And the land breathes back —
March 2021 Virtual Program
Presented in partnership with Woodland Pattern Book Center
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Dark Hollow Falls I (2020)
Lindsey Arturo, 3 minutes 7 seconds, 16 mm transferred to HD Video
Synopsis:
A group of filmmakers decided to explore waterfalls in Virginia in the summer of 2020. Dark Hollow Falls is a trail in the Shenandoah National Park that leads to one of the waterfalls that the group documented.
Title: Dark Hollow Falls I-VI, series
Total Running Time: each of the films above is approx 3 minutes long, 100ft single take
Filmed by: Lindsey Arturo, Rachel Lane, with help from Anna Hogg (filming assistance), Will Jones (filming assistance), Kevin Jerome Everson (gear), and Justin Lawrence (location scouting)
Artist Bio:
Lindsey Arturo is an internet based filmmaker who spent the summer of 2020 staring at waterfalls in order to avoid computer screens.
My father and I dance in outer space (2011)
Wura-Natasha Ogunji, 1 minute 11 seconds, Video
Synopsis:
The creation of My father and I dance in outer space began with a question I had about the physical gestures of my father who is now deceased. I wanted to visualize what it might be like if the two of us could dance together. It could only happen in this futuristic, otherworldly landscape. I used stop motion animation techniques to create the sense of flight, dance and intergalactic connection.
Camera: Darcie Book and Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Artist Bio:
Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings hand-stitched into tracing paper, videos and public performances. Her work is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, from the epic to the intimate. Recent exhibitions include City Prince/sses at Palais de Tokyo; A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings at Modern Art Oxford; and Every Mask I Ever Loved at ifa-Galerie, Berlin. She was an Artist-Curator for the 33rd São Paulo Bienal where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free premiered. She has also exhibited at: the inaugural Lagos Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; 1:54, London & New York; Seattle Art Museum; Brooklyn Art Museum; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Ogunji is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Dallas Museum of Art; and the Idea Fund. She has a BA from Stanford University [1992, Anthropology] and an MFA from San Jose State University [1998, Photography]. She currently resides in Lagos where she is founder/curator of the experimental art space The Treehouse.
Sur la Trace du Sillon industriel (2020)
(On the trail of the industrial furrow)
Capucine Lageat & Antoine Perroteau, 8 minutes 32 seconds, Video
Synopsis:
This video was shot during a creation residency at the Ateliers RAVI in Liège, Belgium. The video is part of a bigger picture gathering a series of photographs, and some photographic experiments such as stereoscope technique.
The film composes an uninterrupted panoramic movement through the peripheral landscapes of the city of Liège. This stroll offers a view of the everyday landscape of some left behind neighborhoods ; through these streets and houses are revealed in the background the industrial ruins of the heavy industry past.
Artist Bio:
Capucine Lageat and Antoine Perroteau obtained their masters degree collectively at the School of Fine Arts in Nantes in the Experiences and Practices of Art Extended to Cinema departement in 2018. They compose links between still images and moving images through films and photographs. Their practice focuses on the memory of places, they thus question the perception of space, with regard to its design, proposing a critical approach to social space and suggesting its possibility of popular appropriation. Their experiments lead them to creating topographical documentations, recomposing images by multiple points of view, updating archives by superposition. In particular, they documented deindustrialized territories in England, Wallonia or the Parisian suburbs, questioning the invisibilization of fragmented social classes, and during a stay in Beijing they illustrated the reality of architectures that are both neglected and coveted. Their research is leading them to the construction of polyptych images, trying to build a new vision of space through multiple images.
Body/Document (2016)
Nishat Hossain, 2 minutes 16 seconds, Video
Synopsis:
Scanned self-portraits, low-contrast stills in silvery-grey tones of my face and hands pressed against the glass of the scanner, encased and enclosed inside the very medium of expression, grotesques made more so by the chorus of voices, my own and the scanner’s. I engage the history of displaying the female body in Western art.
Artist Bio:
Nishat Hossain is an internationally recognized artist who has presented her work at numerous venues including the Museum of Modern Art NY, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and Bryn Mawr College.
Âh (2016)
S. Buse Yildirim, 16 minutes 40 seconds, HD Video
Synopsis:
“Ah”, in Turkish is the sound of a deep sorrow. When words tend to express the pain but remains inappropriate and weak, “âh” exhales it and relieves the soul from the burden of immeasurable, inexpressible feelings. It also replaces the causes and the factual account of this grief. “âh” delivers the whole story in two letters, as in this film. The anonymous female character does not allow us to dive neither into her past nor in her future. The pain and the disquiet apparently trapped her in a vicious cycle. Her relation to her body and to the outer realm oscillates between a will for a new start and the fear.
This cloud of emotions is wrapped into melancholia. She discovers this vicious cycle that her delusions create, while defining the borders of her inner space. Meanwhile the distance is covered more by the time in her mind. She listens all the components of outer milieu. She gazes and feeds them; she attempts to obtain them but cannot take a step out of her own space. The sound of others, from outer milieu becomes disquieting more and more. They sometimes sound hopeful, sometimes noisy to her, but she cannot figure out how she can actually make music out of this noise.
She hurts her body as if the pain only could revive her senses. She wanders around in the space, but apparently, she needs to rediscover and define her own domestic milieu with all its usual components. “âh” is the visual embodiment of her non-factual story.
Artist Bio:
S. Buse Yildirim
curator and filmmaker based in Istanbul
As she has always been interested in fine art practise, creative industry and different cultures, she has firstly got her foundation degree in art and design in Brighton, UK. While getting more involved in contemporary art practice, she delved more into the theory of art and pursued BA degree in History of Art at Goldsmiths University of London. After she worked in various exhibition projects, she discovered her interest profoundly in film and video practice. Then she found herself in Paris, pursuing a second degree in documentary filmmaking at ESEC.
She has been playing an essential role during the construction of artistic and cultural identity of Beykoz Kundura that she is dreaming about since 2011. Today she is in charge of artistic & cultural management of Kundura Stage and Cinema in Beykoz Kundura. Impressed by the rich history of the factory, she also initiated the oral history and visual archive project Kundura Hafiza, which is turning into an upcoming documentation/memory centre right now.
In the meantime, Buse is creating her own audio-visual projects and helping other artists produce works under Lita, a house of production that she founded. As she has recently done MA degree on Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universität in Berlin, she is shaping her art practice more on ethnographic methods, while carrying on curating and managing at Beykoz Kundura.
Dark Hollow Falls V (2020)
Rachel Elizabeth Lane, 3 min 11 seconds, 16mm transferred to HD video
Synopsis:
A group of filmmakers decided to explore waterfalls in Virginia in the summer of 2020. Dark Hollow Falls is a trail in the Shenandoah National Park that leads to one of the waterfalls that the group documented.
Title: Dark Hollow Falls I-VI, series
Total Running Time: each of the films above is approx 3 minutes long, 100ft single take
Filmed by: Lindsey Arturo, Rachel Lane, with help from Anna Hogg (filming assistance), Will Jones (filming assistance), Kevin Jerome Everson (gear), and Justin Lawrence (location scouting)
Artist Bio:
Rachel is an artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her background in studio art, film production and teaching has provided her opportunities to connect and grow with others through creative communication. She earned her BA in studio art from the University of Virginia, where she concentrated her art practice in cinematography and new media. She received her MFA in film, video, animation and new genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she had the opportunity to teach film production courses after graduating. Rachel is passionate about creating content that she hopes will inspire positive growth and individual empowerment.
Rachel's most recent creative pursuits navigate play structures as springboards to recontextualize narratives and exercise creative expression.
Solastalgic Soliloquy (2020)
Ayla Dmyterko, 5 minutes 24 seconds, Video
Synopsis:
Solastalgic Soliloquy was filmed in Glasgow, the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Saskatchewan, Canada and the Białowieża forest in Poland (the last primal forest in Europe). Traditional dance is utilized as an apparatus to convey the way that folkloric traditions cease to exist in their originary formats amidst generational slippage, disconnected from a ‘natural’ environment and removed from a congregation. Solastalgia is a neologism that describes emotional and existential distress caused by global environmental decay, heightened by capitalism’s siloing of the individual. Its synonym is eco-anxiety. Solastalgia is a singular malady of a much wider spectrum caused by the proposed current geological epoch: the Anthropocene. I am invested in research surrounding the de-colonisation of this era, as it pins the accelerated decay of the earth’s geology and ecosystems onto all groups of people while it is not all groups of people that caused it. It displays generational slippage as my muscle memory fails and fragments. Leaning on symbolism and ritual, I present a wax wreath out of church candles, those lit for ancestors passed. Lit on my head, this scene is meant to illustrate the dangers of restorative nostalgia and sentimentalizing the past. Meditating on Sayat Nova’s poetry, I recant: “How am I to protect my wax built castles of love from the devouring heat of your flames?”
Artist Bio:
AYLA DMYTERKO (b. Treaty 4 Territory) is a Ukrainian-Canadian artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her research-led practice encompasses moving image, dance, textiles, painting, sculpture and text. Her work was recently featured in KAJET Journal (Romania), MAP Magazine, CCA (UK) and at Projet Pangée (Montréal, Canada). Upon graduating her Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art, she looks forward to her Fellowship at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios and solo exhibition at Lunchtime Gallery.
Working across multiple media, I reactivate and re-embody cultural memory in response to contemporary ecological concerns surrounding colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism. Informed by social responsibility, selfhood and spirituality I interweave lived experiences, the impacts of imperial dominance, ancestral histories and mythologies to embrace what is fragmented, connective, multiple, porous and in flux. My works echo this by enmeshing moving image, dance, painting, textile, sculpture and text. As a Ukrainian- Canadian artist based in Scotland, it is important for me to understand histories of my heritage in relation to my new home. Questioning where diasporic voice lies in the present, I utilize material culture analysis, archival and narrative inquiry research bound together by auto- ethnographic action, creation and dialogue to understand what inherited aesthetics and ethics become visible through generational gaps. Including epistemologies historically dismissed by the academic mythos of the global north, I am interested in how the past is continuously modified and re-iterated to shape our current psyche and conceptions of the future.