Quem Tem Medo da Arte Contemporânea?

A follow up to award winning documentary 'Herb & Dorothy', the film captures the ordinary couple's extraordinary gift of art to the nation as they close the door on their life as collectors. When Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a retired postal clerk and librarian, began collecting works of contemporary art in the 1960s, they never imagined it would outgrow their one bedroom Manhattan apartment and spread throughout America. 50 years later, the collection is nearly 5,000 pieces and worth millions. Refusing to sell, the couple launches an unprecedented gift project giving artworks to one museum in all 50 states. The film journeys around the country with the Vogels, meeting artists who are famous or unknown, often controversial, striking today's society with questions about art and its survival.

Thomas Hirschhorn, one of the few Swiss artists of world renown, often touches on social wounds with his provocative works. In 2013, Hirschhorn built a monument for Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci in a public housing project in the Bronx. The contentious artist collaborated with neighborhood residents whose everyday life is impacted by poverty, unemployment and crime. Conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise as Hirschhorn’s absolute devotion to art is confronted with the resident’s lack of prospects and fatalistic outlooks. The «Gramsci Monument» becomes a summer-long experiment where diverse worlds collide: blacks and whites, the art elite and street kids, party people and poets, politicians and philosophers. A nuanced film about art, politics and passion.

Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson? is a feature documentary film about this controversial and divisive artist who in the ensuing five years has only solidified his stature with unnerving and provocative new works that elicit extreme reactions from both critical naysayers and vocal proponents alike. Wolfson is not content to play by the rules of a conservative self-policing art market that favors the status quo, instead preferring to make us squirm as he engages a host of lightning-rod issues facing our society today; homophobia, misogyny, racism, white nationalism, antisemitism and violence to name but a few. Wolfson is an art maker on the world stage whose immersive works take on today’s endemic virtue signaling and politically correct narratives, veritably throwing it all back into our faces.

Exiled, yet internationally celebrated Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai's demons come to life as he tries to flee South Africa following increasingly fractious experiences on the Johannesburg art scene. His greatest demon “Black Guilt” is one he can never shake off, this burden of having to speak for his people. But Is this responsibility really a burden at all, or is it actually a superpower? Either way, will Kudzi ever be President of His Own State of Being?

The video, Proposition d'habitation, offers a demonstration of the use of a series of cells forming living spaces, which the artist Absalon designed for his own use. It consists of 6 models at scale 1, reduced dimensions, custom-built for the artist's size and build. These are simple geometric shapes, covered in white plaster or paint, which make no claim to any particular function. These white houses, immaculate and asexual, invite their unique protagonist, Absalon, to isolation and introspection.

Parres is a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City, halfway to Cuernavaca. It is a town in passing that has left immutable and imperceptible traces on the highway. A man paint the screen covering the town. The series is composed of three videos.

Parres is a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City, halfway to Cuernavaca. It is a town in passing that has left immutable and imperceptible traces on the highway. Parres II is a bucolic self portrait that implements the use of rain that covers the screen, activating the monochrome outside the traditional frame of painting. The series is composed of three videos.

Parres is a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City, halfway to Cuernavaca. It is a town in passing that has left immutable and imperceptible traces on the highway. A man clean the paintwork of the screen. The series is composed of three videos.

The camera explores the remains of Tell el-Ful, a building in northeast Jerusalem intended to serve as a summer palace for the Jordanian royal family. Begun in 1966, the building’s construction was halted by the Six-Day War the following year. The building was never completed nor was its early structure removed, and the site is Israeli territory.

Documentation of Lygia Pape’s 1968 performance Divisor - reactivated in the city of Villeurbanne (France) in October 2014. Commissioned by Institut d'Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes.

Many twentieth century European artists, such as Paul Gauguin or Pablo Picasso, were influenced by art brought to Europe from African and Asian colonies. How to frame these Modernist works today when the idea of the primitive in art is problematic?

In 1983, Franz Paludetto acquired Rivara Castle at the foot of the Italian Alps. A century earlier, artists from all over Europe had gathered here to establish the Rivara School of Painting. We witness the story of Italy during the latter half of the 20th century.

Maurício Dias & Walter Riedweg often say the streets are their studio. From the observation of them and of those who populate them there arise installations about encounters, identity and territoriality. The Brazilian-born Dias met the Swiss Riedweg in 1993. Together they learned that they could boost one another’s ideas. “This marriage became Mau Wal,” says Dias. In this documentary, they present their works and the many characters behind them: people who make day-to-day living in the big cities. Street vendors at a Northeast Brazilian fair in São Paulo, illegal immigrants in their quest for the European dream, street kids and their memories. In stories or in the role it plays, the human element is always a centerpiece to the duo’s work.

Marepe, an artist from Bahia, produces art with anything he comes across in the town he lives in, Santo Antônio de Jesus. Packs of cigarettes, coconut palms, walls, and memories taken from the streets, go into putting together a personal archeology for this young artist.

Research and dissemination documentary-film about contemporary art in which more than 30 staff members of museums and galleries, visual and sound artists, collectors, art critics and curators share their knowledge and give an account of their experiences and anecdotes.

A rural American town suffering economically from factory closures finds an unconventional route to recovery with the help of MASS MoCA.

Rafael França: obra como testamento

This film documents Kutlug Ataman's artistic production in a retrospective approach and elucidates his works with his own words and with commentaries by curators, art institution directors, art historians and critics who are familiar with his production through close collaboration, to witness the construction of an impressive artistic production spanning 15 years. The film also includes the excerpts from the artworks and the installation footages of their realization.

This documentary follows 200 days in the life of contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto— a leading presence in the world of modern art. He is the winner of many prestigious awards and his photographs are sold for millions of yen at overseas auctions. The film shows the sites of the Architecture series shot in southern France, the huge installation art work at 17th Biennale of Sydney, his new work Mathematics at Provence, his art studio while working on Lightning Fields, and more. It thoroughly pursues the question Sugimoto's works pose - "living in modern times, what are these works trying to tell us?" A thrilling look into the world of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

In this revealing study of Norval Morrisseau, filmed as he works among the lakes and woodlands of his ancestors, we see a remarkable Indigenous artist who emerged from a life of obscurity in the North American bush to become one of Canada's most renowned painters. Morrisseau the man is much like his paintings: vital and passionate, torn between his Ojibway heritage and the influences of the white man's world.