A compilation of four Films by Yael Bartana
The screening will be followed by a conversation between Yael Bartana and Shaina Anand.
This is a free non ticketed event but to attend the screening you need to reserve your seats.
Reserve seats here!
List of films:
And Europe Will Be Stunned / Mary Koszmary, 2007
Foreign language with English subtitles, 11 min.
'Mary Koszmary' (Nightmares) is the first film in the trilogy and explores a complicated set of social and political relationships among Jews, Poles and other Europeans in the age of globalization. A young activist, played here by Sławomir Sierakowski (founder and chief editor of Krytyka Polityczna magazine), delivers a speech in the abandoned National stadium in Warsaw. He urges three million Jews to come back to Poland. Using the structure and sensibility of a World War II propaganda film, 'Mary Koszmary' addresses contemporary Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia in Poland, the longing for the Jewish past among liberal Polish intellectuals and the Zionist dream of return to Israel.
And Europe Will Be Stunned / Mur i wieża, 2009
Foreign language with English subtitles, 15 min.
The second film of the trilogy 'Mur i wieża' (Wall and Tower) was made in the Warsaw district of Muranów, where a new kibbutz was erected at actual scale and in the architectural style of the 1930’s. This kibbutz, constructed in the center of Warsaw, was an utterly ‘exotic’ structure, even despite its perverse reflection of the history of the location, which had been the Jewish residential area before the war, and then a part of Warsaw Ghetto. The film invokes previous heroic images of strong and beautiful men and women who mythically established Israel. They were depicted as determined pioneers who, despite the most unfavorable conditions, kept building houses, cultivating land, studying, bringing up children collectively, sharing their assets and constantly training to fight off potential enemy attacks. This is the world that Bartana proposes to resurrect in the 21st century, in an entirely different political and geographical configuration.
And Europe Will Be Stunned / Zamach, 2011
Foreign language with English subtitles, 35 min.
In the third film 'Zamach' (Assassination), the final part of the trilogy, Bartana brings the dream about multinational community and the brand new Polish society to the ultimate test. The plot of the film takes place in a not too distant future, during the funeral ceremony of the leader of the Jewish Renaissance Movement, who had been killed by an unidentified assassin. It is by means of this symbolic death that the myth of the new political movement is unified — a movement which can become a concrete project to be implemented in Poland, Europe, or the Middle East in the days to come.
True Finn – Tosi suomalainen, 2014
Foreign language with English subtitles, 50 min.
For her IHME Project 'True Finn' Yael Bartana invited people living in Finland to take part in creating an utopian moment. The condition was that each person has a different ethnic, religious and political background. As a result of an open call, eight Finnish-resident individuals came to live together for seven days in a house in the countryside. Life, discussions and specifically designed assignments were filmed, with the edited material now forming the core of this artwork. What happens when these people live together for a week and re-define Finnishness, and themselves in relation to others?
The artwork plays with questions about identity: How does national identity operate as a means of inclusion and exclusion? What mechanisms exist for this in Finland? What are we talking about when we talk about Finnish identity right now? Can an immigrant become a true Finn?
Yael Bartana will be present at the screening and will have a conversation with Bombay based artist and film-maker Shaina Anand from CAMP about her film-making practice.
Shaina Anand has been active as an independent filmmaker and media artist. Her works are informed by an interest in media and information politics and by a critique of documentary form and process. Anand has exhibited and published widely. In 2007, she co-initiated PAD.MA, the Public Access Digital Media Archive, an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, made available online and for download in non-commercial use. She is a co-founder of CAMP, an organization in Mumbai cultivating radical artistic practice with a variety of media. CAMP seeks to create structures of support, rhythms of production and distribution, and to provide a collaborative atmosphere in which artists can work collectively on the challenges facing art and cultural practices in the region. She recently curated the New Medium section at the JIO MAMI 18th Mumbai Film Festival.
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