A German documentalist Burkhard von Harder in his series invites us to rethink the pages of history. In an old abandoned building of a former communist publishing house of Vinnitsa the author discovers damaged negatives dating from the 60-ties of the 20th century. Not only are these lost in time artifacts of the Cold War taking on new meaning. But also the author finds people depicted in them…
“Where my childhood died‘
Arthur Bondar (Ukraine)
>>photography
The winner of the “Photographer of the Year 2012″ (Ukraine) Arthur Bondar presents a series that addresses the notion of merciless of time flow and the consequences that occur at the very moment of epochs intersection. Comparing the images of the past with the photographs taken at the same places today, the author refers to the memories about the town of his childhood – a former military base from which almost nothing has left today.
“White Elephants”
Piotr Zbierski (Poland)
>>photography
The exhibition of the winner of «Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award 2012″ Piotr Zbierski is a series of black-and-white photographs in which the author explores the changes that occur in the surrounding reality under the influence of emotions and experiences.
“Recovered memory”
Algirdas Musneckis (Lithuania)
>>photography
A collector of disposable cameras, Algirdas Musneckis, presents his collection of photographic discoveries: frames from forgotten in cameras film stocks that turn the fragments of discrete events of anonymous authors from all over the world into one sincere and dramatic story of life.
“Bob Mikhailov‘s finished dissertation”
Shilo Group (Ukraine)
>>photography
“Finished dissertation” is the story of modern Kharkov photography based on the example of a “Shilo Group”. Artists from “Shilo” appeal to their origin – Boris Mikhailov and his “Unfinished dissertation”. By “ending” his dissertation, they thereby declare the emergence of a new wave of photographers who are capable of making a creative breakthrough.
“Tangibility of the past”
Andrew Polushkin, Aleksey Savkin, Vitaly Smirnov (Russia)
>>photography
Exhibition project “Tangibility of the past” is made up of three photographic series of Petersburg photographers: Aleksey Savkin, Andrew Polushkin, and Vitaly Smirnov. Each of the series in its own way pushes the viewer to a tactile sense of the past, its tangibility.
“Lacrimosa”
Sara Angelucci (Canada)
>>photography
Sara Angelucci, a Canadian from Italy, takes old photographs remained in the hands of the surviving relatives, and the tombstone photographs in her native Italian village. By means of her practice she is trying to create a link between past and present, and to show its real importance for future generations.
“Aleli”
WaldemART KLYUZKO
>>photography, installation, mirror
By means of photographic installation a Ukrainian artist WaldemART Klyuzko in his “Aleli” project explores the question of genetic memory which reflects the similarities between us and our ancestors, yet it does not reflect our true notion of the ancestors.
“Memorial”
Robert Hutinski (Slovenia), Pavel Banka (Czech Republic), Anna Block (Russia)
>>photography
The “Memorial” is a reflection of opportunities of memory in a place where the most terrible events of the 20th century had happened. Unique series about concentration camps during the Second World War bounded by one theme of universal human tragedy, and meditation on it gives birth to three interpretations of the same phenomenon.
“Anna and Eve”
Viktoria Sorochinski (Russia, Canada)
Visitors will have an opportunity to view the project “Anna & Eve” that was first exhibited as part of “Month of Photography in Paris – 2010″. The series portrays a real relationship between mother and daughter through psychological and metaphorically staged scenes. It is a 7-year long project that Viktoria Sorochinski has been working on since 2005. After three years of touring around the world finally the project will be presented in Kyiv.
“Belarussian Factography. The First Part”
Aleksei Shinkarenko (Belarus)
>>photography
In the frame of VIZII festival Aleksei Shinkarenko shows the biggest representation of Belarusian Factography series till today. Combining the images of different size, display changes scale of narrative and as a result – optics of perception of the story which is transmitted through the images. Belarusian Factography series functions like a subjective archive of “facts”, events and images.
“Restoration of Memory”
Oleksandr Ranchukov, Igor Belsky (Ukraine)
>>photography, multimedia
Exhibition project “Restoration of Memory” consists of 20 pictures of Kiev from 70-80s and 20 video scenes based on old photos. Can we identify those places that were depicted in the photographs, or even such restoration will not be able to reconstruct the city that remains in the distant past?
“The last bell”
Vaclovas Straukas (Lithuania)
>>photography
The exhibition “Last Bell” is a series of black and white vintage photographs from classic of Lithuanian school of photography Vaclovas Straukas, in which he fills in live scenes of school holidays with restrained eroticism and youth energy. First time the most significant work of the legendary photographer will be presented to the Kiev audience.
“My Place”
Dina Oganova (Georgia)
>>photography
A Georgian documentalist Dina Oganova presents a series in which she mediates about “speaking” places, where a man spends most of his life time and which can thereby tell about him even more than he can.
“Prism tranquility”
Oleksandr Kadnikov (Ukraine)
>>photography, installation
The “Prism tranquility” project unifies two new series of Alexander Kadnikov:
”Margin of safety” and “Krymrezina” – a visual interpretation of philosophical meditations on past and present, literally dissolving in the water …
“America”
Vyacheslav Tarnovetsky (Ukraine)
>>photography
Referring to color, Vyacheslav Tarnovetsky with a series “America” continues his traditional searching for metaphysical content in trivial scenes of American life.
“Beautiful People”
Symon Kliman (Slovakia)
>>photography
Being acknowledged by numerous awards, Symon Kliman’s project “Beautiful People” represents a series of documentary portraits of modern Slovak Gypsies, shot in their habitual environment and breaking all common stereotypes about the life of the Romani ethnic group.
“Excerpts”
Eric Asp, Andreas Bertman, Johan Bryggman, Mikaela Crantz, Viktoria Garvare, Fredrik Holmér, Anna Janerås, Fredrik Karumo, Thea Marlene Magnussen, Fredrik Nätterö, Jimmie Sonelius, Mikael Strandh, Gustav Udd, Alexandra Ydevall (Sweden)
>>photography
Young Swedish photographers within the project “Excerpts” meditate on the authenticity of the photographic image and it’s imminence to talk in the future on what is happening today. Excerpting from the total flow, students of the School of Photographic Higher Education in Stockholm are exploring the very essence of photography.
2012 Portfolio-Review Finalists introduce ten topics, united by a common method of working with the visual reality – method of archivation. Projects presented by authors reflect their personal attempt to stay afloat in engulfing stream of life, and photographs thereby stand as respondent conditioning towards a rapidly changing picture of life.
“Our common personal”
Group L ∞ k (Valeria Barvinska, Dmitry Barov, Igor Belsky, Lana Yankowska, Leah Dostleva, Nickolay Kozhemyako, Olga Tkachenko, Svetlana Morozova, Julia Polunina, Yuri Lisowski)
>>photography
Graduates of the Creative studio under Alexander Lyapin curatorship, a group L ∞ k interpret the concept of “personal and common,” questioning the notion of individual freedom within society.
Working with archives, authors create visual “evide nces” of their main hypothesis.
“City of Future”
Alexander Bychenko, Sergey Volkov, Roman Guk, Dmitry Zverev, Victor Malyshko, Daria Marchenko, Alex Nosenko, Olga Polesovschikova, Julia Polunina, Natalia Pustynnikova, Lyubov Savelyeva, Nadejda Terekhina, Oksana Chepelyk, Irina Chernysheva, Lana Yankowska
>>photography
“City of Future” Contest’s finalists investigate the dynamic change of the city and the transformation of its spirit, and they raise the questions: is our perception of urban space changing? How do we feel there and can we move with the times? What are the expectations, hopes and fears of its citizens? What will remain the same and what will disappear?
MEDIA-ART
“Little Memories”
Andrea Wolf (USA)
>>video-installation / mixed media
Andrea Wolf is working with the concept of scale to create tiny video installations using super 8 home movies and found footage. Little mock-ups and found objects are combined with projections and video mapping to create intimate souvenirs that reflect on how fleeting memories are brought back to us. Each piece is a self-contained object and they are often placed in corners, and in such way that one ‘finds’ them rather than having them displayed as spectacle, again playing with the notion of nostalgia and treasure that memory entails.
“The Golden Rose” (from “Villa Fidelia and other Memories” series)
Pierre and Jean Villemin (France)
>>video installation / multimedia
Our memory is a superimposition of images, mysterious multiple exposure of impressions, where dream and reality intertwine in the mirror maze of time. Pierre and Jean Villemin, French media artists, immerse the viewer in alchemical laboratory of memory melting the fragments of recollections into poetic visual narrative. Their video art is a fruit born from random encounters between places, objects, scents, colors, sounds and words…
“Forgotten objects”
Fabio Scacchioli (Italy)
>>video installation / multimedia
“Disguise the world with the illusion of time” is the main appeal of Fabio Scacchioli’s prolonged video meditation about our place in time. The offscreen voice “travels” through four “found footage” videos, but it is unable to stay in any one of the realities: the fragments get disturbingly overlapped, and the voice dies out in the buzz of shots.
“Light is Calling”
Bill Morrison (USA)
>>video installation / experimental film
Bill Morrison, an American experimental film director, creates surreal compositions from deteriorating nitrocellulose films (particularly, “Light Is Calling” was re-shot from “The Bells”, 1926 by James Young). Morrison manages to bring his dying material to life in quite an unusual way: blurred human figures break through the vivid – and fierce – ocean of the light that damages the film. The soundtrack is a post-minimalist classical piece by Michael Gordon.
“Paperbox”
Zbigniew Czapla (Poland)
>>video installation / video collage
The time will come when your family’s photos will be all covered with water and blooming with mold. The time will come when your parents’ glass elephants will break into pieces, and your hands will be shaking so much as to keep you from taking the all-too-well-known chords… Zbigniew Czapla, a Polish animator, has successfully captured such a moment on film after finding a box of family photos damaged by the flood in his native village.
“Engram”
Ula Bugaeva (Ukraine)
>>video installation / experimental video
Engram is a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored as biochemical changes in the neural tissue in response to external stimuli. In audiovisual experiments of Ula Bugaeva, Ukrainian media artist and physician, memory is represented as a sensitive substance, whose surface reflects subtle changes of our environment. The blurred silhouettes of engraved images are stored deep under the layer of turbulent waves…
“LoopLoop”
Patrick Bergeron (Canada)
>>video installation / experimental video
Using animation, sounds, warping and time shifts, this video loop runs forwards and backwards looking for forgotten details, mimicking the way memories are replayed in the mind. LoopLoop is made from an image sequence Patrick Bergeron, a Canadian video artist, who has worked in special effects for The Matrix, Mr.Nobody, and Lord of the Rings, captured in a train traveling to Hanoi in Vietnam. Moving elements have been seamlessly integrated into the panoramic still activating it in subtle and surprising ways.
What can an old apple tree tell us? What mysteries are hidden in his roots, gnarled over time? Our body remembers more than we can expect and imagine. “Body Memory” takes as its central concept the idea that our body remembers, not only individual experiences, but also the sorrow and pain of our predecessors. A powerful visualization of subconscious processes and the hidden horror of deportation, the film is inspired by historical events: the Soviet deportations from Estonia in the 1940s.
“What Comes Between”
Cecilia Araneda (Canada)
>>video installation / experimental documentary
How we remember, how we forget, and the role of the image in stasis and unpredictable movement – these are the motors and the enduring questions of Cecilia Araneda’s memory work in film. “What Comes Between” is an examination of personal memory and loss rooted in the filmmaker’s birth place – Chile – and her departure from that country long ago. The work is a collage film created with found footage from personal and historic sources, and original hand printed and tinted footage.
“Depot”
Marina Fomenko (Russia)
>>videoinstallation / video collage
We witness a series of architectural transformations of the old building that loses its identity when interacting with everyday life. Circular locomotive depot of the Nikolayev Railway that was built in Moscow in the middle of the 19th century has undergone many changes over of the years. Its massive architectural presence in the urban landscape has been ruined by man’s negligence against the corrosive power of time.
“The City as a Transformer”
>>curatorial festival screening
Marina Fomenko, “Now&After” festival director and curator (Russia)
The city is changing, accumulating time and living in the past, present and future.
Artists transform reality, turning to memory and futurology.
International Video Art Festival “Now&After” is held annually in Moscow Museum of Modern Art, where for a few weeks the festival programs are screened in an integrated space of a video installation. It is aimed at presenting video art projects and pursues activity in the field of culture and international communications in the media art sphere.
“100×100=900”(100 video artists to tell a century).
Magmart International Video art Festival (Italy)
>>special project screenings
To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of video art in 2013, 100 video artists from all over the world created 100 video artworks, each based on one year of 1900s, matched randomly. Due to a wide network of collaborations, the project will be presented in an innovative format around the world.
The 20th century is characterized by the ubiquitous presence of moving images (cinema, television, the internet). The core idea of “100×100=900” implies that in order for humanity to progress, it is necessary to identify which elements of the past need to be archived. However, in an attempt of creating a universal narration about the last century, each artist offers an individual interpretation of the past.
Nostalgia<<2012
Che Kevlin (Great Britain)
>>site-specific video installation / performance documentation
The site-specific autobiographical project explores the increasingly complex notion of home and memory in the rapidly changing world of today. Recreating some of the original ingredients – the surrounding circumstances that created initial recollections, the performance is accompanied by a live physical interaction with a vintage Super8 video footage and is accompanied by contemporary video and music score by alternative instrumental trio PortMone. The production is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Collider
Oksana Chepelyk
>>video installtion / video collage
The Collider project works with time, space, science, urbanism and history. This large, long-term project deals with events, which took place in different urban landscapes, which had an influence on subsequent historical development. Collider examines the iconic places of USA, Russia and Ukraine of C20-21 political history.
The Large Hadron Collider could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time. In the project time is presented by 7-channel projected video that consists of 24-60 fragments of moving images, which are revolved with acceleration in an artistic collider, activating a mechanism of audio-visual jumps where certain fragments can gradually be substituted by archival videos.
The Collider project, working with the events that have formed the world in which we live now, raises the question: is a person a particle in the system of accelerators of global forc es, or the energy of interaction investigating new values, new forms of thought and new ways of existence in the world – insisting that another world is possible?
Amnesia project: an open platform
Oleksandr Mykhed
>>multimedia
“Amnesia project” is a literary and artistic multimedia project representing numerous interpretations of a literary text and of the concept of memory. Project’s key elements are personal memory and collective memory of a generation.
“Memory”: the multimedia program of Vizii Festival
Contest program:
Maryna Makarenko
(Ukraine/Germany). “Expired”
“Expired” is a story about Svema, former chemical plant (located in Schostka,
Ukraine), which was founded in 1931. People, playing in the film, used to work at Svema. Now they come back to abandoned space that was their everyday environment.
I came to Sergiivka in summer of 2011. Sergiivka is located not far away from Odessa and it is a relatively big but not crowed resort town. Heydays of this town were in 80 years. Unusual atmosphere of this town attracted me and in the Autumn of the same year I get back to Sergiivka for several times. I filmed moments that in my opinion especially keenly transferred nature, town and my own state. Only year after I get back to created materials and decided to try transferring what I feel year ago.
VadimKozlovsky (Ukraine). “Timeflow. Ukrainians”
In 1991 my Ukraine became an independent country. Meanwhile, all citizens had the old Soviet passports. Changing old passports to new ones proceeded heavily, especially in villages. One day, in 1995 I was offered a job as a passport photographer for the villagers of Tulchinskiy area in Vinnitsa region.
As “when I was thirty five it was not a very good year …”I agreed … In several villages I took almost 4,500 photos of my co-citizens… It was mainly aged women. Youth was away searching for a better life in the big cities. They would not stay in a village even back then.
The project “Time flow” is awarded of “Les Nuits Photographiques” in Paris, 2012
Olena Bulygina (Ukraine). «BarberShop»
Body in modern culture is far from real bodies around, everybody knows that fashion shoots create false reality but it doesn’t make them less appealing or less persuading. Computer games allow player to visit Barber Shop and change in-game appearance in a few clicks — something that would be in an extreme demand, reflecting different ideas of identity in an attempt to deal with self-doubt. Barber Shop multimedia is a 2012 Lens Culture Exposure Awards Grand Prize winner and a III place at Photovisa Festival.
Specialprogram:
Juan Manuel Castro Prieto (Spain). “Esperando al cargo”
Cargo cult – is a term which means a group of religious movements in Melanesia. Representatives of the cargo cults believe that Western products created by ancestral spirits and intended for Melanesian people. Cargo cult can be seen as a modern manifestation of magical thinking. Over the past 75 years, most cargo cults have almost disappeared. However, this cult is still alive on the island of Tanna (Vanuatu) …
Olga Kravets, Maria Morina, and Oksana Yushko(Russia). ”Grozny: NineCities”
Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a melting pot for changing Caucasus society that is trying to overcome a trauma of two recent wars and find its own way in between traditional Chechen values, Muslim traditions, and globalization. Our project is inspired by Thornton Wilder’s book Theophilus North and centers on the idea of nine cities being hidden in one, which gives us a concept to explore specific aspects of the aftermath of two Chechen wars.
Tamas Dezso (Hungary). “HERE, ANYWHERE”
The map of Hungary is speckled with capsules of time. During the political transformation twenty years ago, as the country experienced change it simply forgot about certain places – streets, blocks of flats, vacant sites and whole districts became self-defined enclosures, where today a certain out-dated, awkward, longed-to-be-forgotten Eastern Europeanness still lingers. There are places which seem to be at one with other parts of the city in a single space, but their co-existence in time is only apparent; places which decompose in accordance with their own specific chronology, determined by their past, such that what remains would then either be silently reconquered by nature or enveloped by the lifestyles of tomorrow’s generations. Of the inhabitants, who have never fully integrated with majority society, soon only traces will remain, until they, too, disappear in the course of time.
Tamas Dezso (Hungary). “Romania”
Spiritual tradition and physical heritage are simultaneously disintegrating in Romania. Time is beginning to undermine centuries-old traditions preserved in tiny villages, in communities of only a few houses, as well as the bastions of the communist era’s enforced industrialisation, which became part and parcel of Romania’s recent history.
Melanie Dornier (France/India). “Memory”
Memory of places, these stories have been built and re-built. Mark of past life is still omnipresent in empty places. Walls are full of memories, they tell stories of themselves. Photography project “Memory” is a research between emptiness and memory. This fine art project has been realized in China where economic pressure built and re-built town. Urban spread boosts disappearance of culture and tradition. Every year, about 15 million people become urban citizens.
Arthur Bondar, Oksana Yushko (Ukraine). “Soullines”
We had a strange feeling on the border with a self-proclaimed country in Caucasus, Abkhazia, well known for its ancient traditions of hospitality. We observed the consequences of the war with Georgia (1992-1993) of a long period of economic blockade, Russian money influence, coming Olympic Games 2014 in Sochi, political propaganda and the borders in people’s thoughts.
Andrew Lomakin (Ukraine) “Two lives”
On the night from 25 to 26 of April 1986 the biggest in the world nuclear disaster happened on modern Ukraine territory. Transient evacuation for 3 days term was proclaimed In Pripyat’ town to clean area from radiation. It was allowed to take personal IDs and minimum of valuables. About 50000 people were evacuated from Pripyat. No one from them was able to come back to his home. It was a very big loose. After some time people were provided with new apartments in different cities of former USSR. But it was hard to recover from the psychological shock. Currently the most part of them is living in Kyiv and Slavutych (town was boiled for former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant workers) People still remember events of those days very well. Some of them managed to bring out archive photos.
Sara Angelucci (Canada). “Snow”
Snow is a five minute video work comprised of a series of film segments taken from the last few seconds of a variety of Super 8 family films. The short scenes in Snow were selected because they still contained the “white dots” which suddenly appear, float over and obliterate the scene. (These dots are literally holes in the film created by Kodak as an identifying tagging system). Although there is nothing remarkable in these ordinary scenes of family life, the video becomes a series of endings strung together forever suspending the narrative. The dots obliterate the last clues of the story; each scene viewed in brief isolation, a small gesture of loss.
Julia Borissova (Russia). “Running To The Edge”
Memory rolls in like waves causing a sudden and acute experience which doesn’t refer to a life of a specific person. This memory is connected to a cultural stratum. Everything is mixed here, the present and the past, some old photo portraits telling the stories of life which were erased by flow of time, dried flowers that represent markers of what was important but was forgotten, the memories of what happened, but couldn’t be remembered.
Roman Pyatkovka (Ukraine). “Soviet Photo”
Soviet photo – is the whole epoch, which gone irrevocably.On one side it is an odious magazine “Soviet Photo”, filled with communist propaganda. On the other side these were pictures of underground photographers of those times. Pictures of which could put into prison. To connect the today means reconsider that time. The time of ephemeral ideals and bitter disappointments. Rethink to understand what to do now.The pictures and pages from the magazine “Soviet Photo” and the author’s works of the soviet period were used in this series.
The “Soviet Photo” project is a winner of “Conceptual, Professional Competition” Sony World Photography Awards.
