Program 3 | The Missives of Subsurface Wellsprings
5:00 PM | Saturday, July 20th 2024 | Woodland Pattern
720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Intermediation, Adéọlá Ọlágúnjú & Nyancho Nwanri, 2 min 9 sec
Synopsis |
Intermediation explores the transformative power of dance to convey embodied and lived experiences. Through movement, the film considers how one can contact and transcend physical surroundings by tapping into one's body's inherent wisdom and how the material body becomes a medium for intangible and affective dimensions of being.
Artist Bio |
Adéọlá Ọlágúnjú is an artist who works with photography, video, sound, film and installations. Much of her artistic work involves considerations of the Self, memory, spirituality, healing, and the social landscape. Her works have been exhibited in festivals, museums, and galleries in many countries. She has been the recipient of prizes and awards, notably the NRW.BANK Kunstpreis 2021, the Seydou Keïta Grand Prize at the Bamako International Biennial for Photography in 2019, the Young Arts Support Amsterdam Award in 2013, and the Lagos Photo Festival Award in 2012.
Nyancho Nwanri is a lens-based creator out of Lagos, Nigeria, whose work revolves around African history, culture, languages, spirituality, and social issues. Her works have been exhibited both locally and internationally, including at the Eyes On Main Street Festival in North Carolina, the VideoEX Festival in Zurich, the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Accra, and the Ndiva Women's Film Festival in Accra.
Bonjour Eric, Clara Jost, 4 min 42 sec
Synopsis |
A film letter to friend and Belgian filmmaker Eric Pauwels.
Artist Bio |
Clara Jost (1997, Lisbon) studied film editing and directing at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon), and holds a master's degree in Audiovisual Arts from KASK (Ghent, Belgium), which she attended as a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation fellow.
Author of several short films, she also works as an editor, having collaborated with Teresa Villaverde, Tomás Paula Marques, Salomón Pérez and João Onofre, for example.
In 2020, her film “Meine Liebe” won IndieLisboa's National Short Film Competition and circulated in countries such as France, Canada, Italy, Spain, Scotland, Mexico, Argentina.
Bringing her thinking closer to the visual arts, in 2022 she wrote the thesis “Au hasard, cinema: thoughts on the location of cinema in space and time”, in which she reflected on the points of (dis)encounter between video art and cinema. In march 2024 she finished her first installation work "Orange Tree Altar", developped in residency at Alfaia association, shown at Galeria Praça do Mar in Quarteira (PT).
Fade, Asako Ujita, 14 min 22 sec
Synopsis |
Fade portrays the rural life of a grandmother in Japan while persimmon trees enter the late season.The grandmother’s tenacious care for traditions, trees & home, the film poetically depicts the tableaux of forgotten rural memory of the post-war; the glimpse of human spirit and persistence appear in the passing of seasons, awaiting the new beginnings.
Artist Bio |
Asako Ujita (1997, Osaka, Japan) is an artist/filmmaker based in London. In her practice, she is interested in exploring history and working with the archival - from news, found footage, to informal recordings such as dairies and letters.
Beneath the layers of calm and dream-like tone of her films, these narratives of the past weave into current socio-political issues such as post-colonialism, ecology, gender, and identity. She considers this stitching of time a reconstruction of myth, evoking psychological experiences of collective memory, trauma and imagination in the present. Her work often deals with ordinary families and disappearing communities, opening the avenues for feminist language in storytelling. She utilises the mediums and combined the forms of 16mm, digital film, archival footage, and CGI. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2024 & 2022 Scotland, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, 2024, Tour de Moon Festival 2022 UK nationwide, Regeneration at Barbican Centre 2021 London, and Speculative Future; Climate Crisis at Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2020 London.
to open a window, Craig Scheihing, 2 min 20 sec
Synopsis |
a mirrored window makes a suggestion, opening spaces between and beyond the interior and exterior.
Artist Bio |
Craig Scheihing is an artist based in New York City. His work has been screened, performed, and exhibited around the world in film festivals, museums, basements, bars, beneath bridges, in cinemas, vacant lots, galleries, garages, universities, yards, and in-between.
THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER, Vika Kirchenbauer, 15 min 08 sec
Synopsis |
THE CAPACITY FOR ADEQUATE ANGER constitutes an attempt at a personal and self-reflexive form of artistic critique that considers contemporary art, in its production as well as its presentation, from a perspective of class. Alongside questions around the intersections of negative affect and political agency, the work problematises notions around upward mobility that the field of contemporary art both produces and presupposes. Deploying an essayistic approach, the video work reflects upon the manifold meanings of distance in both its subjective and social senses.
A voice-over text subtly moves along ambiguous negative emotions such as shame, envy, irritatedness and unsettlement, that––unlike more dynamic and outward-oriented states of feeling like anger or rage––are often associated with scenes of blocked or suspended action. Considering the particular kinds of subjects these feelings help produce, the piece questions the political nature of emotions and which forms of agency they facilitate or hinder.
A return to the village where she grew up after an absence of over ten years marks the point of departure for this video work, which Vika Kirchenbauer produced for the occasion of the her first institutional solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Photographs taken on this journey are combined with scans of childhood drawings, CD booklets, family photos and basketball trading cards as well as reframed scenes of an anime series outlining the life of Marie Antoinette through the story of a fictitious and gender-ambiguous guardsperson. Set against a foundational layer of imagelessness, these pictures and sequences come flashing in and out.
Two strands are connected that have shaped Vika Kirchenbauer’s practice over the past ten years: The personal and autobiographical explorations of societal power relations, and the preoccupation with established routines of looking at and experiencing the physical or visual presence of marginalised bodies in the exhibition space.
The piece complexly negotiates distance both as personal circumstance or necessity, but also as a resource considered a prerequisite for seeing and experiencing as well as for critical or artistic engagement, thus giving rise to a series of underlying questions: What does distance signify in relation to one's own life, past and social positioning? And who are afforded the privileging aspects of distance in contrast to those whose lives and bodies remain intimately affected by politics and its effects?
Artist Bio |
Vika Kirchenbauer is an artist, writer and music producer based in Berlin. With particular focus on affective subject formation, she examines violence as it attaches to different forms of visibility and invisibility, and considers the ways in which subjects are implicated in and situated within institutional power structures. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Kirchenbauer’s work have been presented at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna. Her videos and installations have been exhibited in group shows and screenings at, among others, d/p, Seoul; the Tainan Art Museum, Taiwan; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Berlin International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her first monograph is published by Mousse Publishing, and unites essays and works from the past ten years of her practice. Since 2022 she is Professor of Fine Art / Foundation Class ‘Film/Video’ at the Braunschweig University of Art.
Solid State Drive, Ryan Heath, 6 min 23 sec
Synopsis |
Solid State Drive, 2023 is an existential arcade machine: a non-game, a relic of retail and a new interactive work of fiction.
It explores the birth, life and death of a retro racer - a gaming experience commonly found in bygone brick-and-mortar arcades. While these spaces have shrunk in the face of an increasingly digitised world, our racing simulator has had time to contemplate. Instead of competing, our vehicle takes us on a journey off-course to the back end of its software. Roaming through these cavernous networks, our program delivers a monologue questioning the relevance of both itself and the experience it is supposed to provide.
Music from Heather Perkins, Bradley Cook and Jack Wright.
Voiceover by Oona Evergreen and Robert Mann.
Artist Bio |
Ryan Heath is an artist and facilitator based in Nottingham creating moving image, painting and sculpture. His work often blends critical urbanism with mysticism. He explores the histories and futures of specific spaces, framing new possibilities for them.
He has exhibited in the UK and internationally, receiving commissions from organisations including LEVEL Centre, UK New Artists and Ignite Futures.
As part of his practice, Heath delivers creative workshops for people of all ages. Previous partners include Nottingham Refugee Forum, Harris Museum and Tate Modern.
Heath is a BACKLIT and Near Now studio artist, a former/founding Chaos Magic arts space member.
I AM A FILM, Huw Wahl, 9 min 55 sec