right of Passage focuses on struggles to obtain citizenship, while at the same time questioning the implicitly exclusionary nature of the concept. The film is partially constructed through a series of interviews with Ariella Azoulay, Antonio Negri and Sandro Mezzadra. These interviews form the starting point for a discussion in Barcelona, one of Europe’s most densely populated and multicultural cities, with a group of people living “without papers”. The film is set at night, against a city skyline, providing a dark void from which those marginalized and excluded can articulate their own relationship to the arbitrary nature of national identity and citizenship. The title, The Right of Passage, refers to the stages, or “rites of passage” that mark important transitions on the path to selfhood. The exchange of “rites” with “rights” suggests that freedom of movement must become a right granted to every person – regardless of his or her place of birth.

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Zanny Begg is a Sydney based artist and film maker who is interested in exploring the archeology of contested history/ies and the architecture of social change. She works with film, drawing and installation to explore ways in which we can live and be in the world differently: this has included working with macro-political themes, such as alte-globalization protests, and in micro-political worlds, such as with kids in prison. Her recent films include Doing Time (2014) How to Blow Up a Bubble That Won’t Burst (2015) and 1001 Nights in Fairfield (2015). Her films have screened at Antenna Documentary Film Festival (2015), FILMETS Babalona Film Festival, Barcelona (2014), Diagonale Film Festival Graz (2013), Ok Video Festival, Jakarta (2013), Artspace Sydney (2012) Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (2012) the Berlin Biennial (2012), eva International, Limerick Biennial of Visual Art (2012), Sharjah Biennale, United Arab Emirates (2011), Istanbul Biennale (2009) and the Taipei Biennial (2008).
Zanny’s work is often collaborative, she has worked with The Choir of Love, Oliver Ressler, Refugee Art Project, Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat?) among others. Zanny has run numerous practical and theory workshops including working with children and young people and is interested in open source learning and radical pedagogy. She is a founding member of the art collective Undrawing the Line.
zannybegg.com

Oliver Ressler (Knittelfeld, Austria, 1970) lives and works in Vienna and produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had more than 60 solo exhibitions, among them in Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville. He is currently preparing solo exhibitions for SALT Galata, Istanbul and MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest. Ressler has participated in more than 300 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris and at the biennials in Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), and Quebec (2014). Ressler is the first price winner of the newly established Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016.
www.ressler.at

Jelena Ilić Todorović, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Imperative, 2015, 6’36”
Producer: Academy of Arts of the University of Banja Luka

Pre-election rally in the street. People obediently go out and truly listen to the new promises of those whom they wish to vote for. Politicians tell stories which make people fall into a trance and a state of euphoria. When it’s all over and the elections are over, the harsh everyday life is all that remains.

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Jelena Ilić Todorović was born in 1983 in Bosanka Dubica. She is a student of the third year of the Film and television department, a group of Editing, at the Academy of Arts of the University of Banja Luka. With her films, which she worked as a student exercise at the Academy, has participated in several international film festivals. At Sarajevo Film Festival was awarded the Special Jury Prize for documentary “Imperative”.
Filmography (director and editor): Pasivni posmatrači (Bystanders) – short fiction, 2014; Mokoš (Mokosh) – short fiction, 2014; Imperative – documentary, 2015; Noćna zvona (The night bells) – short fiction, 2015

Undrawing the Line (Mona Moradveisi, Safdar Ahmed, Zanny Begg, Murtaza Ali Jafari), Australia
The Swamp, 2016, 21’42”
Language: English

The Swamp is a short animation produced within and about the experience of detention in Australia’s refugee prisons. Over 20 people contributed drawings to create a dystopian landscape within which dissenting voice discuss the murky and rising waters of borders, white privilege and refugee politics.Guest contributors include Thomas Wales, Hani Abdile, Ghassan Hage and Oliver Slewa.

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Undrawing the Line is an art collective formed within and beside the experience of detention in Australia. Its membership shifts for each project. Lead artists for The Swamp are Mona Moradveisi, Safdar Ahmed, Zanny Begg, Zeina Iaali, Susie Nelson and Murtaza Ali Jafar with drawing contributions from Bossley Park High Students, Bashir Ahmed, Parastoo Bahrami, Neda Bahrami, Mohammad and Madina (some names have been changed to protect the security of participants).
zannybegg.com/undrawing-the-line

Selda Asal, Turkey
Next Turn & I dream, but …, 2009, 12’15”
Sound Production: Serdar Ateşer
Language: French, English subtitiles

Next Turn and I dream, but … are rap music videos made in the frame of 2+1 project. Next Turn‘s lyrics was written by the local immigration background teenagers of Lille, between the ages of 16-18, I dream, but … was made with the youngsters between the ages of 17-19. All of them participated in a workshop that took place in the city, in March 2009. The subject of the video is based on difficulties and dreams on a conceptual basis.
2+1 (one of the sub-groups of Apartment Project) is a rap music video project, targeting youngsters between ages 15-22, and gives young people the possibility to try forms of expressing themselves through writing songs, play music and films. Since 2004, Selda Asal as 2+1 (selda asal+ozgur erkok moroder) has been engaging various artists from Turkey and also from various cultures at their location: France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Norway, Austria, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and Turkey.

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Selda Asal was born in Izmir and currently living in Istanbul and Berlin. She studied Musicology and Art. She is initiator of the Apartment Project – Istanbul and Berlin.
www.kultur.apartmentproject.org
www.seldaasal.com

Oliver Ressler, Austria
Emergency Turned Upside-Down, 2016, 16’12”
Language: English

Oliver Ressler’s new film Emergency Turned Upside-Down confronts the cynical and inhuman discourse that calls refugees’ presence in Europe “emergency” when that word should be applied to the war, terror and economic strangulation that forced people to move. Emergency Turned Upside-Down is set within the tension that runs through social life right now: on one hand the vast imaginative potential of a borderless world, and on the other the petty prison of nationality and all the external, internal and social borders it entails. The film discusses borders performing their everyday function: managing, calibrating and governing global passages of people; dividing and “zoning” into different types of migrants and non-migrants who depend on the trickle of income squeezed from endless work.

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Oliver Ressler (Knittelfeld, Austria, 1970) lives and works in Vienna and produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler has had more than 60 solo exhibitions, among them in Berkeley Art Museum, USA; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt; Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo – CAAC, Seville. He is currently preparing solo exhibitions for SALT Galata, Istanbul and MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest. Ressler has participated in more than 300 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; MASSMoCA, North Adams, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris and at the biennials in Seville (2006), Moscow (2007), Taipei (2008), Lyon (2009), Gyumri (2012), Venice (2013), Athens (2013, 2015), and Quebec (2014). Ressler is the first price winner of the newly established Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016.
www.ressler.at

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