The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance. Charting a path across four decades of avant-garde experiment and radical escapism, This Is Not a Dream traces the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.
The film explores the sexual aspects of Serbian folklore. Ancient myths that have trickled into everyday household remedies or explanations are juxtaposed with the joys of the female and male sexual forms from which all human life originates. Functioning as both sexual liberation and reinvented modern myth, Balkan Erotic Epic is a display of the need for a cultural change in viewpoint around sex.
Before the freeze, there was beautiful garden. "Before the Freeze" is a short psychological thriller with experimental elements, about an overstressed, newly-single mother, her daughter, their dog, and what happens one afternoon when a friend comes over. "Before the Freeze" is Tenley E. Raj's debut film. Written, directed, shot, and edited and by Tenley E. Raj.
A silent experimental film, originally made in accompaniment to Josephine Zwaan's '1/4' album release presentation in 2016. The film sees musician Josephine Zwaan persist through a test of endurance, with the foundation of the film being a one-take of her staring deeply into the lens of the camera, haphazardly overlayed and re-framed by graphical elements color-matched to the album's artwork.
A short documentary film functioning as the introduction to the One Minutes x Inter-Architecture Department (Gerrit Rietveld Academy) short-film broadcast episode for Rietveld TV, as aired on SALTO. This broadcast was meant to give an artistic impression of a communal art-project developed by the Inter-Architecture Department for the municipality of Amstelveen, The Netherlands. This short documentary film introduces each duo placed and posing at their respective project-based locations, spread out over Amstelveen, through purposely awkward still-but-moving vignettes. The duo's are reintroduced several times in quick succession, with each consecutive appearance showing more of an awkward inter-personality, meant to evoke a certain liminal playfulness. An overpass, a bridge, a bridge-barrier, a docking port, the border between Amsterdam and Amstelveen, the edges of Amsterdamse Bos, an abandoned railroad.
IN 1988, rising star Kenneth Branagh tackled the role of Shakespeare’s prince of Denmark for the first time in his professional career under the guidance of celebrated actor Derek Jacobi. Narrated by Patrick Stewart, this hour-long film documents how Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi, two intelligent and passionate men, found new depths in Shakespeare’s classic drama, Hamlet. Filmmakers Mark Olshaker and Larry Klein follow the company through four weeks of rehearsals, from the first read-throughs to opening night.
A performance artist and her former partner and lover begin rehearsing their final piece. When the latter's new partner joins them and secrets of their past emerge, the gap between their work and reality blurs.
One of three films made as part of the multi-media project ‘Doem, Dood & Verderf’ (2017) by Mees Joachim, chronicling the most traumatic moments from three of their prior long-term relationships. This multi-media project took the form of twelve 100x65cm illustrations, 4 per relationship, an EP released as Pink Boah (Zalmroze in collaboration with Jerboah) and three experimental films backed by the three title tracks from the Pink Boah EP. Each of the three films is a self-projected character study, with the three relationships being depicted and acted out, by the artist and a placeholder model, through physical performance and touch. Visually it is most in line with the artist’s photographic series "The Gaze Upon The Male Gaze”, made for Sauce Magazine, with both the films and that photo series being highly sexploitative in nature.
A social-media based film intervention, made up of 6 short videos, meant to be looped to infinity.
Aida Ra Mana invites you to explore a sci-fi universe set in the year 2044. In this imagined future, the story revolves around three aliens whose deep friendship unfolds in a world dominated by military rule and stringent restrictions. Through this work, Aida Ra Mana poses profound questions about resilience and the human spirit. How do we create joy and humor when faced with pervasive limitations and diminished opportunities? What does it mean to nurture friendship and creativity in an environment where one must constantly conceal their magic and beliefs from an authoritarian regime? By blending elements of science fiction with poignant social commentary, Aida Ra Mana's universe serves as a mirror to our own society's challenges and a testament to the enduring power of joy and laughter in the face of adversity.
Following a four-month visit to Taiwan during the pandemic, New York-based artist Yo-Yo Lin shares a first-person account of returning to a place of medical and familial trauma. Moving through the artist’s intimate thoughts, Re:collections melds together new media performance, documentary, Chinese medicine, and Taoist cosmology to question how identity and language are conceived in the context of disability and immigration.
A documentary short film capturing the world of The Creatures of the Night, an up and coming group of alternative drag artists in the Coachella Valley.
"Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the 'sacred erotic.' This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City."
A group of young men waltz in pairs, balancing with a glass between their foreheads. In this captivating setting, director Albert Rask crafts a new code of conduct - an allegory reflecting the experience of growing up. A playful yet poignant exploration that reframes the burdens of responsibility, expectations and the rules of adulthood.
The Concrete Road is a three-channel installation work which was premiered during the Graduation Show 2021 at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. "Landscape shifts, unmodernised desires. This is a story comprising three avatars of myself talking to and interviewing each other, reflecting on memories and weaving a path on coming of age. Sticky childhood memory which never fades. Loosely fitted gender/racial identity struts in juvenile cravings. Self-loathing, negation of the past, and his frowning parents. The tyranny of modernism leaves a leaky path for the protagonist to escape and slobber in a dream of wet summer night. My highest appreciation towards Bertien van Manen, who not only provides images on memory bubbles, but also her images help me to develop the initial script for this work."
A short mock-vlog film explaining and defending the concepts behind the fictional 'Death To Straight White Men 2017' clothing brand. Edited in a way that mocked the trends of Youtube vlogging and apology-videos of the time, including sound effects and interjected fast-moving graphics. "After QnWF-société received an overwhelming amount of negative feedback following the launch of their 'Death To Straight White Men 2017' clothing brand, their CEO felt the need to create an apology video of sorts - explaining and defending the concepts behind their latest line of clothing."
What begins as a spatially abstract, weightless situation transforms into a mediation of geography, culture, and history. Filmed transcontinentally between Singapore and The Netherlands, Control emphasizes the idiosyncratic texture of a common, fragmented consciousness.
Three commercials, presented as a short film, for fictional clothing brand 'Death To Straight White Men' by the QnWF-Sociétè. This fictional clothing brand and the ready-for-action poses and portraits of the three models were in many ways the foundation for 'E Kolór Korra' (2017).