(2020-2021) 11:15 mins

Selected by Belgrade Cultural Centre (BCC), Belgrade

In times of volatile life conditions and the possibility of haptic and corporal sociability, the new virus didn't just threaten the body but also modes of communication, behaviour, movement, worry, love and care. Neda Kovinić is using her dance and visual practice to warn us of the rhythm of the world that gobbles everything in its path leaving nothing in its wake.

Together Apart is a dance-narrative performance that confronts both the participants and the public with the (in)ability of performing and communicating in the times of pandemic culture. How are we supposed to practice togetherness and care through dance now when physical distancing is the ultimate performance? How can an interactive art process, which implies the practice of togetherness, palpable and corporal, not only virtual, be possible in the world of the pandemic?

Artist Q&A

Where are you from and how did you become interested in moving image work?
I am from Belgrade, Serbia. My interests in moving image work came from exploring the great movie authors (Antonioni, Godard...), screened everyday in the cinemas during the war time in former Yugoslavia, in the nineties. The videos by conceptual artists from the seventies and many contemporary alternative experimental film festivals triggered my interests to this media. The camera appears as a “partner in crime” in my dance performative practice.

What inspired/influenced you to make the work?
I was inspired by the thoughts on pandemic, disaster-capitalism, body-politics, and care by P. B. Preciado, Pavle Levi, Sylvia Federici and Naoimi Klein, and by the various statements I collected from everyday speech of my friends, lovers, cousins, neighbours and social media. I connected these verbal, theoretical and poetic observations with body movements. The dancers I worked with faced the difficulties of dancing in the public space and doing contact improvisation because of constant changes of the measures of social and corporal distancing.

The expressive narration in the video culminates in a choreographed movement "knee-on-neck". The repression of the ruling structures raises the question of whether the immunized society, which is now being sought, represents a danger to the survival of art, sociability and even human beings.

What are you working on at the moment?
Currently I am working as an artist-curator of the large exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists of Serbia. I am also making new video research on the topic of loneliness and togetherness. I am exploring the compositions of the dancers in the deserted urban spaces, abandoned industrial zones and emptied tourist resorts… I am also preparing the first animated video of my drawings with imaginary choreographies, reflecting on the current impossibility of the collective projects in real spaces of the urbanscape and ongoing virtualization of artistic labour.

Neda Kovinić (1975) has graduated in fine arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and interior design at the Faculty of the Applied Arts in Belgrade. She holds a PhD at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Department of Multimedia. Since 1996, she has been exhibiting at solo and group exhibitions in Serbia and abroad. She has made ambient installations, thus forming art basis close to conceptual art. In her recent projects, she has been trying to face the facts of the multitude of temporality and the space of global capitalism – from the neoliberal to the conservative one, the retro-local and the national.  She explores types of escapism in artificial autonomies, the space of escape and retreat, especially in former Yugoslavia after the wars and the rise of nationalism.

Her latest research is based on creating networks between artists of conceptual dance and various nationalities, dance backgrounds and age, in order to create the practice of togetherness, and the exploration of social, political and art-political issues.

(2014) 2:06 mins

Selected by Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila

Mag-uuma (Farmer) features a young female dissenter from Mindanao whose performance during a peasant demonstration caught the attention of filmmaker and visual artist Kiri Dalena.

After agreeing to document the song she sang during the rally, Dalena filmed the young woman in the middle of a rice field while farmers submerged in knee-deep paddies continued to plant.

However, the young woman performed another song, compelling those around her to take pause and listen. This song of protest which she sings in the video is an old ballad learned from her mother, its verses speaking of a history of exploitation and poverty, circumstances that continue to cast a shadow on their community and personal lives.

Artist Q&A

Where are you from and how did you become interested in moving image work?
I am based in Metro Manila now, but for some time I have been based outside of the city. I first became interested in moving image work when I was still a student in the University of the Philippines in Los Baños and I was slowly finding my way into the larger world. With the camera, I did not feel lost and felt that I had a center when I was framing and recording what was happening around me.

What inspired/influenced you to make the work?
I have worked as a human rights volunteer, and what is normally expected of me in peasant communities is to document incidents of human rights abuses. These are often in the form of interviews and testimonies about specific incidents, quantifiable and useful in paralegal work. Songs such as Mag-uuma do not serve this same purpose, but I am inspired to make them because they can hold something more, they can awaken something that I thought was impossible or rather, intangible, like hope.

What are you working on at the moment?
I am a resident artist for a museum project on American Colonial photography. The work is online and process is online so I am adjusting to the remote and the non-tactile format. I am also invited to work on a video about “empathy.” I am also active in the human rights movement here in the Philippines. I contribute for video, photography, research and recently even making pins. That one is a lot of work, especially now, with our present government.

Kiri Dalena (b. 1975, Philippines) is a Filipino visual artist and filmmaker whose body of work confronts the underlying social conflicts in contemporary Philippine society. Articulating certain realities of injustice and inequality, Dalena’s deep understanding of the mass struggle greatly influences her artistic practice, depicting forms and histories of civil resistance. Her works assert the importance of protest and activism against state persecution. She participated in Berlin Biennale 11: The Crack Begins Within, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, ExRotaprint (2020); JIWA: Jakarta Biennale 2017, Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, Jakarta (2017); and Singapore Biennale: If the World Changed, Singapore Art Museum (2013).

(2017) 14:47 mins Selected by Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)

my castle your castle by Kerstin Honeit focuses on the debate about the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace on the foundation of the Palace of the Republic, the former seat of the People’s Chamber, the legislature of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

Kerstin Honeit invites two of the craftsmen involved in the construction and demolition of the palace to a conversation at the palace construction site. The setting plays with the ambience of a television talk show and thus underscores the stage-like nature of the large construction site, which serves as a platform for a wide variety of stakeholders and interest groups.

A musical interlude by two queer cowboys interrupts and caricatures this reference. The castle as an ‘identity-forming’ building of national importance is thus reoccupied as a space by protagonists whose voice is otherwise lost in the debate.

Artist Q&A

Where are you from and how did you become interested in moving image work?
I was born and raised in Berlin where I grew up watching a lot of television. It was the 1980s and I was able to flick between images of capitalism and socialism. The meeting of these two opposed worlds in the same television set, disgorging their mixed messages into my living room, fascinated me from early on and shaped my interest in the production of moving images.

What inspired/influenced you to make the work?
I still live in Berlin and I usually find the stories and political issues I am interested in literally outside my front door. The drastic changes this city has experienced during the last 30 years since the wall came down, for example, are impossible to overlook and have almost rendered the city unrecognisable. Neoliberal urban planning policies, gentrification as well as large reactionary building projects like the resurrection of the Prussian city palace, create a city exclusively for tourists and the rich, while long established communities are pushed out.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot of activist energy left in the city to fight against investors and rampant privatisation. There is currently a huge campaign for a referendum to de-privatise 240,000 apartments, bringing them under public control. These gestures of resistance–and also solidarity–inspire me.

What are you working on at the moment?
My next project will investigate the aesthetics of poverty based on my own background, seeking forms of representation which examine economic discrepancy and structural classism (in the cultural sector as well), without being exploitative or exoticising.

Kerstin Honeit (*1977 in Berlin, lives in Berlin) works as a filmmaker and artist with different forms of staging. Honeit’s artistic research focuses on the investigation of representational mechanisms in the production of hegemonic imagery in connection with cultural and linguistic modes of translation, especially in the cinematographic context.

Her works have been shown at HMKV Dortmund, International Short Film Festival São Paulo, Ruhrtriennale, Kunsthalle Rostock, Off Biennale Cairo, Videoart at Midnight, MMOMA - D’EST, HKW Berlin, SixtyEight Art Institute Kopenhagen, Kunstmuseum Bonn and many more.