in to documentary

anthropological journey

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'Turbo Sculpture', 2010-2013 / Alexandra Domanović HD video, colour, sound, 20 mins -- Courtesy the artist & Tanya Leighton Gallery

Public monuments that don’t refer to a common history of a specific site or occurrence but they are based,  on modern popular culture. Instead of war heroes, local authorities now decide to eternalize Hollywood stars and heroes of the Western world in bronze. Bruce Lee, Johnny Depp & other film characters provide new points of identification for the community in place of celebrating national heroes, following the atrocities of war and the damaged reputations of political leaders.

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Resist: Disappearing Happiness, 2014 // Dragana Žarevac

Two-channel video installation, 4min.

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The Role of a Lifetime

The work of Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius deals with the experience of collective—mostly Eastern European—history.

Narkevicius’s films reinterpret historical events by playing with different genres and narrative structures, such as memoir, documentary or drama, he constructs history out of active relations with individual biographies. Socialist realist sculpture is a recurring subject in his work.The Role of a Lifetime was commissioned for St Peter’s Church in Brighton as part of Art and Sacred Places, a national initiative for which contemporary artists are invited to make new work in sacred spaces. The Role of a Lifetime (10 min., 2003) is a single-screen video installation, which can be projected onto a wall or a screen in a darkened room. This work brings together three different but interwoven elements: firstly, an interview with the British filmmaker Peter Watkins -known for his innovative and politically-charged documentaries - recorded in Lithuania, where Watkins lived in self-imposed exile for several years; secondly, landscape drawings of Lithuania’s Gruto Park, where various socialist sculptures of the postwar era are kept; and thirdly, Narkevičius combines these elements with found footage from the early 1960s by an amateur filmmaker showing everyday life in Brighton. In The Role of a Lifetime, the interview with Watkins on the sound level is joined and related to the drawings and the found footage on the visual level. Watkins and Narkevicius share a distrust of the conventions of the documentary genre and its claims to authenticity. While Watkins speaks programmatically of the relation between reality and fiction in his work, Narkevičius underlines the political nature of his words, partly by focusing on the broken remnants and their lost representative function, and partly by using found footage to question the representative value of the documentary approach per se.

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We are all Egyptian

Photographer Nabil Boutros monitors Egypt's changing face. Starting from the questions “What is Egypt?" and "What does it mean to be Egyptian?” he decided to show the modern side of his country of origin, he wanted to be able to show ordinary Egyptians using his photography to make ironic statements that serve as a commentary on the changing society in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. In 2010 Boutros produced a series of photos of himself where he changed his look to create 25 Egyptian men. Part of the resulting photographic series Egyptians was on view at the Darb 1718 Gallery in Cairo in December 2010, when the bomb attack against a Coptic Church in Alexandria during a New Year's Eve service killed 21 people. As a response to this attack, Moataz Nasr – the founder and director of Darb 1718 – took the initiative to make a protest poster using the photographs, adding the slogan All Egyptians. Although for Boutros there was a difference between the ambiguity of an artwork’s questionings and the direct communication purpose of such a poster, it was like the other side of the same coin, so he agreed as his contribution to this protest. The poster All Egyptians was signed by 20 private cultural institutions in Egypt, and it was distributed for free and put up in the cities of Cairo, Alexandria, Minya and Assiout. Two weeks later, the message of All Egyptians grew even stronger when it was shown and distributed among the protesters on Tahrir square.

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Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s films and multi-screen installations explore and experiment with storytelling, creating extraordinary tales out of ordinary human experiences. In the film If 6 was 9 (1995), Ahtila's main preoccupation with narrative and what she terms ‘human dramas' at the centre of personal relationships, is presented both as a ten-minute video installation with triple projection and sound and as a 35mm-film installation. The curious blend of documentary and dramatic narrative is underlined by the syncopated montage and an intense, often overbearing use of sound.

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Shirin Neshat, *Art in exile*

Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat explores the paradox of being an artist in exile: a voice for her people, but unable to go home. In her work, she explores Iran pre- and post-Islamic Revolution, tracing political and societal change through powerful images of women.

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UNTITLED IN CASE 05_4 / 2009

Number #05 of Markus Oberndorfer's series of documentary photofilms on urban and suburban space

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GIF extract form Hito Steyerl, How Not To Be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File , 2013. HD video file, single screen, 14min.

more

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Eddie Spanier | VHS Tape Loop at Filmforum festival Udine/Gorizia 2-11 Aprile 2014 Mediateca Provinciale Ugo Casiraghi, piazza Vittoria 41, Gorizia The video loop use a VHS digital technology and it is built through a VHS tape recorder and a VHS closed circuit camera. This loop is possible thanks to the projection of pictures recorded continuously by a camera. The camera records the changes in the loop produced by the pictures quality loss.

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REMAKE Romanzo Criminale HD - Video, 13 min, 2011

Annja Krautgasser provided seven young people from the “Villaggio Attrezzato” Roma camp in Rome with HD video cameras for a series of interviews; overnight, off their own bat the youths shot a remake of the gang thriller Romanzo Criminale - based on a cult novel about the "Banda della Magliana" published in 2002 - as it were as an illustration of their desires and conceptions of a life outside the camp. The way in which Rome's young people are portraied is filtered by the hegemonic systems of representation as well as those in which we perceive this portrait. These young people knew that their video material is used for an exhibition, they knew that they will have a cultural visibility. The video work REMAKE Romanzo Criminale was created simultaneously with the video production Romanes, produced in Rome for the exhibition "CELLA - Strukturen der Ausgrenzung und Disziplinierung" ("CELLA - Structures of exclusion and discipline "). An essential part of the artistic conception was the decision, to involved as part of the production the young people from the camp "Villaggio Attrezzato". These people took their role very seriously and take the opportunity to represent their situation - the life in the camp - in a very reflected way.  During the night they shoot two episodes of the cult series "Romanzo Criminale". They meticulously imitate the band members of the "Banda della Magliana" but also they imitate their idols in a very playful and childlike way. The video scenes oscillate  between the playful adolescent dealing with models that can be in the "gangster milieu" violence that appear attractive as a means to power, and the hopelessness of their social, political and cultural context awareness. In the game of youth thus forms the entire scope of the dangerous intersection between reality and fiction, between, possible realities and wish in the lives of young people.

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Un luogo aperto a cura di Associazione Culture Attive 29 Giugno/1 Ottobre

Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea R. De Grada, via Folgore, San Gimignano. Francesca Banchelli, Gianfranco Baruchello, Michele Bazzana, Bread&Puppet, Lorenzo Cianchi, Emma Ciceri, Tacita Dean, Serena Fineschi, Regina José Galindo, Mario Giacomelli, Love Difference/Fondazione Pistoletto, Marco Andrea Magni, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Giovanni Ozzola, Adrian Paci, Maria Pecchioli, Giacomo Ricci, Massimo Ricciardo, Ufo, Nari Ward.

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The artist Rabih Mroué creates performance-based video installations that examine the powerful influence that photographic representations exert on cultural memory, official history and personal recollection. At dOCUMENTA (13) his works include The Pixelated Revolution (2012), Photo-Romance (2009), The Inhabitants of Images (2008), and How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fools Joke (2007). In the installation Rabih Mroué investigates about videos of civil victims of the current uprising in Syria. 

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The Documentary in Contemporary Art Practice

A publication resulting from the international panel The Documentary in Contemporary Art Practice organised in 2010 in the context of the third edition of the Lo schermo dell'arte Festival - with artists Libia Castro, Phil Collins and Jan Peter Hammer, art critic and curator Bettina Steinbrügge and Silvia Lucchesi, Director of Lo schermo dell'arte.

www.archivebooks.org

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BAD WEATHER (Germany-UK 2011, 82') 

work by Giovanni Giommi

Award Winner of for best documentary in Italian at  ITALIA DOC bffdoc - bellaria film festival

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Città morte, fabbriche dismesse, ferrovie e miniere abbandonate, relitti di terra o di mare. Dal 31 luglio (sulle pagine della Domenica di Repubblica) e per tutto agosto (su R2) Paolo Rumiz ha tracciato una mappa dei luoghi perduti narrando questo mondo parallelo popolato di fantasmi. La documentazione (video, photogallery, mappe) è presente sul sito RE LE INCHIESTE. Ora l'inchiesta muterà forma, per la regia di Alessandro Scillitani le case degli spiriti saranno elevate a dimore del vento.

La carta "dell'abbandono" è soggetta a copyright, cercatela, vale la pena

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"The intention is to construct a visual discussion in which each individual contributes to the project, continuously redefining and enriching the different levels of the arguments engaged, stimulating new considerations, generating and provoking new visions and themes. In an individualistic scenario, such is the Italian one, the idea is also to favour new forms of dialogue and confrontation among the authors."

Documentary Platform is an idea of Michele Cera and Federico Covre.