SCREENING PROGRAMS

produced and conceived by Beatrice Bulgari

AFTER US

MAXXI VIDEOGALLERY, ROMA, 3rd – 28th February 2021

curated by Julian Rosefeldt

Life on earth is changing at breathless speed, with ambivalent consequences: The expanding access to a globalised market has facilitated the growth of the middle class in former Third World countries and enabled a rising number of humans to escape poverty. On the other hand globalisation and turbo-capitalism come along with an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, with consequential civil wars and mass migration. Digital technologies and social media provide better access to communication and education to those who were formerly isolated, but also created new phenomena such as hate speech and fake news.

Most obviously, our insatiable hunger for resources and the concomitant destruction of nature and our planet’s sensitive eco-systems result in local ecological catastrophes and global climate change. The whole scenario is evident and omnipresent, yet mankind seems not to be able to read the alarming signals and to react accordingly. As if humans are meant to extinct themselves and would follow an invisible masterplan of self-destruction.

Artists, always being seismographs of their time, have sensed the ominous developments since long. They look – sometimes from a present-day perspective, other times from an imagined far future – at the Anthropocene, or better: at the Capitalocene, since the increase in the scale, scope and speed of environmental change originally emanated from the concept of capital and growth which excludes the majority of mankind and reduces most humans to their role as mere consumers. Artists contribute to the actual critical discourse in different ways: as investigative journalists, or at the contrary as visionaries drafting utopias and dystopias.

The here selected works from Beatrice Bulgari’s In Between Art Film collection and archive show a poetic yet sharp diagnosis of the present and suggest a melancholic perspective on the future, on an epoch after us. The artists in this selection of film and video works focus on the problems and phenomena of our time: migration, loss and displacement; identity and alienation; nostalgia and memory; control and surveillance; populism, truth and manipulation. They analyse strategies of image production in a digital age and its contribution to the manufacturing of history; they elaborate on the repercussions of globalisation and the transformation of cultural identities; they emphasise the consequences of military conflicts and social revolutions and thus reveal how identity is always conditioned and created by the socio-economic and political context.

AFTER US
Selection of film / video
Curated by Julian Rosefeldt
MAXXI Videogallery
3rd – 28th February 2021

Stefanos Tsivopoulos
Untitled (The Remake)
14 min. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2007.

Amnesialand
24 min. video single channel HD, super 16 mm transferred, colour, sound, 2010.

Eva Giolo
Gil
4min. 43 sec. archive footage and home movies, b/w, stereo, 2016.

George Drivas
Beta Test
15 min.  video single channel, b/w, sound, 2006.

Kepler
15 min. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2014.

Hiwa K
Pre-Image (Blind as the mother tongue)
14 min. 40 sec. video single channel, colour, sound, 2017

Masbedo
2’59’’
2 min. 59 sec. video single channel HD, sound, 2014. 

Driant Zeneli
Maybe the cosmos is not so extraordinary
10 min. 13 sec. two channel video (trasferito in mono canale), colour, sound, 2019.

Agnieszka Mastalerz
Play down
2 min. 31 sec. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2017. 

Alyona Larionova
Staying with the trouble
14 min. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2018.

Polina Kanis
The Pool
9min. 36 sec. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2015.

Hiwa K
The Bell Project, Part I (Italy) and II (Iraq)
Part I: 25 min. 29 sec.
Part II: 35 min.
Two channel video HD, colour, sound, 2007 – 2015.

Valentina Knezevic
Voiceover
6min. 33 sec. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2017. 

Thao Nguyen Phan
Becoming Alluvion
16 min. 25 sec. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2019.

Adelita Husni-Bey
The Reading/ La Seduta
18 min. video single channel HD, colour, sound, 2017.

After the finish line
12 min. 39 sec. video single channel 4k, colour, sound, 2015.

INVISIBLE CITIES

MUSEO MAXXI, ROMA 2019

Curated by Leonardo Bigazzi

Video Festival created and produced by Beatrice Bulgari for In Between Art Film, Curated by Leonardo Bigazzi

You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. ItaloCalvino,Lecittà invisibili (trad.WilliamWeaver)

Every political, social and economic contrast of today’s world can be found in the spaces of the city. But which stories can a city really tell and how can we rethink our relationship with the urban spaces?
This video festival is an ideal journey in seven stages between real and imaginary places. A tale in which anyone can find their own beginning and where, as in Calvino’s novel, there’s no hierarchy among the different parts. The selected works reveal the artists’ ability to comprehend ad elaborate the urban semantics by imagining alternative visions and ideas that reflect the fast and radical transformations of the contemporary metropolis. The investigation of this complex stratification is narrated through the wishes, questions and anguishes that we confront every day, in the hope of finding our path and, if not, building our own shelter.

Iván Argote
La Plaza del Chafleo
2018

Katja Verheul
Ostile Sites – Part 2
2017

Jordi Colomer
New Palermo Felicissima
2018 

Hiwa K
A View from Above
2017

Vincent Ceraudo
Paris City Ghost
2015 

Arash Nassiri
City of Tales
2017

Loretta Fahrenholz
Ditch Plains
2013

SILENCE AND RITUALS

MUSEO MAXXI, ROMA, 8.05.2018 – 10.06.2018 MUSEO DEL 900, FIRENZE, 17.09. 2018 – 24.01.2019

Curated by Paola Ugolini

This video project aims to show, through the work of nine international artists, that magic suspension of sound and time preceding and accompanying ceremonies and the rites, both lay and religious. Silence, whether it is physical or mental, is the soundtrack accompanying all the works present in this project for which we have deliberately chosen those works that, albeit with deep political and social meaning, favor an aesthetically lyrical and poetic visual approach.

The artists chosen are: Vanessa Beecroft, Mircea Cantor, Democracia, Regina Josè Galindo, Sigalit Landau, Masbedo, Hans Op de Beeck, Adrian Paci, Janis Rafa.
“Silence is not a state of tranquillity, but a tensione, that of a whirpool in which the sounds eddy toward the bottom”. Erri de Luca

Sigalit Landau
Salted Lake (salt crystal shoes on a frozen lake), 2011.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Masbedo
Madame Pinin, 2017.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Hans Op de Beeck
Staging Silence (2), 2013.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Adrian Paci
Interregnum , 2017.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Vanessa Beecroft
VB82, 2017.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Janis Rafa
Winter Came Early, 2015.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Regina José Galindo
La Intención, Novoli Italia, 2016.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Mircea Cantor
Funia, 2015.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Democracia
Ser y Durar, 2011.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

SURVIVAL STRATEGIES

MUSEO DEL ‘900 FIRENZE

Curated by Paola Ugolini

“We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.” Isabel Allende

This program of videos coordinated by Beatrice Bulgari for In Between Art Film and curated by Paola Ugolini features video works by nine international artists: MASBEDO, Hiwa K., Santiago Sierra, Maria José Arjona, Adrian Paci, Regina José Galindo, Shadi Harouni and Mary Zigouri address our present time, tragically torn by bloody conflict, racial hatred and religious feuds driven by economic and geo-political interests.

Hiwa K (Kurdistan, Sulaymaniya,1975) began his artistic career in his native country as a figurative painter, depicting the reality that surrounded him.

The idea of the Bell Project (2007-15, Iraq-Italy) came from the video Nazhad (made in 2007 in Kurdistan), which tells the story of a Kurdish man who uses metals left over from wars, transforming them into products exported all over the world. Nazhad knows how to recognize the metals and their origins, and the words of this simple man make us think about how the circulation of materials creates a continuous connection between different places, and above all how military conflicts contribute to global economic exchanges. The video is composed of two parts, the second of which was shot in 2015 entirely in Italy, inside an old foundry in Cremona specializing in the production of church bells.

Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1965) is an extremely radical artist who for almost 30 years has created video works and performances, moving on the treacherous ground of a critique of socio-political conditions in the contemporary world. A disturbing messenger of the dark truth of our time, Sierra touches on the sore spots of today’s society, including labor exploitation, inequality and discrimination. Reality always plays a leading role in his works, creating an ambiguous relationship between them and the world, as in the 10-channel video Palabra destruida (Destroyed word) (2010-12) in which the artist stages the physical destruction of the ten letters of the word Kapitalism. The letters were made with different materials in different geographical locations, and then destroyed in a series of 10 performances.

Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, 1974) uses her fragile and often naked body to address the issues of violence against women and, more generally, the social, political and cultural violence of contemporary society. In the video La Sombra (2017) presented at Kassel during Documenta 14, the artist again protests against the oppression of women, running and gasping for breath as she is pursued by a tank whose cannon is pointed at her. This video is also a statement about the arms trade and the countries that produce weapons, including Germany, the location of Documenta, the world’s fifth-largest producer. As the artist says, “We cannot escape the horror. The horror follows us, it is our shadow.”

In the video Linea de Vida (2016) the Colombian artist Maria José Arjona (Bogotá, 1973) also uses her body as a dynamic tool to reconnect the viewer with the mystery of nature and its intrinsic force. The artist, moving gracefully in the narrow horizontal space between the floor and a thousand glass bottles hung from the ceiling with nylon cords makes the bottles move in rhythmical waves that visually suggest the movement of the sea.

In the video Venere degli Stracci/In transito/Elefsina (2014) the Greek performer Mary Zygouri (Athens,1973) makes use of one of the most famous works of Arte Povera: the Venere degli stracci by Michelangelo Pistoletto. Various narrative episodes (The Reawakening of the Goddess, The Holy Shadow, Purification, Out with the Profane) form this surreal narrative of images shot at Eleusis, a city that is a typical example of uncontrolled urban development that clashes with the archaeological ruins of its glorious past. The land of Eleusis is a place of paradoxes and traditions, many of them contradictory: on the one hand, the great legacy of an archaic sacredness due to the worship of Demeter and the Eleusinian Mysteries; on the other, the contemporary dystopia of an environment extremely polluted by intensive unregulated industrial activity. Using a wagon, the artist dragged the statue of Venus with its pile of rags across vacant lots, abandoned industrial sites or unfinished construction zones. This goddess “in transit” in search of a new location thus becomes the symbolic transposition of the condition of transition of Eleusis itself.

The Iranian artist Shadi Harouni (Hamedan, Iran, 1985) shot the video The Lightest of Stones in a stone quarry in Kurdistan where a group of men imprisoned in that inhospitable place due to their political ideas talk about ISIS, legends and American sex symbols like Jennifer Lopez. With her bare hands the artist digs in the earth to extract the stones, with her back turned to the group of men, who seriously but also facetiously continue to chat amongst themselves, speculating on the meaning of the illogical physical action performed by the young woman.

In Glima (2008) the Italian video art duo MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza, Milan 1973, Iacopo Bedogni, Sarzana 1970) portray the tragedy of incommunicability and the difficulties of man-woman relationships with great theatrical and narrative efficacy. In the dazzling whiteness of Iceland, a hostile natural setting indifferent to human drama, a man and a woman bound by long strands of black leather, reminders of the “cat o’ nine tails” used in practices of BDSM, struggle in a merciless battle that will leave no winners and no losers in its wake.

“Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.”

(Charles Darwin)

Maria José Arjona
Linea de Vida, 2016 – 2017, video HD, color, sound, 6’43’’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Hiwa K
The Bell Project – Iraq/Italy, 2007 – 2015, two-channel video installation, color, sound, full HD, 16:9, part I Iraq, 25’29’’, part II Italy 35’25’’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Santiago Sierra
Palabra Destruida (Destroyed Word), 2010 -2012, video 10-channel, no color, sound, 24’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Regina José Galindo
La Sombra, 2017, Video performance with a leopard tank. Video full HD, 16:9, color, sound, 8’ 26’’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Mary Zigouri
Venus of the rags /In Transit/Eleusis, 2014, Video, one-channel, full HD, color, sound, 17’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Shadi Harouni
The Lightest of Stones, 2015, video HD, one-channel, color, sound, 15’55’’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Masbedo
Glima, 2008, video HD, single channel, color, sound, 17’59’’.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

THE BODY IS A SACRED GARMENT

MUSEO DEL 900, FIRENZE, 21.04.2018 – 16.09.2018 VIDEOCITTÁ, ROMA, 26.10.2018

Curated by Paola Ugolini

In this video exhibition, the human body is the silver thread running through the works of eight international artists: MASBEDO, Anahita Razmi, Lucy Harvey, Damir Ocko, Silvia Giambrone, Marzia Migliora, Alessandro Piangiamore and Marinella Senatore. In the selected works the focus is not only on the physical body but also on the mental body; a body that is the measure of our existence in the physical world, a body that may be denied, or sometimes represented by a single anatomical part that becomes a metaphor of more complex existential scenarios.

Masbedo
Until The End, 2011.
Courtesy the artists and In Between Art Film

Lucy Harvey
Guide to Life III (B): Productive Living (Emotional Well-Being): 4. Strategies for Those Living Alone, 2000.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

 Anahita Razmi
Middle East Coast West Coast, 2014. Courtesy In Between Art Film

Damir Ocko
Dicta II, 2018.
Courtesy the artist, Tiziana Di Caro, Napoli and Eastwards Prospectus.

Silvia Giambrone
Sotto Tiro, 2013.
Courtesy Galleria Stefania Miscetti, Roma.

Marzia Migliora
Forever overhead, 2010.
Courtesy Galleria Lia Rumma, Milano.

Alessandro Piangiamore
Around an empty shell, 2014.
Courtesy the artist e Magazzino, Roma.

Marinella Senatore
The school of Narrative Dance, Equador, 2013.
Courtesy the artist and Laveronica arte contemporanea, Modica.

DOMESTIC AND URBAN LANDSCAPES

LOOP BARCELONA, FUNDACIÓ, SUÑOL 12- 22.10.2018

Curated by Paola Ugolini

On the occasion of its first collaboration with LOOP, In Between Art Film presents a video selection, featuring works by international artists that variously deal with domestic architecture and the urban space. From the cold architecture of contemporary cities to the private dimension of a house, all works put forth the idea of the home as the “epidermis of the human body” – to say it with Frederick Kiesler’s. Furthermore, the chosen videos offer an overview of contemporary moving image creation, while they present a coherent aesthetics to the films produced by In Between Art Film.

Hiwa K
A view From Above, 2017.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Democracia
Ser Y Durar, 2011.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

George Drivas
Beta Test, 2006.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Diego Marcon
Monelle, 2017.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Masbedo
Ionesco Suite, 2013.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Mircea Cantor
Funia, 2015.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Giovanni Giaretta
La Casa (ostinato crescendo), 2018.
Courtesy the artist and Tiziana Di Caro Gallery

Anahita Razmi
Middle East Coast West Coast, 2014.
Courtesy In Between Art Film 

Lucy Harvey
Guide to Life III (B): Productive Living (Emotional Well-Being): 4. Strategies for Those Living Alone, 2000.
Courtesy In Between Art Film

Hans Op de Beeck
Staging Silence (2), 2013.
Courtesy In Between Art Film