New Selected Artist’s Moving Image includes three short films by filmmakers and artist’s Bernardo Zanotta, Zuza Banasińska and Şirin Bahar Demirel. The filmmakers featured in the program will be present for a Q&A.
New work by Dutch artists and experimental filmmakers that was recently added to Eye’s collection. The selection highlights recent trends in the artist’s film and the short experimental film.
Programme:
WILD FRUITS (BERNARDO ZANOTTA, 2024, 35’)
A series of episodes in the life of a fictional servant of French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, Jean Aurand, against the backdrop of the 16th century colonial expansion and religious wars. After Jean’s return to France from Brazil, he meets Montaigne and develops an intimate relationship with him. One day while walking they stumble upon a group of time travelers from a distant future, on a mission that will change the life of these two men forever.
GRANDMAMAUNTSISTERCAT (ZUZA BANASIŃSKA, 2024, 22’)
Created from archival materials of the Educational Film Studio in Łódź, the film tells the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandistic tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a site of auto-fictional memory, its scientific register shifted toward a treatment of the images themselves as specimens.
The classic Slavic witch figure, Baba Yaga, is reimagined as a prehistoric goddess from the time of matriarchy. This transformation provokes layered reflections on kinship and identity as the child navigates binary gender roles. The women of the family find a home in the archive, engaging in a process of self and world-making that transforms the often sexist and anthropocentric images into tools of freedom and resistance.
- BETWEEN DELICATE AND VIOLENT (ŞIRIN BAHAR DEMIREL, 2023, 15’) An experimental documentary that considers hands as memory places that can both accumulate and transfer memories. Through hands and their creations, it imagines unearthing lost memories that have not been included in performative, socially acceptable family albums.
Can we see the violence of the painter’s hands in the brush strokes of his paintings? Could cross-stitch be an alphabet of some sort? The video connects with the director’s personal past through imagination and creation, while opening up to larger human stories such as domestic violence and intergenerational trauma and resistance.
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