Opening of the Festival
Nirmal Puwar
The Otolith Group
Dara Birnbaum; Peggy Ahwesh
Fri., Oct. 1, 7.30 p.m.
Lecture and short films____Kinodvor, Kolodvorska 13, Ljubljana
Nirmal Puwar
Space Invaders
Lecture
Nirmal Puwar's lecture Space Invaders
looks at the 'arrival' of women and racialised minorities in spaces
from which they have been historically or conceptually excluded, such
as the art world or the public domain. Formally, today, women and
racialised minorities can enter positions from which they were
previously excluded. However, social spaces are not blank and open for
'any body' to occupy. There is a connection between bodies and space,
which is built, repeated and contested over time. While anyone may, in
theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly
designated as being the 'natural' occupants of specific positions. Some
bodies are deemed as having the right to belong within, while others
are marked as trespassers who are, in accordance with how both spaces
and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually),
circumscribed as being 'out of place'. Not being the somatic norm, they
are 'space invaders'. Investigating the paradox of the increasing
proximity of hitherto outside 'dissonant' bodies with inside 'proper'
bodies, allows us to see how less obvious, nuanced exclusion operates
within institutions via the tacit reservation of privileged positions
for the somatic norm. A brilliant analysis journeying through
ontological anxiety, social cloning and super surveillance, taking us
from high theory to everyday cultural spaces and back again...
Nirmal Puwar (b. 1967) has recently joined the
sociology department at Goldsmith College, London. Her publications
include Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004),
a co-edited book on South Asian Women in the Diaspora (2003) as
well as a special double issue of the journal Fashion Theory on
Orientalism (2003, English & Brazilian Portuguese). Nirmal
Puwar is part of the editorial collective of the international journal
Feminist Review and has contributed to special issues on Globalisation,
Fashion & Beauty and Labour Migration. Her work has also been
published in a range of journals including Multitudes (2004, in
French) and Derrive Approdi (2004, in Italian). Besides her
scholarly activities she is involved in art and culture, and has, for
instance co-directed a film-based exhibition that is currently being
shown at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, London.
Puwar's work is receiving growing recognition, and surprises
and inspires her readers:
"Space Invaders is the book we've all been waiting for! Puwar
masterfully shows how neither bodies nor the spaces they occupy can be
neutral...Her insights are original, her analysis clear and forceful,
and the overall result is surprising, convincing and breathtakingly
illuminating. Absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in
power and politics."
(Professor Moira Gatens, Chair in Philosophy, Sydney University)
Sci-fi Film Cycle:
The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, Richard
Couzins)
Otolith
Otolith links three historical moments: the
mutant future of the 22nd Century, the ambient fear of the early 21st
Century and the post independence era of the mid 20th Century. The
voice-over addresses the viewer from a dangerous future that positions
the present as historical ruin. This mode of address allows Dr Usha
Adebaran Sagar, the fictional narrator, who resides in a permanent
state of weightlessness that prevents habitation on Earth, to speculate
on the evolution of humankind through an investigation of the archives
of her female ancestors: the 21st century researcher Anjalika Sagar and
Ms. Anasuya Gyan Chand, grandmother of Anjalika and 20th century Indian
feminist.
The Otolith Group (founded by Anjalika Sagar and
Kodwo Eshun) uses the form of the essay film to test the hypothesis
that agravic space-time may be reconceived as a temporary heterotopia
for concentrating the apprehension of disorientation that accompanies
global crisis. Through their understanding of microgravity as a field
of forces that immerses and extends subjectivity, the group proposes
that the navigation of the agravic field allows the awareness of the
groundless systems that support the Era of the Pre-emptive Nuclear
Strike.
Anjalika Sagar is an interdisciplinary artist who
studied Social Anthropology and Hindi at the School of Oriental and
African Studies at London University. She has worked in England and
India with a range of filmmakers and development groups. As a sound
artist Sagar has collaborated with a variety of musicians and composers
such as Talvin Singh, Jem Finer, Heiner Goebbels and the Future Sound
of London. Anjalika Sagar is the founder of the Multitudes list and the
co-moderator of the Undercurrents list. With the Otolith Group she will
produce the first retrospective of the work of the London based Black
Audio Film Collective in 2006 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
Kodwo Eshun studied English Literature and Theory (BA
Hons, MA Hons) at University College, Oxford University and Post
Colonial Discourse Analysis (MA Hons) at Southampton University. He is
a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, Course Leader in
Public Arts at the Dutch Art Institute, University of Twente, Visiting
Tutor at De Ateliers, Amsterdam and Artist and Tutor in Residence at
Nanjing Institute, China. He is interested in the utopian potential of
interdisciplinary Afrodiasporic culture and has published and lectured
extensively in this area.
Peggy Ahwesh
She Puppet
"Like earlier magical entertainment that generated new
notions of the body as a technology, such as late 19th century trick
films (magicians transforming women into butterflies, skeletons or
angels, etc), Lara Croft is the girl-doll of the late 20th century
gaming world. What we like most about her is that she is a collection
of cones and cylinders - not a human at all - most worthy as a
repository for our post-feminist fantasies of adventure, sex, and
violence without consequence. The limited inventory of her gestures and
the militaristic rigor of the game strategies created for her by her
programmers, is a compulsive repetition of sorts, offering some kind of
cyber-agency and cyber-prowess for the player. As I played the game, I
recorded it live on tape, collecting hours of footage. Then I re-edited
the material as 'found footage'. Ignoring the original drive of the
action, I make Lara a vehicle for my thoughts on what I see as the
triad of her personae: the alien, the orphan, and the clone. Quotations
are from The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, The Female Man by
Joanna Russ, and Afro-futurist and jazz mystic Sun Ra." (Peggy Ahwesh)
Over the last two decades, Peggy Ahwesh has produced
one of the most heterogeneous bodies of work in experimental film and
video. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary
styles, improvised performance, Super-8 film, found footage, digital
animation, and Pixelvision video. With playfulness and humor, she
investigates cultural and gender identities, the role of the subject,
language and representation.
Dara Birnbaum
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation:
Wonder Woman, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology
embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating
imagery from the TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats
the moment of the 'real' woman's symbolic transformation into
super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum's
stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll.
Through radical manipulations of this female Pop icon, she subverts its
meaning within the television text. (sources: www.eai.org)
An architect and urban planner by training, Dara Birnbaum
studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the San Francisco
Art Institute. She began using video in 1978 while teaching at the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she
worked with Dan Graham. Recognized as one of the first video artists to
employ the appropriation of television images as a subversive strategy,
Birnbaum describes her early video tapes as "attempts at slowing down
'technological speed' in order to arrest movements of TV-time for the
viewer".
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PROGRAMME:
Nirmal Puwar (GB)
Space Invaders
Lecture, Kinodvor
English with Slovene overtitles
Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar in Kodwo Eshun, Richard
Couzins) (GB)
Otolith
Short film
GB, 2003, DVD, colour, 22'
English with Slovene subtitles
Peggy Ahwesh (USA)
She Puppet
Short film
USA, 2001, DVD, colour, 17'
English with Slovene subtitles
With the permission from: Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New
York
http://www.eai.org
http://www.hi-beam.net
Dara Birnbaum (USA)
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
Short film
USA, 1978, DVD, colour, 5'50''
With the permission from: Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New
York
http://www.eai.org
http://www.vdb.org
Organisation: City of Women
In co-operation with: Kinodvor
With the support of: The British Council
Free admittance
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