Directors Lounge Screening Marissa Rae Niederhauser Unbinding Spell Thursday, 30 November 2017 21:00 Z-Bar Bergstraße 2 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Marissa Rae Niederhauser, dancer, artist and filmmaker from Seattle, United States, lives in Berlin for two years, now. Her films vary between radical body expressions, and transcending body-nature relations, the complications of desire, and the search for love while counteracting the (male) role expectations.
Her work as an artist is based on modern and contemporary dance. After learning ballet at an early age, she studied dance at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Through documenting her early dance pieces, she learned how to edit video and moved from there to her own performances for the camera, while still frequently performing live dances. Though she does not have a formal training in visual arts, her process of working with video is surprisingly similar to visual artists working with performance and video. Like many artists, she often works alone or with only a small crew (camera/sound person) instead of big dance productions. Influences by artists like Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneeman and Charlotte Moorman are becoming obvious in the pieces which have performance quality, while others are structured as dance choreography.
Marissa Rae Niederhauser will present a program of video work, all conceived and edited by herself. And she will be available for Q&A after the screening.
The Berlin artist Verena Kyselka presents her video works connected with art projects in different countries. Born in Erfurt, Thuringia and having studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, her video work is related with her earlier emphasis on performance. She further works with installations, collages and photography. Her interest in questions of identity let her investigate people’s connection with culture, tradition and ethnic differences. Her many projects in Asian, Arabic and Latin American countries started with invitations to Taiwan, where she has collaborated and exhibited many times with local and international artists. Her quest for identity, especially of women, gives her a distinct interest in how people live, how artists live, and how they connect contemporary life with tradition. It also brought her attention to ethnic minorities, people of indigenous background or to people whose families or peoples had to migrate in the past.
Artists who research on ethnographic themes often do not dwell much on cultural differences within the countries they are interested in. Traditions of other countries are often seen as singular, unicultural and seen as unchanging during generations. Cultural changes related to migration or ethnic domination however are rarely perceived.
In her projects, Verena Kyselka often collaborates with local artists. Performance artists, musicians or people unrelated to contemporary art appear in Verena’s films and express their issues through their art. In this way, the video artist transforms the documentary idea into a multi-layered cultural expression with many voices, instead of attempting to “objectively” record ethnographical sources.
The screening will present a large selection of her video work from different countries. The artist will be present for Q&A.
DORIS SCHMID. PROJEKTIONEN Book Presentation Friday, 20 October, 19.00 Echo Bücher, Berlin Grüntalerstrasse 9, 13357 Berlin
Introduction: Klaus W. Eisenlohr Concert by Katharina Klement (Zither, Elektronic)
Doris Schmid is a Berlin artist who has contributed to Directors Lounge screenings and festivals for many years. The book is connected with a screening of Doris Schmid at Directors Lounge Screenings in September 2014. The discussion with curator Klaus W. Eisenlohr after the screening was recorded and resumed on another day. The edited version of the conversation gives a valuable insight of the ideas, background and process of filmmaking of Doris Schmid. The book altogether has become an art project interweaving filmstills, photographs, texts and responses of divers musicians and authors.
DORIS SCHMID. PROJEKTIONEN Artist book, 2017, Hardcover Deutsch / Englisch, 192 Seiten Schlebrügge.editor Verlag für zeitgenössische Kunst, Wien
With contributions by Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Katharina Klement, Klaus Merz, Jürgen Palmtag and Thomas Peter
Grafik design: Petra Egg, Translation: Helen Adkins
Crooked Beauty (2010, 30 minutes) This internationally acclaimed poetic documentary chronicles artist-activist Jacks McNamara’s transformative journey from psych ward inpatient to pioneering mental health advocacy. It is an intimate portrait of her intense personal quest to live with courage and dignity, and a powerful critique of standard psychiatric treatments. Poignant testimonials connect the fissures and fault lines of human nature to the unstable topography and mercurial weather patterns of the San Francisco Bay Area.
In Light, In! (2013, 12 minutes) A haunting, visual essay about the awkward and angry junctures where our culture struggles to manage its emotional distress. Images recycled from 1950’s-era educational films are accompanied by original compositions by world-renowned cellist, Zoe Keating.
Director Bio Ken Paul Rosenthal is a cinema artist and mental health advocate whose current work explores the geography of madness through the regenerative power of nature, urban landscapes, home movies, and archival footage from social hygiene films. His films are visually sensual, emotionally intelligent works of art that also function as tools for personal and societal transformation. His films, Crooked Beauty and In Light, In! have collectively won eighteen awards, screened in sixty film festivals, and been presented in person at dozens of peer support networks, universities, mental health symposium and community events worldwide.
Directors Lounge Screening Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat The Other Side Thursday, 27 Juli 2017 21:00 Z-Bar Bergstraße 2 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, artist couple visiting from North Carolina, United States, will present their films.
Being a Flaneur, walking to explore the city and the society, exploring modernity and the anachronisms of life on foot does not really make sense in the United States. The equivalence in Northern America would be the road movie: comprising the change of media, change of speed, change of surmounted distances. Bill Brown is one of the filmmakers in the US who hit the road many times to make movies. Born in Lubbock, Texas, he has lived in many cities, Chicago being one of them. His movies, not what you would typically call road movies, have the quality of artistic ethnographic research, or one could also say psycho-geography.
“The Other Side 2005” started as a coast to coast trip from Texas to California similar to a trip Brown undertook some years earlier in the United States, along the Canadian border. In the South, the artist was soon confronted with border control, border activism (helping people in trouble trying to cross the border in the desert), abandoned migrant camps and personal stories, walls and fences. When finishing the film, the artist thought, this would be a film about a short term issue, not that it would rise to a political quarrel until now. Bill still narrates the film with the dry humor he used in his earlier film, but the film became intrinsically political, even more so when watching it now, more than 10 years later.
Sabine Gruffat on the other hand is an artist working with two kinds of artistic stance, a rather experimental, almost abstract point of view, and a documentary style, mixed with political demeanor. “A Return to the Return to Reason” is an astonishing remake of Man Ray’s movie from 1923 with means of “art and tech”. Even though it almost looks like hand-knitted, it is made by laser-carving onto real film. A similar kind of hybrid quality between analog and digital also marks “Headlines” which uses animation software to layer and animate newspaper headlines and part of printed articles. Unlike David Gatten, well-known for animating letters on analogue film, the project has a less enigmatic, mysterious quality about the meaning of letters or words, but is a reaction to the discrepancies Sabine found reading the New York Times while living in a remote place in North Carolina.
The couple has been working together for several year. The most recent and joint project, “Amarillo Ramp” will be a German/European Premiere. It is connected with Land Art and specifically Robert Smithson. The film is a tribute to Smithsons work at large, while dwelling on an earthwork by Robert Smith situated in Texas, which is less known than Spiral Jetty in Utah and his last work. It could only be finished with the help of Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, and Tony Shafrazi.
Thinking of an American Flaneurism, the Land Art by Smithson is not that far off. For Smithson, his land art was always connected with some kind of industrial use or man-made landscape. It creates a specific relation not only between landscape and earthwork, but between the work, local people, supporters, land owners, visitors and the art public. For the film project at Amarillo, the artist couple visited the site of Amarillo Ramp many times over 7 years, and at the same time, they undertook a close research to Smithsons ideas and writing. The film explores the surrounding of Amarillo, follows a team of local supporters for restoration on the ramp and finally undertakes a few interventions with the project. It could be seen as a documentary about Smithson, but at the same time also as an art project in tribute to Smithson and his ideas to connect the landscapes and rural areas with the city, ideas which become even more important today, in times of a deeply divided country.
Directors Lounge Screening Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman Drone Drama – Music for the Dead Thursday, 29 June 2017 21:00 Z-Bar Bergstraße 2 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Drone Drama – Music for the Dead Film of 11 Episodes by Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt (Chicago/Berlin) and Cecilia Chapman (San Francisco) And two addiditional films “Déjà vu” and “fear don’t knock” by Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman
Live Music by accidental guitarist Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Elle Peril poetry & performance. Readings by Miriam Glinker and Heike Klar will be from the stories that are published with the new album “Musik Für Die Toten”
Followed by the Album Release of: Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt & Globoscuro – Musik Für Die Toten (2017) by Hortus Conclusus Records with written stories by Anne Hahn, Miriam Glinka, Heike Klar and Odessa Selestina Marquardt & poem by Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt Published June 9, 2017 https://www.archive.org/details/Musikfrdietoten_HCR2017
Drone Drama – Music for the Dead is a collaborative project of Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman. The project will be presented by Cooper-Marquardt as Berlin Premiere at Z-Bar together with live music and with a reading of texts that were inspired by episodes of the film.
Cooper-Marquardt, originally from Chicago and living in Berlin for 34 years, is an artist who mainly works with music but who has been engaged in many projects, collaborations and festivals. It may be the influence of his earlier times of playing free jazz and early house music in Chicago that makes him seek many collaborations. He also likes to play with different versions of the same piece, created by himself or by collaborations. His preference for this kind of iterations, may be more related to the influences of fine arts in Germany than from music: Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt just released a record by the same title, Drone Drama – Music for the Dead, including the same chapters as the film, however with completely new compositions and adding two more chapters. He also asked writers, to contribute short stories to the project Drone Drama – Music for the Dead, some of which will be read while Sean will improvise music during the reading.
The film Drone Drama – Music for the Dead consists of 11 chapters. Each chapter has a rather poetic title, like “I Love Watching the Movement of your Limbs when they Tremble from the Wind’s Gentle Caress (chapter 1)” or, “When Eating the Fruit, Remember the one who Planted the Tree (chapter 9)”. And, it is rather exceptional to see films, which are based on music, where music is the inspiration for the images.
The film starts with a section of a woman in an orange dress lying on a branch of a massive tree on the edge of a valley. The images are clearly metaphorical, but the recording is a very clear high-definition image. The orange color of the dress will reappear periodically in the film. The music is dominated by a drone sound, a hum from electronic or radio noise and some reverberated music. This is intercepted with some tonal electronic sounds. Everything appears to be soft and dreamlike.
Chapter 2 starts with the orange colored dress as background and the title “Things that never die have never lived.” In opposite to the first chapter, the filmmaker now uses blurred and electronically distorted images, clouds in pink, patterns, a hairline cross view of a sky with a jet fighter passing, sparks of an explosion, color streaks in water and fume rising up in the sky. The sound on the other hand is quite similar, only not as smooth.
The differences between two chapters introduces the viewer into the variety of images created by Cecilia, and into the more subtle nuanced changes of the music by Sean. It also introduces the associative relation between title and content of the story in the film.
Thinking about the multi-faceted associations, the collaborative project of Cooper-Marquardt and Chapman evokes, it may also be interesting to know how their collaboration evolved further. The two artists exchanged ideas about the places in San Francisco to be used as locations over the internet, without him knowing those places before. Cecilia shared her experiences during the production with Sean, and everybody interested, in the diary of a Facebook Page, which can still be visited. https://www.facebook.com/ChapmanMarquardt/
The reading of texts about Drone Drama together with the music, and finally the films of Sean and Cecilia will create a very inspiring evening, which can be interpreted in many different ways, poetic and political, metaphorical and associative. And of course, it will be great to see the different collaborative pieces of Drone Drama come together in one evening.
Directors Lounge Screening Sean Derrick Cooper-Marquardt and Cecilia Chapman Drone Drama – Music for the Dead Thursday, 29 June 2017 21:00 Z-Bar Bergstraße 2 10115 Berlin-Mitte
“Music For The Dead” originally arose as the third act of the Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt’s Drone Drama Trilogy, which was previously released in three acts, on three seperate labels, and which includes “The Radiant Child : First Act The Awaking Assiduous Awareness”, “God`s DNA” and finally “Music For The Dead”.
The third act has been recently put to film by the director Cecelia Chapman and has now premired in the city of Cologne and soon at various international film festivals, the album Music For The Dead has been also released and translated in the following languages: English, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Croatian, French. This German Album Release is something completely different due to the fact that is has been re-worked, re-arranged and re-recorded with totally new compositions molded and shaped by the artistic embrace of Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt and Emiliano Pietrini aka Globoscuro and also includes a pdf booklet with four stories by Anne Hahn, Heike Klar, Miriam Glinka & Odessa Selestina Marquardt plus a poem by Sean himself. To crown and wrap this album with another veil of beauty there is the ambigous and wonderful cover art created by the magnificent and talented italian photographer Linda De Luca. The album contains 13 tracks of variable duration between 1 minute and maximum 3 minutes (no second is allowed) that sail like a roaring turbine among sounds devoted to the musique concrete, electroacoustic, psychedelic, post-rock, dark ambient and noise. The sound passage seems to be metaphorize a polidimensional journey in which the listener encounters significances, geometries, emotions and visions that interweave and alternate creating a labyrinthic yet strangely well-defined landscape. Like stories inside the same story that fight to spread their desperate voice but far from the constraint of the word.
Directors Lounge Screening Dagie Brundert Ode an Sommer Saturday, 27 May 2017 21:00 Z-Bar Bergstraße 2 10115 Berlin-Mitte
Ode an Sommer – Ode to Summer Berlin’s cultural scene would not be the same, if filmmaker Dagie Brundert was not there. The artist started off in the 90’s with some female colleagues as FBI, Freie Berliner Ischen. With ironic and unconventional films they challenged established and artsy art forms, skewed films spiced up with resonances of Camp and Beat, as it reverberated in some young circles in the first decade after the breakdown of the wall. Since then, Brundert stuck to her guns of Super-8 filmmaking with admirable creative productivity. She records everyday occurrences, the obvious things on sight and the things offside, however always dispersing a positive message.
The new program at Z-Bar presents a number of brand new films, one premiere (“Widerstand”, 2017, resistance) and a few rare early films. “Ode an Juni 4 “ (2016, Ode to June), the film giving the name to this program, is one of the few medium long films by Brundert. And, it is part of her favorite seasonal project. She has planned to record a film about June every year. Film developing in biological developer, a trip to the film festival Hamburg, establishing a new dark room, a bath in lake Teufelssee and the hand written numbers of the days are some of the scenes of last years diary, all of which being hand-developed, digitally edited and underscored with summer tunes. It is the small things in the film, the joys of everyday life, which, condensed by a combination of time-lapse and short cuts, makes the film poetic and amiable. It is this delight about exceptional but unspectacular moments, which inform her films, and which still oppose the garish images of the media or the attempts of “going viral” on social media, and which still reminds me of the bearings of the Beats.
In a number of new films, goes back to humorous forms she used back in the past: narrated films (“Bin ich reich? Bin ich reich? Bin ich reich?…” 2015), using objects as characters ("Lametta” 2016), or games from childhood (potato stamps in “Kartoffel” 2013). Other films follow a more discriptive style. The savvy viewers and the friends, however, do not expect new experimental forms from Dagie, but they like to follow her frame of mind, the lighthearted way to look at life. Her films often have the effect of a line of a pop song that suddenly enters your mind and changes the way you look at yourself or your surrounding.
Dagie Brundert will be present for Q&A. Curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.
You are cordially invited to join us “Zeig Dich!”, Zwingli-Church, Berlin, 25 – 27 May 2017
We are pleased to announce that works by Directors Lounge Lizards André Werner and Joachim Seinfeld will be shown among selected media art, installations and performances by Thomas Bratzke, Stefan Demming & Michael Rieken, Roswitha von den Driesch & Jens-Uwe Dyffort, Jorn Ebner, Monika Jarecka, Karl Heinz Jeron and Ulrich Vogl.
Curator: Karin Scheel.
Vernissage: ZEIG DICH! 25 May 2017, 7 p.m. Zwingli-Kirche, Rudolfstr. 14, 10245 Berlin (4 min from S/U-Bhf Warschauer Straße)
Directors Lounge heading for contemporary art ruhr, media art fair: Besides presenting installations, paintings and photography, we will be screening genre-straddling slices of cinematic art and cuts of media experimentation as part of the c.a.r. Video Lounge.
Dedicated presentations include the screening “REtreat” (RÜCKzug), new experimental shorts created and produced in the context of the medienwerkstatt Berlin, an artist-run project of the BBK Berlin offering production facilities for media artists, and a fresh selection of video art curated by Michael Murnau and Annalisa Cosentino from Delete TV. Delete TV is an independent platform for video art and experimental films. It investigates the captivating nature of images with the specific aim of looking up to new approaches by taking distance from the conventional film making method. The platform opens a window to the world of art and offers strong, wild and uncensored works from upcoming artists and filmmakers.
And as a final bit of dazzle, Directors Lounge presents, in collaboration with the Leo Kuelbs Collection, tidbits from the Mitte Media Festival in Berlin.
Meet us at World Heritage Site Zollverein, (a former Coal Mine Industrial Complex) centre of the creative industry in the Ruhr area.
with works by Giorgos Efthimiou (Greece), Emmanuelle Negre, Jil Guyon (United States), Joe Pisciotta, Luka Fisher (United States), Mabby Alam (United Kingdom), Maxime Contour (France), Natalia Alfutova (Russian Federation), Neil Needleman (United States), Paulina Rutman (Chile), Sian Fann (United Kingdom) Tara Nelson (United States), Tina Willgren (Sweden), Dan Inglis (New Zealand), Ying-Fang Shen (Taiwan), John T. Williams (USA), Michael Woods (USA) see full program here
with works by Alisa Javits, Anne-May Fossnes, Barbara Deblitz, Betty Böhm, Christa Biedermann, Daniela Butsch, Darko Aleksovski, Elisabeth Molin, Fellipe Sperk (FELL), Florian Bielefeldt (The Fortunists), Francesco Pace (Tellurico), Gabriele Stellbaum, Gaby Schulze, Hara Shin, Heike Hamann, Helen Anna Flanagan, Herbert Liffers, Insa Langhorst, Jakobine Engel, Karen Thastum (TURA YA MOYA), Laurent Bébin (CARBON CREAM), Lina Walde, Lotte van der Woude, Maria Felix Korporal, Mariel Gottwick, Marissa Rae Niederhauser, Ottjörg A.C., Petra Lottje, Regina Liedtke, Rosanna Chizhova, Sandra Becker 01 Sandra Riche, Simone Häckel, Una Quigley, Verena Kyselka.more info here
Mitte Media Festival
Directors Lounge presents together with the Leo Kuelbs Collection, selected works from the Mitte Media Festivalin Berlin.Videos by Matl Findel, Tomas Draschan, Franz Reimer, Kristina Paustian and Christopher Winter.read more
supported by
Artists attending Visuman (read more), Julia Murakami, André Werner. Next to installations, photography and paintings, we will show Visuman’s video works in collaboration with André Chi Sing Yuen, respectively Marcel Munte, and silent single channel loops (more) including a restored version of the legendary “Kleine Lobhudelei auf den Monitor” (Little Flattering of the Monitor), 1990 by Cosima Reif, and moving images by Matl Findel and André Werner.
World Cultural Heritage Site Zollverein
Areal C [Kokerei], Kokereiallee 71, 45141 Essen
Official Opening Friday, May 12, 8 pm
Public fair hours Saturday, May 13, 11 am – 7 pm Sunday, May 14, 11 am – 7 pm
pictured: Zeche Zollverein, DL; Delete TV with “Nefarious” by Joe Pisciotta; film still by Simone Häckel; Matl Findel “Wann fahren wir zur See?”,“Untitled” (Bass, nude) by Andre Werner
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