Amazing musicality and intensity in color are the foremost impressions of Sheri Wills' films. At the same time they speak about the beauty and fragility of the microcosm that surrounds us, and in our daily life, barely catches our attention.
Having started off with super-8 and 16mm films, and the endless possibilities of an optical printer, Sheri Wills still uses photograms as starting point of her films, however, she now also uses found footage, lens-based images and digital technology in combination with this "earliest and simplest photographic technology".
On a closer look, one could also say, the films of Sheri Wills evoke memories, illuminated memories without pointing to a specific time, or reference in the past. Rather, they are passageways in a territory of synthesized memories. If there are (according to Roland Barthes) signifiers without significants in language, one could then say, Sheri Wills' pictography is an artistic mnemonics without significants in the past. The colors and shapes, as abstract as they may appear still maintain a reference to the physical world. Their mere beauty and rhythmical structure, though, give them the quality of unresolved deja-vues. Bergson's view of a simultaneously present existence of the past and the presence comes into mind. In this concept, Sheri Wills' image making would be the presence of memories, which extend into the future while ignoring the logic of a time axis. Her films evoke memories of forgotten dreams, of childlike awe, of the "earliest cinema" of Brakhage, while rubbing your eyes. Even the used found footage does not point to a specific time period, although we can read traces of a timed fashion. Thus, Sheri Wills, in her own genius way, has made the leap from "movement-image" to "time-image" (Deleuze). Memory does not have to talk about past; memory and image associations may as well be about the present or the future. However, they definitively live on in a different time mode.
Sheri Wills deep interest in contemporary music has also led to congenial collaborations with young modern composers. Viewing her films thus becomes a synesthetic experience of color, form, rhythm and music.
The program will consist of 16mm films and digital video projections.
MEemory in motion, art in the public space takes place in Munich these days. To give you a little idea about what´s going on in rainy Bavaria wé add this feed to serve ou some snaps from the show.
Kvetshing (Complaining) to Gertrude Stein, Video performance, 1 min, 2007
Felice Naomi Wonnenberg's video work is a unique, sometimes surrealist collage inspired by Jewish thought and political and gender issues. It combines in an intriguing manner Middle-Eastern reality with European cinematographic aesthtics. The Tel Aviv and Berlin based artist has been showing her video works and experimental films internationally since 1998, among others at the Directors Lounge, Berlin (2005), in the MoMA Museum of Modern Art New York (2007), The Israel Museum Jerusalem (2007), the Jewish Film Festival Berlin and in Goethe Institutes worldwide. She was awarded the ARTE / 3Sat prize for artistic innovation, her work was repeatedly screened on 3SAT (German speaking art TV channel) and in over 30 international film festivals. In 2001 she graduated from the Masterclass of the Berlin Art Academy (HdK Berlin – UdK) (the highest degree in visual art in German art academies). She has been living and working in Israel and Berlin as an artist, art critic and in museums since 2005. Her experimental films are shot on 16mm film (a format launched in 1923, used by surrealist and dadaist artists and later in WW2) and she also works with digital video. pressrelease
Jewel Garden experimental documentary, digital video, 10 mins, 2006
"...a delightful...wonderfully inventive film and...great addition to our program"
writes William Sloan, curator of MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Portrait of an old 2nd-hand jewelry dealer on Berlin's shopping-mile Ku'damm. In an uncut 9 min. close-up shot, the camera glides over the glittering necklaces, war medals, Jewish Chanukah candlesticks, worn-out wedding rings and other broken dreams on sale. We never get to see the dealer, but we do hear him chat about his theories on love.
Cocoon, Performance on digital video, 9 mins, 2007
Some young men wander in the desert. In a cave they make the chance discovery of a giant cocoon with female content... In the encounter the young men devour the cocoon, but then as they penetrate into it they do not even realize that the content of the cocoon is a woman. Their actions appear as a fickle mood of fate. The men destroy the woman's fragile protective wrap for a moments' culinary pleasure and leave her behind - deprived of her protection, desinterested in her fate.
Cocoon is a video that brings visual inspirations from Man Ray's nude photographies and the sexy armpit from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Chien Chien Andalou onto a feminist panel. The viewers' sexual expectations are first stimulated and then playfully led ad absurdum. The cocoon is the poor worm's / woman's longing for transformation, the attempt to withdraw from the world in order to emerge as a new magnificent self.
As in many of Wonnenberg's films the puzzling sexual encounters between man and woman remain unsatisfactory. Both parties do not recognize the others needs and desires and their physical contact remains at once naive and yet cruel and destructive.
The location of the scenes is a metaphysical place in itself: Cocoon was shot on location at the caves of Qumran in the Judean desert on the shore of the Dead Sea, where in 1947 a Bedouin boy discovered, by coincidence, the oldest surviving Torah scrolls.
The Orient through Western Eyes video collage, 8 min, 2007
A video collage juxtaposing clips from early silent movies to modern fantasy blockbusters to show how the West has constructed its own image of "the Orient". This art video commissioned by Israel's biggest art museum The Israel Museum Jerusalem was shown in conjunction with its exhibition Eden- East and West. It is a critical visual analysis of the West's cinematographic fantasies of "the Orient". The Middle East and the Land of Israel were an important locus of Western longing, curiosity, fantasy, and apprehension of the “Other”, and these feelings were articulated visually by many artists. This art video juxtaposes clippings from existing footage of Hollywood movies, from their beginnings in the early days of silent movies (such as DeMille’s monumental biblical epics) to contemporary fantasy Blockbusters (such as The Lord of the Rings). The visual confrontations demonstrate how the West has constructed its own image of "the Jew", "the Arab", "the Orient" or -in brief - the necessary and fondly hated "Other" for its own psychological needs.
A Turtle‘s Life in the Middle East, 16 mm and Super 8 black/white and color, 10 mins, 2003 3Sat / ARTE Prize for Artistic Innovation
This is an experimental documentary about fear and how to deal with it after a terror attack. The basis of the film is the childhood memory of a Palestinian, in which the need of protection turned into perverted and absurd violence. The child confronted his seeming enemies, the turtles. "I declared war on turtles...Until they were dead. Then I‘d be very satisfied.“ Contrasting this are an Israeli‘s angry comments. He cannot stand his German girlfriend's questioning him about terror attacks, which she needs for her documentary film, anymore. The images of the film stand in contrast to the interviews: a group of nervous birds and architectural shots of a prison relay the fear that the narrators struggle to repress. The film ends in bitter words juxtaposed with pictures of hope.
Oliver Whitehead from Helsinki, who recently showed his work in a retrospective at Cartes Flux Festival in Espoo/Helsinki, comes to Berlin to show his work at Z-Bar.
Oliver Whitehead has explored a wide range of fields within arts, such as drawing, painting, photography, computer imaging, film, video, installation, and sound stretching their expressive possibilities, and without respecting boundaries. He thus may be called a ³true media artist². In his early film work, he was influenced by the uprising Film-Coop movement in England and the French Nouvelle Vague. He however stopped making films when coming to Helsinki in 1970, where he since has worked as artist, and partly at Kuva Academy, the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.
In 1991, he has picked up with film and video again, now exploring his personal and built surrounding in most unorthodox ways. In most recent years, film and video have become a main focus in his work.
As in "bike", where the camera travels along the shore of the city of Helsinki, his film work mostly evolves from captured impressions. Here, he depicts glances on people, traffic and architecture, edited in an Allegretto rhythm of movements. The film thus reflects the intrinsic meanings of a different but daily perception of urban life and the built surrounding. In "visual violence", a camera travels through contemporary interior public spaces and, as in other films, the captured immediate impressions tell about sensations, which are both political in their direct relationship to the body, and metaphorical in the ways they become examples of a 'bigger picture' of meanings in the world. The films thus are less part of a simulacrum made by the media but they are reflections on visual and media perceptions, and the ways our contemporary and vernacular surrounding can be read in meaningful ways. In Whitehead's later work the subject matter comprises the structures and users of urban settings(...) The visual idiom and the overlaid soundtrack give the works a politically slanted narrative dynamic. The meaning of the films, on the other hand, arises from the combination of cinematography, editing, repetition and thematic combinations. These have an inherent political dimension in the works in that they oppose the solutions typical of commercial cinema." (Hanna Johannson)
With two films, Oliver Whitehead was already part of this year's Directours Lounge and some further Urban Research screenings. Now, we are proud to be able to give a more deep insight in his film and video work, and have the artist present his work at Z-Bar. The screening will be the opening of further summer screenings of Directors Lounge in August and September 2007.
With great pleasure do we announce that the beautiful lady pictured here joined Team Directors Lounge on Tuesday as a cognitive mentor. Not much bigger than a Katz she will become a great asset for the future of the whole cinematic universe.
How should public space be defined, in our times? - this question has been the point of departure for Klaus W. Eisenlohr's project in Hannover. The resulting film by the Berlin filmmaker and artist takes the viewer on a visual trip through the larger urban area of Hannover and shows portraits of places of various urban qualities. This visual and spatial exploration is being complemented with investigations of "place-making": Public interventions by artists, scenes of everyday public life played by youths, and conversations with local city planers converge in a multi-facetted reflection on public space. In cinematography and visual montage Klaus W. Eisenlohr has accomplish his own personal film language, based on experimental documentary and avant-garde film. Thus, the filmmaker has conceived a complex film essay about everyday urban spaces in the modern European city. more
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"Was ist öffentlicher Raum heute?" Diese Frage stellte der Filmemacher und Künstler Klaus W. Eisenlohr an den Beginn seiner Recherche über Hannover. Der entstandene Film nimmt den Zuschauer mit auf eine Bilderreise durch öffentliche Plätze im größeren Stadtgebiet der Landeshauptstadt.
Mit filmischen Mitteln entstehen Portraits von Orten unterschiedlicher urbaner Qualität. Den Berliner Filmemacher interessieren jedoch nicht nur die sichtbaren Merkmale, sondern auch die Handlungen und Erzählungen, die öffentliche Räume erst entstehen lassen. Weiter geht er der Frage nach, durch welche Eingriffe/Interventionen öffentliche Orte aktiviert werden können. Künstlerische Handlungen, die Reaktionen herausfordern, Inszenierungen von Alltagsbegebenheiten mit Jugendlichen und Begegnungen mit Stadtplanern sind im Film den Stadtbildern gegenüber gestellt. Sie fügen sich zusammen zu einem filmischen Essay über alltägliche Orte einer exemplarischen Stadt der europäischen Moderne.
Der Film entstand im Laufe des 6-monatigen Kunstprojektes Stadtrandzone Mitte in Hannover, bei dem Klaus W. Eisenlohr weitere Künstler aus Berlin, Stuttgart und Hannover einlud, an unterschiedlichen Plätzen Performances zu inszenieren. Überdies entstanden Szenen, indem er mit Jugendlichen aus Jugendeinrichtungen szenische Workshops durchführte. Das Projekt wurde unterstützt mit dem „Cast&Cut“-Stipendium der Stiftung Kulturregion Hannover und der nordmedia Fonds GmbH, mit einem zusätzlichen Zuschuß des Kulturbüros der Landeshauptstadt Hannover.
Samstag, 19 Mai 2007, 21 h Z-Bar, Bergstr. 2
Eintritt 4, ermaessigt 3 Euro
• Sat. 19th May 07, 9 pmZ-Bar, Bergstr. 2U Rosenthaler Platz
Thanks to Katja Diallo/ Noordkaap, a selection of Urban Research, one of the major programs of Directors Lounge, can be presented during the Urban Explorer festival in the project rooms of Noordkaap, Dordrecht, NL
NOORDKAAP // U.E. // PROGRAMMA 11 T/M 13 MEI // FILM Een selectie uit het internationale filmfestival Urban Research, ondersteund door de Directors Lounge Berlin. Curator Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Zaterdag 12 en zondag 13 mei 11h.-18h. in de projectruimte
Roger Warren Beebe - Strip Mall Trilogy,9:15, USA , 2001
"The Strip Mall Trilogy" is a series of three city symphonies that attempt to liberate color, sound, and form from the sprawling consumerist landscape of postmodern America. Part 1, 'Green Means Go,' presents fragments of color over a musique concrete soundtrack composed of sounds recorded at the strip mall. Part 2, 'The Abecedaire,' wrestles (and later plays) with alphabetic form extracted and abstracted from the signs of commerce of which they are normally a part. Part 3, 'X-formations,' tries to argue that there is, in fact, beauty after strip malls. Let's hope so.
Julie Murray - Detroit Park , 8:00, USA 2005
Michigan Theatre was an elaborately decorated theater at the heart of a busy and vibrant downtown Detroit in the 1920s. The advent of television in the 1950s saw a significant drop in public performance attendance and it was finally closed in 1967. Sometime in the 1970s it was converted into a parking lot, where floors and ramps were installed with only the most necessary intrusion upon the old interior. Murray's camera is driven by impulses of awe and reflection. In Detroit Park she does not celebrate the 'good old times' but she rather encompasses future and past in one movement that reveales otherwise unseen layers of overlapping times in the urban mesh.
Edita Stepien, Margaret Noble - Sonata , 18:09, USA 2006
Interested in the collaborative fusion between audio and video, analogue and synthesized, Margaret Noble and Edyta Stepien decided to explore these dichotomies through a contemporary reinterpretation of the classical form 'Sonata.' Through the sounds and imagery of architecture and nature, this piece examines our current environmental conditions. Modeled on a pictorial score and recorded as a live performance mix, "Sonata" alternates between nature and urban industry in the settled terrains of the American Midwest.
Katerina Sedá - There is Nothing There , 14:00, CZ 2003
Ponetovice. A village close to Brno in Czeque Republique. No post office, no school. One Saturday in May, everybody in town is doing what they usually do on Saturdays; except this time artist Katerina Sedá directed the inhabitants like a real life video game into a synchronism of the ordinary. The film gives a multitude of ideas on the problems and chances of being on the verge between rural and urban life. From the questionaires handed out to the citizens of the village Katerina found out that all families spent Saturdays in the countryside in a similar way. She also discovered that nowadays people from a village live with a certain skepticism, they feel as if all the important things happen in the city and say 'there is nothing' in their village.
Vrijdag 11 t/m zondag 13 mei vanaf 21h. window screening
Seppo Renval - Rumpu Zinfonia , 21 min, FIN 2005
The camera meanders through artificial architectural space: architecture models. All the models represent exsisting buildings in Helsinki. The camera speeds up, the low-resolution video quality and lighting create sensations of real space, of emotional space. Thus, the film reinterprets the imagination and conception of materialized architecture, or more so, the ways architectural space has been depicted before being realized.
Kemmy Thyssen - In'na City , 7:23, DE, 2005
In 'na City seeks for harmony, connectivity between images and music. A collage with images from the City of Hannover ‹ skyscrapers, traffic, the surface of the city and its mesh ‹ that creates a composition, a new vision. Images and colours become music and rhythm, which complement sounds and beats. Everyday space and vernacular modern architecture are the matrix of pulsing music.
Virgine Laganiere - The Corridor, 2:26, CAN, 2005
A corridor, passage way between offices, becomes the internal and visible projection of the outside city. Dream, hope or halluzination? Virginie Laganière shows, with very dry humor, imaginary metamorphosis of the daily urban environment.
Ivan Martinez - Fear Itself ... Yea Right , 7min, USA 2006
"According to the media and government officials we have much to fear, despite what FDR once proclaimed. With anxiety on the rise, running scared is all we have left, at least to warn others of the impending doom. This custom animation and action script allows me to frantically run through the streets typing out my fears for all to know in real time. If needed my character could stop running to converse with someone on the street, but when fear strikes, its off and running again." Fear Itself, by Miami based Ivan Martinez, is a street art projection using custom action script in which he runs scared through the streets typing in his fears which are then projected on building facades. The works combines concepts on the running tiger of Karolina Sobecka´s Wildlife, previoulsly mentioned here and Paul Notzold´s "What/Who Are You Afraid Of?". According to Wooster Ivan started in August doing guerrilla projections of images on the new building developments that are appearing in and around downtown Miami.
Memory In Motion will present media art that seeeks for new ways of remembrance by using the public space as a stage to challenge the neglecting of history with artistic means. The urban space, that makes history visible as architecture, offers the oportunity to connect artistic questioning with concrete history. Memory In Motion is an intervention into the public space that question the handling of the past, the construction of historiography, the attribution of identity, social and ethnic codes and their reflection in society right there where such a basic discussion should start: in the public.
Public space is not a fixed space, it is everywhere, constantly in change, consequently we will be a project in motion, using different spaces for different works and different questions.
• Memory In Motion – call for proposals
We welcome any proposal for Memory In Motion, be it a site specific work or an existing film, installation, whatever that could fit into the concept. Get in touch and we´ll send you the link to the project pages.
• Memory In Motion – accompanying program
Memory In Motion will be accompanied by related screenings, we hope to realize a catalogue and/or a DVD to document the whole project.
Directors Lounge kindly invites for a personal show of video work by Alli Savolainen curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Alli Savolainen will come from Finland to present her video work.
Alli Savolainen works with video, photography, sound and painting. She was born in Joensuu, Finland, and she graduated from Lahti Institute of Fine Arts. Since 1986, she is active as artist in Helsinki’s art and film scene. She since has compiled an impressive catalogue of video works which date back until 1989. When writing about her own work, she tells that she is interested in “time continuity and memory”. Saying that, she takes the viewer into a contemplation of the duration of visual moments.
In more recent times, Alli Savolainen looks with her camera at cities, street scenes and rural roads, still interested in the poetry of the non-spectacular, vernacular visual environment.
Kvetshing (Complaining) to Gertrude Stein, Video performance, 1 min, 2007
Jewel Garden
Cocoon, Performance on digital video, 9 mins, 2007 
The Orient through Western Eyes 
A Turtle‘s Life in the Middle East, 16 mm and Super 8 black/white and color, 10 mins, 2003
