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May 27–28
The Greenroom: Programs and Events
Film Screenings in New York City: May 27 and 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 – 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, as well as New School and CCS Bard faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID.
Two evenings of special screenings introduce The Greenroom, a large-scale exhibition exploring the “documentary turn” in recent contemporary art practice and its heritage in relation to the history of film, documentary photography, and television. Set to open in Fall 2008, The Greenroom, curated by CCS Bard graduate program director Maria Lind, will feature works by more than forty artists and extend beyond the exhibition format to include a long-term research project and related publications.
The research project is a collaboration between the Center for Curatorial Studies and the artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl, and is co-sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and CCS Bard.
These preview screenings, organized by CCS graduate student and curatorial assistant Fionn Meade, include selected works from artists participating in the exhibition.
Program 1: Tuesday, May 27, 6:30-8:30pm
- Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (2007, 11 minutes)
- Rosalind Nashashibi, Ambassador (with Lucy Skaer), (2004, 5 minutes)
- Matthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story (1999, 21 minutes)
- Chantal Akerman, D'Est: Au bord de la fiction (1993, 110 minutes)
Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (2007, 11 minutes)
Recently commissioned by the Foksal Foundation and Hermès, Mary Koszmary considers the complex legacies and realities of European anti-Semitism and xenophobia. A young man, played by Polish leftist author and politician Slawomir Sierakowski, enters an empty stadium and entreats the three million Jewish Poles who left Poland to return to their homeland while a troupe of Boy and Girl Scout-like youths stencil a message of hope for reconciliation across the stadium floor.
Rosalind Nashashibi, Ambassador (with Lucy Skaer) (2004, 5 minutes)
Playing with the rules of ethnographic framing, this monochrome study of the British Consul moving about his Hong Kong residence presents the enigma of a representative figure within an un-exoticized, quotidian context.
Matthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story (1999, 21 minutes)
Buckingham uses the cinematic space of film and video to stage personalized narratives that question the relationships between the living presence of the viewer, the phantasms of history, and the politics of institutions, archives, and cultural memory. Situation Leading to a Story recounts and complicates the artist’s having found four amateur movies dating from the 1920s in an abandoned box on a New York street.
Chantal Akerman, D'Est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction) (1993, 110 minutes)
D’Est retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Akerman wanted to make shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc "before it was too late," reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction. By filming "everything that touched me," Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of a subjective crossing.
Program 2: Wednesday, May 28, 6:30-8:30pm
- Anri Sala, Dammi I Colori (2003, 16 minutes)
- Harun Farocki, Workers Leave the Factory (1995, 36 minutes)
- Hito Steyerl, November (2004, 25 minutes)
- Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, We Will Live to See These Things or Five Pictures of What May Come to Pass (2007, 47 minutes)
Anri Sala, Dammi I Colori (2003, 16 minutes)
Dammi I Colori accompanies artist and Mayor Edi Rama on a slow tour of Tirana, attentive to Rama’s ongoing narration as the camera visits various projects throughout the city that attempt to offer a new direction for its residents, including the geometrical painting in rich and primary colors of various housing complexes in the most impoverished areas.
Harun Farocki, Workers Leave the Factory (1995, 36 minutes)
“Workers Leaving the Factory” was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurry out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. But where are they rushing? In his documentary essay, Harun Farocki explores variations upon this scene right through the history of film, exploring how the space before the factory gates has always been the scene of contested social conflicts and narratives.
Hito Steyerl, November (2004, 25 minutes)
A short film loosely based on the life of Steyerl’s close friend, Andrea Wolf, who, prior to her assassination as a suspected Kurdish terrorist in 1998, was accused of being a member of the Red Army faction in Germany. November is an elegy to a distant friend, an essay on the construction of mythic identities, and a commentary on the defunct ideologies of revolution.
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, We Will Live to See These Things or Five Pictures of What May Come to Pass (2007, 47 minutes)
Shot in 2005–06 in Damascus, Syria, We Will Live deals with competing visions of the future. Each section—the chronicle of a building in Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew—offers a different perspective on what might happen in a place caught between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.
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