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First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) opens in a small room, where a therapist is in consultation with a young man. Through the use of hypnosis, the young man is experiencing a ma¬nipulation of his unconscious motivation. A feeling of debt is implanted in him through psycho-suggestion. First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) proposes the idea that the indebt¬edness of the citizen is not only a causality of a flawed eco¬nomic system, but also the last relation that connects the citizen to a community. The only sure way to be part of any power relation is to enter the creditor/debtor relationship. Debt might hence be something that the citizen uncontiously desires - as the only means of experiencing community. First Citizen (House of the Deaf Man) paints an awry portrait of the indebted man with a little help from Goya’s painting ‘Duel with Cudgels’.

Soren Thilo Funder’s works are formal investigations of the power relations of modern day society. Through the use of conceptual visual strategies, cinematic narratives and mise en scène, the works aim to expose the precariousness of contemporary society using fiction to generate new potential spaces for political contemplations and counter-memory. Soren Thilo Funder has an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The School of Art and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been an artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, SOMA in Mexico City, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt and Platform Garanti in Istanbul. He was represented at the 19th Biennale of Sydney, 1st Copenhagen Art Festival, eva International Biennial of Visual Art - “After The Future”, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2nd International Moscow Biennial for Young Art, Manifesta 8 – Parallel Events and 6th International Liverpool Biennial.

Red Tape (Don`t go down into Tarlabasi) Video - HD AppleProRes Duration: 7:09 min. 2010 Coming to Istanbul I was told immediately that I should not go down into Tarlabasi. The ghettoized area Tarlabasi is, apart from not being all that dangerous, also the next poor area to be gentrified. Red Tape takes it outset in the Japanese horror film Kairo and in the mix between documentary and horror fiction it aims to distort the image of ghettoization.

Soren Thilo Funder is a visual artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His works are audio-visual productions dealing with diverse cultural fields and integrating aspects of critical theory, literature, theater, cinema, Sci-Fi, Horror, political activism and other counter-cultural disciplines. The works are formal investigations of the power relations of modern day society. Through the use of cinematic narratives, choreography and mise en scène, the works strive to expose the precariousness of contemporary society and the broken link between politics and the political. The works use the fictional and extra-real to pose new questions and generate a new potential space , a third place, for political contemplations and counter-memory. Soren Thilo Funder has exhibited his works in international galleries, film festivals, museum exhibitions and public space exhibitions. He has been an artist-in-residency at Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt Am Main, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul and Townhouse Gallery in Cairo. He was furthermore represented at the 2nd International Moscow Biennial for Young Art, the 6th International Liverpool Biennial and Manifesta 8.

In GAME Engine (Orange Bulletproof Kids) we are invited to an exclusive press meeting at an undisclosed location. Here, the spokesperson of a notorious game developer, presents a brand new game engine. A game engine that promises revolutionary in-game experiences, the layout of which are never fully disclosed in protection of its intellectual property value. This oral evasive manoeuvre leads the spokesperson into complex landscapes in which game and reality, body and avatar, the sensorial and the informational, blend together. Parallel to this fiction scenario, a group of CS:GO athletes are recreating their game experiences, using their bodies as vehicles for motoric and visual memory.

Soren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions insisting on new meaning forming in the thin membrane negotiating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters. Soren Thilo Funder’s previous exhibitions include solo presentations at Turku Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Tranen Contemporary Art Center, Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art and Den Frie - Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. He was furthermore represented at the 19th Biennale of Sydney, eva International Biennial of Visual Art - “After The Future”, 12th Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta 8 – Parallel Events and 6th International Liverpool Biennial. He is currently doing a PhD in Artistic Research at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen.

Archipelago (No one is an island) splashes heedlessly into a fictional exploration of the high frequency trading firm Archipelago and its existence in the strange socio-political, socio-economical and psychological reality of the proliferating internet and lives lived in wireless connectivity. In this business realm, human activity, unfolding in virtual spaces and directed by algorithms, is mainly left to perform the rituals that gives the bodiless stream a body; performing the myths of human ingenuity and dominance; repeating the hierarchical patterns that represent human social activity. The dramatic structure of the two channel video work shapes an archipelago in itself. Every character inhabiting the depicted environment forms an island within herself, literally plugged into a closed circuit; AirPods in ear; screen glued to face. Islands that seem to react upon one another even across time particulars and image frames.

Soren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions insisting on new meaning forming in the thin membrane negotiating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters. Soren Thilo Funder has an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The School of Art and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of the Arts. He has been artist-in-residence at ISCP in New York, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, SOMA in Mexico City, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt and Platform Garanti in Istanbul. Previous exhibitions include solo presentations at Turku Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Tranen Contemporary Art Center, Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art and Den Frie - Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. He was furthermore represented at the 9th Bucharest Biennale, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, the 1st eva International Biennial of Visual Art, the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta 8 and the 6th International Liverpool Biennial. He recently finished his PhD in Artistic Research at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen, titled “Oceanic Horror - or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism”.

Mirror-touch synesthesia" is a neurological phenomenon where a person feels the same touch as they see another person experiencing. Stimuli on one sense thus trigger a feeling in another. In the video work ’Mirror Touch (Archipelago DLC_01)’, employees at the high-frequency trading company Archipelago™ are subjected to a series of experimental tests in the development of synthetic empathy. The process aims to reunite the body's space with the cognitive; the corporeal with the immaterial; the real with the imaginary. Accompanied by the film's actors, the viewer is led by a commanding voice on a suggestive journey from the trading terminals to the physical reality of the factory. Here, we are reminded of the factory floor's still indisputable and violent physical reality and the worker's body as a physical witness to the violent imprint of progress.

Søren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions that insist on new meaning being formed in the thin membrane separating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters.

When the day has declined, the night overwhelms us. An unusual bestiality envelops us, it does not belong to us but attracts us to itself. Ciacco develops from a reinterpretation of the sixth canto of the Inferno of the Divine Comedy, where Dante and Virgilio enter the third circle. In the Tartarean circle gluttonous sinners are scourged by a violent rain and tormented by the gigantic and frightening dog Cerberus, feral triad. Ciacco is the gaze through which we are spectators and actors, as well as dogs: the eyes of a damned incessantly hit by a cyclical storm of images, instincts, rain. A damned who lies beneath the beastly torment inflicted by Cerberus, a gigantic, frightening three-headed dog. Three, the number is repeated: triple is the beast, triple the setting in which it navigates. As if we were in the amphitheatre of Dante’s hell, sitting on Ciacco’s lap, we observe the spectacle from the third tier of benches. On stage, the torture of the damned is revealed by the staging itself and by the epic character of the natural environment. The sequences in the film become the viewer’s exploration in “this long night of the world” that we are experiencing.

Valentina Furian (b. 1989, IT) is an Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy. She is working mainly with moving images. She studied Visual Arts at University Iuav of Venice. Her research investigates the relationship between human and nature. She is particularly interested in exploring animal domestication as a form of human domination as well as human domestication in relation to social rules. Her films have been exhibited in institutional and indipendent spaces such as: Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai, CN; VISIO - European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images; Collezione FARNESINA, Mattatoio, MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; MUSE - Science Museum of Trento; UNA galleria, Piacenza; Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Treviso; MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; The Blank Contemporary Art, Bergamo; Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa; Case chiuse, Careof and ViaFarini, Milan; Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa and Microclima, Venice, IT; Sunaparanta Center for Contemporary Art, Goa; Italian Cultural Institute in Mumbai, IND; Goyki3 Art Incubator, Sopot, PL.

This hybrid video blends fictional and documentary source material in an imaginative re-creation of a crucial political moment in U.S. history. Co-scripted by Rick Moody (The Ice Storm), it tells the story of an FBI agent who confesses to his involvement in the nationwide search for Angela Davis, the famous radical philosopher and black activist who was on the FBI`s "Ten Most Wanted" list in 1970 and an underground fugitive for two months.

"Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has performed, lectured, exhibited and curated around the world since 1988. She is the author of "English is Broken Here" (The New Press,1995), "The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings" (Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of "Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas" (Routledge, 1999) and "Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self" (Abrams, 2003). Fusco is a recipient of a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco`s performances and videos have been included in such events as The Whitney Biennial, Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The London International Theatre Festival, and the National Review of Live Art. Her 1993 documentary about her caged Amerindian performance with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The Couple in the Cage, has been screened at over two hundred venues around the world. She recently curated a comprehensive exhibition on racial taxonomy in American photography for the International Center for Photography, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, that is currently on tour. Her latest video, a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert, was selected for the 2004 Shanghai Biennale and will screen at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Her video, Els Segadors, commissioned by the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam in 2001 was featured in the ICP`s first Triennial in 2003. Her video installation, Dolores from 10 to 10, received an honorable mention from the 2003 Transmediale Festival in Berlin. Fusco`s writings have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The Nation, Ms., Frieze, Third Text, and Nka: Journal of African Art, as well as a number of anthologies. She is the co-founder and co-moderator of Undercurrents, an on-line discussion about feminism, new technologies and globalization. Fusco is an associate professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia University`s School of the Arts." Courtesy Video data bank

In Cleaning & Cleansing, director Thomas Fürhapter offers a meticulous and haunting meditation on modern society’s obsession with purity, order, and control. Through a series of observational vignettes, the film examines spaces and practices where physical cleanliness intersects with psychological and ideological cleansing. With precise cinematography and a minimalistic narrative approach, Fürhapter challenges viewers to reflect on the boundaries between hygiene, surveillance, and conformity. The film unfolds like a quiet, unsettling symphony of routines and regulations, inviting us to question what lies beneath the surface of our polished realities.

Thomas Fürhapter was born in Vienna, Austria. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and is now a writer, director and producer. His films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals including Sarajevo, Zurich FF, CPH:DOX, DOK Leipzig, DOK.Munich, Sheffield, DOCVILLE Leuven, BAFICI, Anthology Film Archives NY, DOXA Vancouver, FID Marseille, etc.

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A collection of public picture is recorded and chronicled to draw attention to how the archivist, the act of archiving, and the archive itself affect one another through the techniques and practices that develop and maintain the resulting archived content. By suspending at the very beginning of the study the following quote by Jacques Derrida: "There is no archive without a place of consignment, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. There is no archive without outside", an investigation into the conditions by which archiving and the archive are able to exist, is set in motion. As the camera shifts its attention from passers-by on the streets to the collection's interior, archivists are seen searching and selecting pictures and illustrations for the catalogue by severing them page-by-page from their books of origin. Illustrations then pass through a series of procedures that will see them re-shaped, catalogued, and re-classified before they are finally filed for public browsing. As illustrations of astronautical, historical, archaeological, and anthropological content are seen on record, being torn, cropped, and inscribed upon, the historic power of the content is metaphorically reduced and stripped away as it becomes an assimilated and transformed item in the collection?s vast history. In a scene that brings to the brink the limits behind classification directives, a grinning man?s portrait is caught between an archivist?s decision to classify it under "disease", or "skin", due to the picture?s emphasis on the subject?s condition with vitiligo. In the final sequence, the pictures, now fully integrated into the collection, fall under a new set of selecting eyes, this time while in the hands of patrons, as they choose the images for their own objectives. The study is brought full circle as a patron is seen leaving the building with his pictures and then disappearing amongst the passers-by. Departing with him is not only an infinitely small portion of the collection but (as the video was set out to record) a testament of performative acts brought forth through procedures, a living piece of the archivist?s hands, and a history of its very own.

Paul Gabel received a BFA from Binghamton University (1994-1998) for his work in drawing and printmaking. During his training, Gabel was a courtroom illustrator for a local television station in Binghamton, covering the murder cases Pennsylvania v. Dr. Stephen Barry Scher (1997), and New York v. Guiseppe Cataldo (1998). Afterwards, Gabel went on to work for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Drawing Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2001, he was hired on to help develop The New York Public Library Art Collection and, since 2005, The New York Public Library Picture Collection. Paul Gabel was born in Kingston, Pennsylvania, in 1976 and brought up in Binghamton, New York. Today he lives and works in New York City. Paul Gabel?s video projects (which have explored themes concerning cognition, remembrance, faith, authority, presence, absence) have gained visibility through publication, group exhibitions, and international video art festivals. The Journal of Motion and Sound highlighted "The Impossibility of Remaining" (2003) in their first DVD compilation of 40 international artists. Distribution rights for "The Impossibility of Remaining", 2004?s "The Seen and Unseen" and 2005?s "I will always wait, It will never be" (Gabel?s latest video piece on the possibility of mourning against the current state of Ground Zero), are held by The Film-maker?s Cooperative, the largest archive of independent and avant-garde films in the world. Gabel continues to seek new venues for these projects and for his latest video study "For Safekeeping (Scissions, Sutures and Naming)". For Safekeeping is an experimental documentary that chronicles the procedures behind an image archive to offer a view on how origin, history, and authority are formed, ordered, and sustained. After recently having its first Canadian screening, at the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec in September 2006, Gabel?s video piece "I will always wait (It will never be)" is now showing at PULSAR CARACAS 2006, Encuentro Internacional de Multimedia, from October 1st to November 18th.

A film that captures Wall Street at a point between deconstruction (the shrouded Deutsche Bank) reconstruction (7 World Trade Center) and destruction (the absent Trade Towers), the phrases "I will always wait" and "It will never be" make possible a lamentation for the tragic September 11th event, at a time when its physical indications are in the midst of upheaval by urban renewal and the flow of progress.

Paul Gabel was born in 1976. He received a BFA from Binghamton University (1994-1998) for his work in drawing and printmaking. During his training, Gabel was a courtroom illustrator for a local television station in Binghamton covering the murder cases Pennsylvania v. Dr. Stephen Barry Scher (1997) and New York v. Guiseppe Cataldo (1998). Afterwards, Gabel went on to work for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Drawing Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2001, he was hired on to help develop The New York Public Library Art Collection and, since 2005, The New York Public Library Picture Collection. Paul Gabel was born in Kingston, Pennsylvania, in 1976 and brought up in Binghamton, New York. Today he lives and works in New York City. Paul Gabel?s video projects (which have explored themes concerning cognition, remembrance, faith, authority, presence and absence) have gained visibility through publication, group exhibitions and international video art festivals. The Journal of Motion and Sound highlighted The Impossibility of Remaining (2003) in their first DVD compilation of 40 international artists. Distribution rights for The Impossibility of Remaining, 2004?s The Seen and Unseen and 2005?s I will always wait, It will never be (Gabel?s latest video piece on the possibility of mourning against the current state of Ground Zero) are held by The Film-maker?s Cooperative, the largest archive of independent and avant-garde films in the world. While Gabel continues to seek new venues for these films, he is also at work on his upcoming project titled, For Safekeeping (scissions, sutures and naming), a video study that follows the processes behind an image archive. I will always wait (It will never be) was recently shown at The Hull 4th International Short Film Festival in the United Kingdom and the Luksuz Film Festival in Slovenia.

An eerie whispering voice tries to comfort anxious souls while the sky is invaded by fake objects. The female protagonist resembles a school shooter with Kylie Jenner-like lips and eyebrows. An American landscape of nearly bankrupt casinos and desolated neighborhoods. Heartache and burning baseball caps. A plane hangs still in mid-air as someone tells us ”Do not believe what you think”... NO PANIC BABY, by artists trio Leo Gabin, is an evocative love story steeped in anxiety and extreme paranoia. The film captures the inner sense of irreality, as emblematic of an era as it takes its last gasp.

Leo Gabin is a trio of Belgian artists, who have worked together since 2000. Their practice includes painting, installation, sculpture & film. They take inspiration from the proliferation of user generated media on the internet and the until now undefined space straddling the public and private realms. Work by Leo Gabin has been exhibited and screened at museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), White Cube (London), Museum M Wood (Beijing), CPH:DOX (selected New:Vision award), Nowe Horyzonty (selected Grand Prix), IFFR (Critics’ Choice), Torino Film Festival, CineMarfa, among others.

The whole Paris is covered by a GPS-based large scale virtual object “SAN Foood office Paris”, that can be seen using the augmented reality app SAN (download - san.lv). At the center of the object, 25-kilometer-high SAN towers are located near the Eiffel Tower. Foood office based on the idea: UN estimates that by 2050 the number of world’s population will reach 9 billion, therefore it will be necessary to produce by 70 per cent more food. Unlike the tendency to think how to produce more and more, the FOOOD project proposes genetically modified human metabolic bacteria that have been endowed with the ability to synthesise enzymes that break down cellulose. Cellulose, a simple sugar glucose polymer, makes up a significant part of plant biomass. In the ordinary human metabolism, cellulose is indigestible and totally without nutritional value. That is why these enzymes that break down cellulose would allow the use of everyday food products from the vegetable world with almost a third more efficiency. They would also allow the more effective use of completely new types of food resources for example, cellulose rich wood and paper. If we managed to create a complete process to break down cellulose then humans would obtain 11% more kilocalories from 100 grams of paper than from 100 grams of bread (400 kilocalories from paper and 355 from bread).

Gints Gabr?ns (b. 1970, Valmiera, Latvia) works mainly with installations and new media art. From 2016 to 2020, he developed the augmented reality mobile application SAN. Solo exhibitions include: Transreality Zirgu Street, Riga (SAN, 2018); Out of Nowhere, Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Paris (2015); The Bright Sky, Watermans New Media Gallery, London (2010); Paramirrors, Latvian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); Invisible. Special Effects of a Parallel World, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2005); and STARIX, 26th Sao Paulo Biennial (2004). Group exhibitions include: 2019 "The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100, Garage Museum, Moscow Obvious and Incredible, Gallery 427, Riga (2018); New Eden, Arctic Biennial, Sølvberget Galleri, Stavanger, Norvay (2016); Science Inspires Art: Food, New York Hall of Science, New York (2016); Visionary Structures. From Johansons to Johanson, Bozar Art Centre, Brussels (2015); and the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011). He lives and works in Riga.

It is a documentation of the collective hypnosis session at a full moon night. During the session, hypnotist is telling that a bright daylight is breaking in and with the manipulation with artificial light the night is turning night into day. When hypnotized people wake up, they really see a light day. The viewer can follow the transformations of the space and perception or he can be hypnotized and become a participant of the imaginary happening.

Gints Gabrāns Born in 1970 in Valmiera, lives in Riga, Latvia. 1989 - Liepāja Secondary School of Applied Art 1989 - Latvian Academy of Art, Department of Scenography Fields of activity: installations, objects, videoart, painting, stage design.

"By transforming a vagrant from Riga railway station into a media star, Gabrans attempts to unmask the mechanisms inherent in media strategies. For the project Gabrans founded Neostar advertising company. `Starix` is mixing meanings of the English word `star` thet inevitably reminds the viewer of popular culture, and of the similarly sounding Russian word meaning simply `old man`, in this case somebody who is homeless but in the context of an art project might become a star." source: kiasma

On the eastern side of the Railway station in the town of Split, just beside the railway track, people are living in houses built long ago for railway personal. This short documentary follows them in one short moment, which represents their whole lives.

Tonći Gaćina was born in Split in 1983. In 2007 he turned into the Academy of Fine Arts in Split, at the Film and Video department. He is currently working in visual arts and film. Since 2006 he made a couple of experimental films, and "22:22 Split - Zagreb" is his first documentary.

`The mirror is dark and inky` is comprised of images of daily life in Iran- driving through the city in the afternoon, playing board games with friends- alongside the narration of a neighbour concerned about a whale living in a bath in her apartment building. As the film progresses, we leave the city behind and move into the forest in northern Iran, where the narration turns inwards to a “feeling that does not come from my brain, it more erupts and descends like a fog, barely perceptible until it is enveloping, with a similar cold, dewy feeling.” The whale is the mirror and the mirror is dark and inky. Filmed on location in Tehran and northern Iran, two participants narrate the film and perform the roles.

Kevin Gaffney is a visual artist working in film and photography, living and working in Dublin. He graduated from the Royal College of Art`s MA Photography & Moving Image in 2011, and received an Honorary Mention from the Startpoint Prize for Emerging Artists. He was awarded a Sky Academy Arts Scholarship for the development of a new body of work (2015); was an UNESCO-Aschberg laureate artist in residence at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong Residency in South Korea (2014); and received a Film Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland for the creation of a new film while artist in residence at the Taipei Artist Village, Taiwan (2014). His work is part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art`s collection and has been shown in exhibitions and film festivals internationally, including: Out There, Thataway at CCA Derry~Londonderry (2015); the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival (Scotland, 2015); We at Catalyst Arts (Belfast, 2012); Abandon Normal Devices at Cornerhouse (Manchester, 2012); and solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Institute CAI02 (as part of the Sapporo International Art Festival, Japan, 2014); the Galway Arts Centre (2013); and RUA RED South Dublin Arts Centre (2011).

Space Down is a feature-length collage film made with amateur footage retrieved on the Internet. It documents the bootstrap of an astronaut community here on Earth who migrates to space in the confines of their homes. The film is a detournement of the COVID-19 lockdowns that renders visible the Earth momentarily as one of the biggest space analogues in history.

In his ongoing quest to explode the film frame, Dominic Gagnon’s flurry of internet collage films not only cull the lonely, shocking margins of YouTube to captivate us with pixelated self-representations of despair, anger, and survivalism, they also challenge and question the definition of what constitutes cinema. (Text: J.P. Sniadecki)

L'Affaire Bajazet is an open-air, costumed adaptation of Racine's play of the same name, in which the passions of the heart and the stakes of power clash in early 17th-century Byzantium. Love, pain and death are just words here.

Simon Gaillot is a young filmmaker. At the age of twenty, he decides to shoot an open-air film every summer based on a play. In keeping with Jean Cocteau's belief that cinematographic art is above all a craft, he works, with a constant concern for to establish a relationship of proximity and necessity between a text, a face, a body and a landscape. He has thus been able to adapt, with great freedom, works by Julien Gracq (Le Roi pêcheur), Heinrich von Kleist (Penthesilea), Jean Racine (Bajazet), Robert Walser (Aschenbrödel), Oscar Wilde (Salomé), Fernando Pessoa (O Marinheiro), William Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale), Torquato Tasso (Aminta) and Charles Péguy (Ève).

Aslan Gaisumov développe une œuvre qui se nourrit de mémoire personnelle et collective, mais les transforme et les transcende aussi. Son travail se situe entre l’immédiateté visuelle et le commentaire social, entre le momentané et le monumental. Si elle se compose surtout de vidéo et d’installations incluant des objets trouvés ou confectionnés spécifiquement pour la pièce, Gaisumov expose parfois des photographies et des œuvres sur papier aussi. People of No Consequence est le titre que Gaisumov a choisi pour cette installation vidéo : un plan séquence de la première rencontre d’un groupe de personnes âgées qui ont toutes vécu la déportation de la totalité du peuple tchétchène vers l’Asie centrale en 1944, il y a 72 ans. Il réutilise le titre pour sa constellation de trois œuvres récentes, incluant la vidéo Volga (2015) et l’œuvre tridimensionnelle Household (2016).

Aslan Gaisumov :son parcours relève presque du miracle : aujourd’hui âgé de 25 ans, l’artiste a grandi dans le nord du Caucase tchétchène, région marquée par la guerre civile et le terrorisme, et vécu sept ans dans un camp de réfugiés avec sa famille. A travers ses oeuvres marquantes, Aslan Gaisumov trouve le moyen de traiter son traumatisme et d’attirer l’attention sur la situation en Tchétchénie.

Dans cette vidéo faisant preuve d’une simplicité des plus efficaces, l’artiste de 24 ans Aslan Gaisumov nous plonge dans le conflit tragique auquel est confrontée sa Tchétchénie natale. Ce document, en partie autobiographique, montre comment les familles tentent de fuir le pays en s’entassant par douzaines dans de minuscules voitures. Le langage intuitif et poétique de Gaisumov vise à signifier les conséquences de la guerre, associées à la perte des traditions et des repères d’identité. Lorsque la survie devient une nécessité, les constructions fragiles comme le langage, les contes de fée et les symboles disparaissent. La mémoire et les histoires familiales se font rares et sont la plupart du temps perdues à jamais. Mais ceux qui parviennent à fuir, tel Gaisumov, représentent une nouvelle génération. On observe alors un nouveau leitmotiv, où le passé et le présent s’entremêlent pour créer de nouveaux symboles et métaphores perpétuant la continuité d’un peuple.

Aslan Gaisumov son parcours relève presque du miracle : aujourd`hui âgé de 25 ans, l`artiste a grandi dans le nord du Caucase tchétchène, région marquée par la guerre civile et le terrorisme, et vécu sept ans dans un camp de réfugiés avec sa famille. A travers ses oeuvres marquantes, Aslan Gaisumov trouve le moyen de traiter son traumatisme et d`attirer l`attention sur la situation en Tchétchénie.