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26/1/2015

Three exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova MSUM, Ljubljana

Nika Autor
The News Is Ours!

The title of the exhibition is a paraphrase of the titles of two notable films - the 1971 American newsreel Finally Got the News and the 1936 French newsreel La vie est a nous. The first film is a collective work by the film activist group Newsreel and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers about the position of workers in the Detroit automobile industry. La vie est a nous is a political propaganda film by Jean Renoir, which was commissioned by the French Communist Party and explores the position of the working class in France. The guiding principles of both works are the exploration of the intertwinement of images and the political and social situation at the time, and the dialectics of montage, thought and social engagement. A similar principle guides the artworks presented by The News Is Ours!, that is, the exploration of the intertwinement of images and an attempt at social engagement.

The News Is Ours! is a continuation of the artistic research work and the eponymous exhibition presented at the Jeu de Paume in Paris between February and May 2014 at the invitation of curator Nataša Petrešin - Bachelez in the framework of her one-year curatorial project entitled Histoires d'empathie. In addition to the films, the exhibition in Ljubljana also presents documentary material based on the visual research material gathered in cooperation with the Newsreel Front.

At the invitation of the curator of the exhibition Bojana Piškur, two new works, For Slava (2014) and Falsches Bild (2014), and other documentary material will be shown in addition to Newsreel 55 (2013), Solidarity (2011) and In the Land of Bears (2012), plus Jurij Meden?s Karl Marx Among Us (2013) from the collection of the Newsreel Front.

The first part of the exhibition presents fragments, notes, photos and videos that use images to try to explore the history and the economic dynamics of former Yugoslavia, emphasising the paradigmatic example of the decline of the industrial centre of Podravje, the Yugoslav Manchester as they once named Maribor. The examined content opens questions related to the social and political shifts that determined the economic, political and social dynamics of the city. Maribor as a city of occupation, a city of industrialisation and deindustrialisation, a city marked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the war and the economic crisis.

The second part of the exhibition attempts to think about the same questions more broadly, experimentally and more daringly (Karl Marx Among Us, In the Land of Bears ...), foregrounding the historical aspect of the experimental newsreel form presented by a selection of three Yugoslav films. Documentary essayistic film practices in former Yugoslavia were a rare, but most precious form of political cinema. In the 1960s, engaged cineastes used them to probe various neuralgic areas and to try to capture on film what mostly remained invisible. The Record (Zapisnik, 1964) by Aleksandar Petrović, A Tear on Your Face (Suza na licu, 1965) by Stjepan Zaninović and June Turmoil (Lipanjska gibanja,1969) by Želimir Žilnik, three works that were made in different times and spaces and behind different editing tables, are rarely seen and noted. The three films were selected by Andrej Šprah and will be shown during the entire run of the exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a booklet which includes three texts. The first discusses the genealogy of the newsreel as a subversive and political form of resistance (Ciril Oberstar); the second is a review of The News Is Ours! as it was presented in Paris in 2014 (Darran Andersson), and the last is a reflection on the experimental film Newsreel 55 (Andrej Šprah). Enclosed in the exhibition catalogue is a reprint of a brochure in which Andrej Šprah reflects on Karl Marx Among Us. [Nika Autor]

Thanks to: Yugoslavian Cinematheque in Belgrade, Dunav film, Zastava film, Museum of National Liberation Maribor, Želimir Žilnik.

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Loredana Bianconi
Do You Remember Revolution?

The exhibition is curated by Bojana Piškur.

In Italy, in the mid-1970s, Adriana, Barbara, Nadia and Susanna were 20 years old when they decided to join the armed struggle and leave behind their social life and their families in order to make the revolution the centre and the aim of their existence. Today they reappear, after many years in prison, and they try, each of them, to recount their own experiences. They speak about the political reasons which initially sustained them, the conflicts, the doubts, and the moments of being torn apart, which marked out their lives as women caught up in the vortex of war. A course of events which ended in the condemnation of the armed struggle and the pain of the lives that were destroyed - their victims' lives and their own.

Loredana Bianconi

In her documentary Do You Remember Revolution?, the Italian director Loredana Bianconi interviewed at length four women who actively participated in the leftist armed struggle in the Italy of the 1970s. All of them were leading figures in the Red Brigades. Bianconi has no intention to judge their actions, nor their lives. Instead she has decided to listen. So she stays manifestly absent from her film. We hear no sensational - and very few anecdotal - aspects of these women's revolutionary lives. Instead, we listen to answers to questions no judge ever asked them. Then Barbara, Nadia, Adriana and Susanna talk about their decision to join the armed struggle. A decision that was all-demanding. A radical choice that required not only giving up most of what they had, but also put at risk their very existence. Bianconi opens her film with a personal note, recalling the revolutionary years. Then she cuts to archival images shot by Italian State TV. We see the four protagonists at their trial.

The film shows us how four exceptional women look back at their common cause. This is not a mythic, sloganesque, nor apologetic discourse, but a personal one. We hear four different ways of remembering, and living with, a common past. A past that today everybody tells us to renounce, to reject, to forget. Loredana Bianconi and the four women in her film remind us to have the courage to remember. [Excerpted from Koen van Daele's text published in Časopis za kritiko znanosti, no. 190/191, 1998]

In addition to the film, the exhibition presents archival newspaper clippings on the events related to the Red Brigades and photographs by Italian photographer Tano D'Amico.

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Art of the Stateless State / New World Summit

The New World Summit is an artistic and political organization founded by artist Jonas Staal that develops "parliaments" for unacknowledged states, stateless and blacklisted political groups. The members from the New World Summit together collaborate in creating temporary platforms all around the world in art institutions, theaters and public spaces to tell the histories of stateless political struggle banned from the existing political order.

The New World Summit claims to redefine the project of democracy - the unrestricted representation of all voices - through the space of art. Developed in the age of the War on Terror, the summits that took place so far in Berlin (Germany), Leiden (the Netherlands), Kochi (India) and Brussels (Belgium) focused largely on organizations confronted with modern day politics of blacklisting, such as the Basque Independence Movement, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, the Kurdish Women Movement, the National Liberation Movement of Azawad and the Oromo Liberation Front.

In a period of two years the New World Summit effectively build a network of representation for dozens of stateless political groups, created collaborations with both art and diplomatic institutions, and founded its own school, the New World Academy, with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, which facilitates collaborations between artists, students and stateless political organizations.

The title of this first overview of the work of the New World Summit refers to two fundamental aspects of the organization. On one hand, it refers to the role of art in creating alternative political platforms through new visual, architectural and choreographical models in the form of parliaments in which stateless political groups can speak publically. On the other hand, it also refers to the role of art within stateless political groups.

Art of the Stateless State will exhibit the architectural models and designs of the New World Summit as well as video documentation of several of its speakers. Further, the exhibition will give an overview of the role of art in representing unacknowledged states through contributions of artists, writers and theorists engaged in stateless political struggle, such as the role of protest puppetry in creating alternative people's trials in the Philippines and the role of art in the creation and representation of the new state of Azawad (northern-Mali).

With contributions by Lisa Ito (theorist, Concerned Artists of the Philippines), Moussa Ag Assarid (writer, National Liberation Movement of Azawad) and Mazou Ibrahim Touré (Artist Association of Azawad).

http://www.newworldsummit.eu

New World Summit is: Jonas Staal (artist and founder); Younes Bouadi (production and research); Renée In der Maur (project coördinator and programmer); Imara Limon (communication); Henry Procter (media and communications officer); Paul Kuipers (architect); Remco van Bladel (visual identity); Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (editor and advisor); Robert Kluijver (diplomat and advisor); Sjoerd Oudman (web design); Kasper Oostergetel (development and construction); Jan de Bruin, Rens van Meegen, Rob Schröder and Gabriëlle Provaas (film documentation).

The exhibition is curated by Bojana Piškur.

Image: Slava Klavora in the summer of 1938 in the Kamnik Alps. Courtesy: Museum of National Liberation Maribor

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