Transition Worlds is a video program that focuses on personal, environmental, political, social, economic, and psychological change in recognition of the ongoing global turbulence started in 2011. It features international artists from Berlin, Geneva, Chicago, Petersburg (Russia), Romania, Egypt and Ireland. Two of the films that will be screened also deal specifically with the events in the Middle East: The Video Diaries by Cairo-based artist Khaled Hafez, and 40 Shades of Grey by Irish artist Nicky Larkin.
The program will take place at the Artfoyer, an independent art space located on Albisstr. 27, Wollishofen, Zurich
February 29, starting at 7pm
In Transit, Joanne Richardson
30 min, 2008
In Transit is a diary of a journey through space and time, made up of subjective impressions of the present and childhood memories of the past. While traveling across Romania in the year of its EU accession, the monologue reflects on the meaning of transition, the re-writing of history and the relation between images and memory.
Noé, Pauline Julier
22 min, 2010
The viewer sees through the eyes of Noah, taken to the end of the world to a place where all seeds are kept safe. He can no longer stand the ordered space in which he is enclosed to live and decides to leave. Outside the world has disappeared under the ice. Poetic metaphor for a state of lucid madness, the film suggest the possibility of a world uninhabited and sterile, a white nightmare…
Following the Line of Arguments: Strada Fabricii, Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage
6:30 min, 2010-2012
The film is in the form of an essay and follows the relocation of the Nokia plant from Bochum to Cluj, Romania.
Lessons on Dis-Consent, Chto Delat?
18min16sec, 2011
This work continues the development of musicals (Songspiel *) over which Chto Delat? and composer Michael Krutik have been working for the past 3 years. Lessons on Dis-content is a concert given by a “chorus of patients” in the context of Chto Delat?’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, that engages in dialogue with the audience on the nature of communism, health, and the future of our society.
Battling Inertia, Matei Bejenaru
14min, 2011
Battling Inertia was the name of the literary circle of a factory in Iasi, Romania. Founded by one of the workers of the factory, it offered an opportunity for hobby poets and writers to share their compositions and literary interest after work. This documentary focuses on the founder’s story.
On Blind Faith, Gabriela Vanga
9min9sec, 2010
Eight children smash over two hundreds china figurines against a wall, in a nondescript urban setting. Then the shards of china are picked and grouped, the figurines are patiently pieced and glued together. Plural symbolic extensions coalesce into a meditation on education, but also beyond, obliquely inquiring into social processes of learning and unlearning, their effects and aftereffects – invoking all and not settling for any single interpretation.
What is Capitalism, Dara Greenwald
10min, 2006
A failed attempt to understand capitalism, do we experience it so fully that we can’t even put it into words?
About the artists:
Joanne Richardson is a media theorist and video artist currently living in Berlin. She completed an M.A. in philosophy at New York University, and postgraduate studies in critical theory and film & video at Duke University. From 2002-2009, she was the co-founder and director of D Media (www.dmedia.ro), a Romanian NGO active in the intersections of art, activism and new technologies.
Pauline Julier graduated from the Institute of Political Studies of Grenoble in 2002 and from the school of Photography of Arles in 2007. She presents some of her films in collective exhibitions and film festivals in Paris (Centre Pompidou) or in Berlin, Zagreb, Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Lyon, Grenoble. Her movie Pamiec had been published in 2009 to Waknine Editions (http://margueritewaknine.free.fr). She received the 2010 Swiss Art Award in Art-Basel for the installation of her last film : Noah. Pauline currently lives and works in Geneva.
Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage live and work in Berlin and have been collaborating since 2001. Both studied together in the Class of Photography and Media at the Academy of Visual Arts of Leipzig (Prof. Heidi Specker).
The platform Chto delat/What is to be done?was founded with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
Gabriela Vanga was born in 1977 in Bucharest, Romania and currently lives and works in Paris, France.
Matei Bejenaru is an artist, media professor, and the founder of Periferic Performance Festival in Iasi, Romania. He currently lives and works in Iasi.
Dara Greenwald was the director of the Video Data Bank in Chicago, an arts activist, artist, and organizer. Her exhibition, Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960’s to Now, co-organized with her partner Josh MacPhee, made an essential contribution to the understanding of art’s impact on social movements. Dara passed away at the age of 40 on January 11.
March 8, starting at 7pm
The Video Diaries, Khaled Hafez
6min19sec, 2011
Khaled Hafez’s latest work, The Video Diaries, is the artist’s response to the revolution that swept through Egypt in January and February 2011. This three-channel video has been adapted for Ibraaz into a single-channel work in which three windows display footage either shot by the artist or taken from social and international media.
40 Shades of Grey, Nicky Larkin
1hr24min, 2011
Nicky Larkin’s film, premiering in Dublin and Zurich in March, is an experimental, feature-length, non-narrative film piece, shot on location in Israel and Palestine. Some very black and white ideas and opinions exist, particularly in Europe, when people think of this notorious hot-spot. This project aims to explore the forty shades of grey and the many stories that exist in between the definite black and white opinions that we are presented with daily in our Western news media.
About the artists:
Khaled Hafez was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 where he currently lives and works. He studied medicine and even received medical degrees, but he gave up his medical practice for a career in the arts. He later obtained an MFA in new media and digital arts from Transart Institute (New York, USA) and Danube University Krems (Austria). His work has been shown at international biennials including Manifesta, Bamoko, and Sharjah among others, and in international museums including the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, and others.
Nicky Larkin was born in Birr, Ireland, in 1983. He studied Fine Art in Galway-Mayo IT and Chelsea College of Art, London. He has exhibited internationally at film and video festivals such as Optica Madrid International Video Art Festival, Spain, The Locarno International Film Festival, Switzerland, and the European Media Art Festival, Germany. His work has also been shown in museums and galleries.
Itinerant Projects 