DETOUR
THIRD INTERNATIOAL VIDEO FESTIVAL, CAIRO
23.11.2008 – 3.12.2008
Synopses
DREAMS
This video is based on my dreams, in which I was on a train, looking at odd but beautiful landscapes through a train window. In this video, as a train travels a desolate and abandoned world, an eye in the train witnesses various cultural, political and environmental milieus. Traveling through the landscapes, where there is no human presence, sense of isolation, fear, sorrow and anxiety are projected on to the landscapes outside the train. I created 2 and 3 dimensional models for a single channel video, which has various cultural references, such as Islamic villages, American suburb, European houses, Asian and Middle Eastern landscapes.
IN THE FRIDGE
Sewing as a hobby and an unusual appetite for food insertion.
LANTERN DOGS
Los Angeles dogs and puppies . Sidewalks-rich, poor, famous, empty. Beverly Hills lost and found in translation. Who is the dog-we are what we do. Watch out for the sweet and lovely lamp posts-in broad light by day and by night.
Technology: Lamps become sound triggers and pitch shifters by means of light sensors, irons turn into turntables through pressure sensors, chairs become free-moving VST instruments through sensor combinations. Drawers (open/close), closet doors, curtains (movements) and the TV set (light intensity) become a sampler. This performance consists of seven different interactive scenarios. A night in the luxury hotel becomes a performance night.
LUXOR
A m/hotel performance went down in Vegas. Luxor: rooms 4455, employees 4000, casino 120,000 square feet, 250 miles visible Xenon light shot. Room No.22.145: sensor equipped bending mattresses, sound generating moving chairs, pitch shifting ironing and flickering lights.
Technology: Lamps become sound triggers and pitch shifters by means of light sensors, irons turn into turntables through pressure sensors , chairs become free-moving VST instruments through sensor combinations. Drawers (open/close), closet (movements) and the TV set (light intensity) become a sampler… This performance consists of seven different interactive scenarios. A night in the luxury hotel becomes a performance night.
PLAY
Entertainment can have positive impacts on us , it can destroy and break. Unachievable fantastic sim worlds, growing frustrations, suppressions of problems… Play!
Technology: live pitching of audio samples with distance sensor on the ground. Sensor equipped rocking dog as music score controller.
YAMAKASI
Yamakasi is the art of movement: the “conquering” (climbing) of urban objects. The video “Yamakasi” shows the struggle of the individual. The protagonist seems to be a mountaineer or yamakasi trying to climb cliff. As the perspective broadens, however, we gradually realize that only the image slewed round by 90 degrees has deceived our perception of space. He is crawling at the very bottom of urban space: in the street. He drags himself along by grabbing into the protrusions of the city, ignored by the passers-by. The strenuous and slow advancement signifies achievement that is basically immeasurable on a social scale. From the perspective of the individual, however, it means something entirely different: the formulation of a conscious relationship with the environment and the self as a result of inner motivation. It is the art of concentration and effort, the psychic art of movement.
LA VILLE LOOPY
Berlin’s Hansa Quarter-a veritable who’s who of international style buildings and urban planning-is the setting for this “loopy” meditation on the modernist architectural paradigm as formulated by le Corbusier in his conception of la ville radiuses. A synthesized walk around the quarter intimates the imagistic monumentality of the buildings as the repetitive movements of the pedestrian’s journey parody the life of the ideal city.
SERIOUSLY
The woman in front of the camera (the artist herself) reflecting over what she sees in the television .The aim with the film started with the artist wanting to see her self- looking at herself. “what we see on television that is true or?…” investigate and problemiatize identity and all its sources and also how the artistic practice is constantly living in symbiosis with the artist itself is of main interest. Born in Romania in the Hungarian minority and moved as 10 year old to Sweden Now studying at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm Sweden.
DATABASE LANDSCAPE
New Medias are expanding the boundaries of aesthetics introducing the concept of real time that it is modifying the way that we experience everyday life.
The work is the result of a 7 months investigation is Sao Paolo city . It’s a video performance recorded in a real time video software , in which 3000 images had been remixed searching for patterns that could reveal a new kind of knowledge about the urban scape.
READING AGATHA CHRISTIE
Two men and a woman of Middle Eastern appearance read in Arabic from Christies they came to Baghdad, while the British filmmaker interferes and manipulates them. The possibility of a different interaction emerges in the readers expressions, in this uncomfortable yet humorous film , made with members of Birmingham’s Kurdish community (who support this submission) .it reflects the artists struggle to understand the Iraq war and to explore the minutiae of popular culture which accrete to form our view of others as ‘not like us’ through her favorite detective fiction –popular in Iraq and allegedly much requested by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay .
STARING AT THE STRANGER FOR A LONG TIME
Holding the writing and having the video-camera between us, we put ourselves on display in a lively neighborhood.
MEDICARE
A brief introduction into Chinese medicine
BUT THE CUSTOMERS LIKE IT!
Musical intervention in the discounter supermarket.
CLAUDIA AND PAUL 2:13A.M
Its an experiment to discover what artistic event would occur if we could see all the activity around us in the next couple of minutes juxtaposed. Would our actions appear more meaningful? Would a choreography suddenly emerge? Is the motion around us better observed by extending our memory into the past and future simultaneously? Therefore, there are four short scenes in Claudia and Paul 2:13a.m .which repeat the same two characters in the same scene but in different locations, a minute apart. In the final scene, all four repetitions are juxtaposed.
A DOLL’S HOUSE
A work which explores connection between movement that occurs in an apartment building, other units in that building and the exterior world. It shows that each motion, whether it is made by human , animal, object , light or sound , is connected and extended by other motions to compose a phrase , a sentence a great artistic interest.
THE ORDER
Originally conceived for the runway , the order presents experimental stop-motion animation which emphasizes beauty and abstraction. It is important to note that the entire production was created from disposable materials within an arms length space. Materials include containers, cake toppers, straws cardboard, twigs, cards and artificial snow. The work is inspired by the magic of the stage and bringing inanimate objects to life.
Atmospheric mood and the internal response to pacing trumps narration. Influences include those who transform and highlight the physical traits of objects such as Sarah sze to image maker Julian Schnabel and director Michel Gondry.
AL BENDARI AND THE BUNDUQIA
Intended as a visual exploration of childhood expectation and fulfillment in the Arabian Gulf, Al-Bendari and the Bunduqia is a video installation by Qatari video-artist Sophia Al-Maria. The piece opens with the disembodied hands of a young boy twirling an Emirati gun on the roof of a house and ends with a young girl in a colorful jalabia disappearing into the seam at the center of the screen. Casting a rifle and a yellow rose as cartoonishly brash symbols of male and female, the gun and flower are then rhythmically superimposed over the moving images. In April 2008, Al-Bendari and the Bunduqia was censored and forcibly removed by the Amiri Diwan in Qatar for unknown reasons after only two days of prominent display in the Doha Waqif Arts Center.
SHE HAS HER OWN STORY TO TELL
In the video are 6 of my friends with different nationalities and occupations, but all live away from their home country where the local language is not their mother tongue. I asked them to tell their story about a certain pair of glasses in their mother tongue, projecting their memory to my glasses in their hand. The text was translated by me-with the unfamiliar languages, I tried to pick keywords and fill the gaps using my imagination based on knowledge about these friends, their gesture, their voice tone, etc. The piece deals with language barrier and biased perspective.
CASE STUDY
Case: any of various types of container or covering used for keeping or protecting things. Case:
- An instance of something occurring
- The situation.
- Cicumstances or special conditions relating to a person or thing
- A matter that is being officially investigated.
Case-study: a detailed account of the development of a person or group of people over a period of time.
THE DECISION
It is a walk along an empty city
It is a bad transmission.
It is Athens on a Sunday afternoon.
It is an advertisement, a monologue, a question
It is thoughts, nothing more.
STONE
A loaf of Egyptian bread is the symbol of life for most common people in Egypt “Zalata” (stone) displays the miss-order of elements and roles in contemporary Egyptian life, in an ironic context.
A LETTER TO A LOVER
And immediately I started to load the guns and rifles with gunpowder, and Friday helped me with it.
RECORD OF LABOUR
A personal documentary about child birth based on the official birth report and done with the method of combining structural narrative, diary film and strong sounds cape.
BACK TO THE HUMANITY
Back to Humanity is a video about industrialization, the all-mighty power of the machines and the destructivity which can’t be separated from them. We see car crashes, bullets shots etc. in extremely slow motion, with Zape leppanens music, based. on the sounds of steam engines. images are originally shot by the inventor Harri Vanhala with the special camera that can shoot 10 000 frames/sec.
ECUADOR
“I was invited to make a video which would be shown among Henry Moore sculpture in didrichsen art museum in Finland. The organic forms of the artworks and an exhibit of pre-Columbian art in the basement of the building inspired me to make Ecuador. As a starting point for the process I purchased two bananas imported from Ecuador from the local mall and scanned the barcode”.
NATURE MORTE
The silent actors of a natural history museum turn into a fluid and semi abstract flow of shapes and patterns. The preserved beasts are brought to life by the camera movements to perform an ambient dreamlike dance.
The soundtrack comes from a world beyond the museum doors. The looped sentimental sound of a Bollwood B-Film star creates a link to the modern world where emotions and moments are preserved on to film and hard disks.
TURNING GREEN
A short minalistic “screensaver-comedy” which has something to do with the man’s
Relationship towards nature and himself.
WRONG
A depressed man lies down in a hotel room. He’s having a imaginary conversation with his ex-wife about the reasons for their divorce. Naturally; this film is a comedy.
STATIONARY
“La vie miserable mit angst-KABOOM!”
TRANSACTIONS
This video shows one example of how Asian parents devote themselves to their grown children. Here a mother works tirelessly for rich clients so she can send her daughter to study in the USA. The montage illustrates the detailed procedure of dressmaking, and the phone conversation covers credit card expenses, converted from US dollars to Taiwanese Yuan.
KNOCK ON WOOD
This idea was inspired by the huge impact of Western culture on Asian society.
Based on the Western cultural habit of “knocking on wood”, instead of using my hand to knock on wood for good luck, I used my head.
X-MISSION
X-mission explores the logic of the refugee camp as one of the oldest extraterritorial zones. Taking the Palestinian refugee camps as a case in point, the video engages with the different discourses-legal, symbolic, urban, historical-that give meaning to this exceptional space. The narrative relies on a series of interviews made with experts, interspersed with multiple-layer video montage deriving from both downloaded and self-recorded sources. With Susan Akram, Bilal Khbaeiz, Ismael Sheikh Hassan, Samer Kanafani, Beshara Doumani.
PARADISE LOST
Home is an ongoing research. It consists of collections of interviews with people who were forced to migrate in the course of a political event. However, the examples of the project lies on remembered space and social structure of the architecture, not on the political event. 2007 “paradise lost”, a selection of the collected material of home, was screened at the royal geographic society. For the video “paradise lost”, artists from Pakistan interviewed their parents; we filmed them drawing floor plans and views of houses left during partition in 1947.
An installation will show at RGS this fall, making it part of the current discourse on representation of partition. For the lines of control exhibition by green cardamom a comprehensive video installation is being produced.
AN ORDINARY DAY
An ordinary day is a video animator based on a resistance of Malcolm x concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is victim of brutal attacks, it’s video shows Hakeem B animated visitor, walking victim of invisible blows, a decapitator and an insulator sniper. In spite of these brutal attacks, Hakeem B is raised and taken its walk as by resistance –a resistance which humanity implement daily. A resistance against an omnipresent violence that so me undergo and that others look at.