Straße 55 Presents: Video Art Evening:
SPEAKBODIES & Reinvented Cells
Curated by Sopo Kashakashvili, Co-organized with Straße 55 (Dora Tarasidou and Arela Simerson)
23rd September – 7:00pm Grab food & Drinks
Screening – 8:00pm
Join us at Straße55 for a cosy video art evening on 23.09.18, where 13 video works by International and Berlin based artists will be shown.
Each artist will present their own approach towards body, self and identity – their own way of communication and their own world of vision, belief and exploration of internal and external influences. All video works confront or question body in various ways, whether unraveling body in movement, abstraction, satirical commentary, found footage, psyche, exploring behavioural structures, trauma, word play, performance, research, self-experimentation, character play or other worldly creatures.
The video works will offer and mediate their own access to the world and how it reflects onto representation of self, body or identity.
How can self be uncovered through character embodiment? How to change the narrative of beauty advertising campaigns? How can colonial narratives be re-written? How to be unstuck from your body? What can be new possibilities to talk about body? How do we embody emotions? Whose voice is heard, whose voice is speaking? What is the role of representation in relation to moving image?
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Kurt Guo- Reality Workshop
“Reality Workshop”, an experimentation that Ten, a self-believing clairvoyance god, combining his reality with his fantasy through moving image and performance.
Andrea Riba & Ahshesay Rinaldi Castro- The First Reconquest
Our trailer aims to subvert Hollywood’s Western cultural production by portraying colonial narratives and female superheroes through a Hollywood trailer format.
Levinson Eliza – America’s Next Top Postgrad
America’s Next Top Postgrad is a satirical and autobiographical look at post-graduate employment options for one reality television-obsessed art student.
Gaia Bethel-Birch -a different name
A compilation of similar activities done by people who would call them by a different name. This specific piece was compiled after thinking about ‘what is one beauty product that black women and white men share?’ Gorilla Snot is exploring a hair product that transcends bathrooms, ethnicity, age, and gender. Exploring the humanness in all people. Gorilla Snot; laying the edges and spiking the hair.
Uncharted Land (Elana Scott) – Transforming DNA Dysphoria
Compiled together in DNA Dysphoria it tells a story of unresolved existence. There is a different context to be kept in mind while watching it here in Europe, in contrast to where Scott comes from in the States. Ethnicity, race, womanism, blackness, and identity continuously being told to her by third parties, changing deepening on her placement in the world… This creates a polarizing anger and uncertainty deep down. She is of mixed decent that is portrayed through conditioned that she finds harmful and limiting. This was her attempt to articulate this difficult uncomfortable topic of race that she finds still lacking in the European diaspora.
Aurora Del Rio- #2
Changing the skin is like moulting. Hypothetically, not to remain stuck in one body but to allow a new state to emerge. The transformation originates itself from the wound, from the opening gesture.
Moran Sanderovich – INSIGHT SKIN
“INSIGHT SKIN” deals with the way trauma transforms a body, its behaviour and shape. This performance investigates the boundaries culture places on women.
It discovers hidden layers inside the body that are thought to be repulsive and seeks to transform them into agents of new possibilities while no longer treating the skin as a boundary. Within InsightSkin another body is created, one in which the terms disability and imperfection are irrelevant. A body which naturally produces its own movements.
*The photographers and editor of the video are: Yael Elbee, Tom Garber)
Mariana Rocha -Habitò
Hábito means to dwell, to inhabit, to indwell, to live. It can also means form, habitude and vestment of religious women. In a assemblage of meanings, body and skin, the feeling of a new bodily language no longer based in words but on signs emerges through a maze of gestures, postures and bones that occupy the outlines, the in betweens, the other.
Livia Daza-Paris – No Sounds Carried The Wind
The Fallen (video series 2011-2012)
These videos are movement-studies on unresolved childhood memories in 1960s Cold-War era Venezuela. Visceral and kinaesthetic responses to the impact of a story are expressed through the “mimetic-imagination”. Tatarwrites: “…stories can make a kinaesthetic claim…enlisting something that can be called mimetic-imagination.” I explored the notion of becoming with a memory engaging sensorially, physically and emotionally to the memory. In this way, the mimetic imagination, is not mimicry, rather,a transformative intuitive activity in the process of sense-making.
Lena Kocutar- home
How it all came together
Sopo Kashakashvili – Spirits Playhouse
Breath and Saliva met and LIL was born. She began the journey through her alternate universe, where she was searching for her body. Breath in, Breath out… breath kept LIL going, producing movements, words, worlds, that naturally flew out escaped from her body. Her soul unclothed .. somewhere in the imaged universe.
Sivó Benjámin – THE STAGE IS BARE
A masked figure takes a hostage and is reminded of his own innocence.
Lilliam Nieves- I did it for you!
Physical appearance is the most evident theme in beauty advertising campaigns. Women are the principal targets of the selling strategies in which ads allude to the female figure and refer to their legitimate desire.
These enormous attacks to the feminine psyche generate a series of counterpart behaviors like frustration, gratification, pleasure and suffering; these clearly in- fluence a woman’s self-image.
Therefore, many women tend to do everything in their power to be “beautiful” and to comply with all sorts of impositions gathered from beauty stereotypes.
Cover Photo: by Lilliam Nieves – I did it for you!
***Donations at the door from 3EU-8EU
***Delicious Vegan Food from Rainbow Slices team: Esmé Forbes & Sophia Zbinovsky Braddel
Instagram: @walnutbitch & @tofu__mama will bring their collaborative efforts into celebration colours of the season with rainbow breads and seasonal veggies.
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/290456251770236/
Tener una conversación con Lilliam Nieves es toda una experiencia sónica. Su voz está hecha para teatro. Ella entona claramente. Habla con holgadas pausas. De cuando en vez aprieta el puño al describir su arte. Cuando dice algo que considera importante, te mira a los ojos y baja el tono de voz sin perder esa entonación distintiva. Su énfasis en la idea se mantiene en ritmo. Igual puede saltar de una conversación seria a carcajadas con mucha facilidad, entrelazando sarcasmo con buen humor. El trabajo artÃstico de Nieves también mantiene esa entonación particular. Apreciar su obras es casi como escucharla dirigirse a un público amplio. Igual que 
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