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NOW&AFTER
The topic of this year is "SUPER- SUPER CITY". From the total of 458 submissions we could include only small part videos of 32 artists from 16 countries. «Now&After'12» took place within the period 24 May – 10 June 2012 in Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The modern city is more than just a thickly settled agglomeration of architectural and engineering structures. It is a metropolis, absorbing millions of inhabitants. It is a settlement subordinated to the logic of industrial development. It is a small town, where time glides. It is a habitat that have known better days and unneeded now. According to the rules of formal logic a double statement is not a denial, but merely reinforces the statement. However, contrary to logic, whether a double statement is a denial or a statement depends on intonation. The intonation is determined by an artist. "Super-super city", what does it mean for you? Is it a cosmopolitan city or a small patriarchal town that keeps up their traditions? Is it the natural habitat of a modern man or above all a set of "places of universal communication" (airports, subways, large supermarkets), where, according to Baudrillard, "people are deprived of their citizenship, nationality, their territory"? Is it a monotony of contemporary urbanism or a futuristic project? Is it loneliness in a crowd or togetherness of different? Is it a poetic urban landscape or the life of society around us? Is there an alternative to the city? Is “super-super city” a heyday or a decadence?
Winners
Alexandra Mitlyanskaya, Russia (RUR 50,000)
Youki Hirakawa, Japan (RUR 30,000)
Brit Bunkly, New Zealand (RUR 20,000)
A SPECIAL MENTION OF THE JURY
INFO SURFING/MOSCOW 2 Marina Chernikova, Russia NEVER ENDING STORY Roman Mokrov, Russia DOUBLE CODING Lucia Nimcova, Slovakia THE ONLY WAY DOWN IS DOWN Christopher Steadman, Germany Participants
COMPETITIVE PROGRAM
"To be whole is to be part, true voyage is return..."Ursula K. Le Guin
Reflections on production of bodies. A pregnant body produces sculptures made of metal alloy for solder and notes that the passage of states finds in the skin the most outstanding screen.
A camera moves inside a giant, manipulative, miniature , 3x2 m\' architecture model, which generates a historic memory devoid of any clear context. In contrast to the emptiness, the camera is in constant motion, generating rhythm and \"life In the background, a distorted voice comes out of public sound system, constantly trying to deliver an emergency announcement.
Paradox of Plenty (Futurology) begins with a “study” of futuristic edifices such as the Auckland Sky Tower, airport terminals, a natural gas cargo ship, and the Seattle Space Needle. Each of these structures is mirrored along a single axis, a minor adjustment that has a major affect: the ordinary, practical edifices become features of a fantastic, Flash Gordonesque City of the Future – or the assets of a post-apocalyptic military force. The work’s futuristic “ships” have a double nature that goes beyond their mirrored symmetry. They are practical and functional, like the industrial constructions they are, but also dream-like
“Collider” project has to do with such ideas as Time, space, science, urbanization and history. This great prolonged project started in Dallas, in USA (at the place where John Kennedy was killed). The project concerns events that took place in various urban landscapes and had great influence for the further historical development. It analyzes the conic sites of the US, Russia and Ukraine of the XX and XXI centuries. Large Hadron Collider can be the first system that could give birth to the elementary particles that could travel back to the past. Responsibility comes with knowledge.
The fast increase of the new technologies turns it real: movement and virtual existence at several various places. Non-linear processes in our brains and memories help us to be here and there, now and then. We could ride on the subway having a round-world trip at a time, experiencing the last year adventures or going deep to the computer game world.
An unhurried film dealing with the notion of the abstract.
A psychedelic walk around Oporto’s city, a reflexion of city life and urban landscape where confusion is installed everywhere.
“Double Dream” is a project designed for the Aichi Triennale 2010 “Arts and Cities”. I am creating a site-specific video installation for the Nakagawa-Canal,Nagoya,Japan. Through my work I try to bring out the ”Genius loci” hidden in the Nakagawa-Canal. A standstill water surface that looks like a puddle and a warehouse with a shuttered facing the canal are like a connection to this “Genius-Loci”. These two elements create a special atmosphere that I call “Sleeping in a closed space”. I created two characters to represent the “Genius-loci” of the Nakagawa-canal. One of the characters is a man sleeping in a boat and the other is a woman sinking in the canal. Each character keeps dreaming they awoke from sleep.
This work is about the memory and the experience of communication. The artist confronts the outer space (huge hangars, parking places for trucks) with the inner one (endless shelves with boxes looking like warehouses themselves). The film’s action shifts from the outer space to the inner space and then transforms itself to the sound, shifting one’s attention and changing the visual paradigm of perception to the audio one.
Insomnia a sleep state of misperception of time and space.
Transformance is a video-event-work that activates and documents a five-month durational performance. Over this period of time, Nina Kurtela establishes a daily practice of visiting and witnessing the construction of Centre of Contemporary Dance.
"Home" is a work that makes use of an poetic speech to explore the idea of temporality. The narrative of the video is constructed as an temporal sequence in which the totality arises from the fragmentation. The edition plays with \"time x action x duration x space\" depicting and fictional \"cause and effect\".
Workers – immigrants from the former USSR republics are building a block tower. In each cell a unique event is happening – laying of bricks, sawing, drilling, cement kneading, smoking or just sitting immovable. It seems that this story has started very long ago and will last forever.
Human life… what is that? Going with the stream or against it? Urge or following? Search or indifferent acceptance? What is that? Each day of human life is overcoming.
Nebe in a clever move takes the reason prisoner, only to appoint reason to be the king of his game of chess. He calls for a close review of the encyclopedia of our philosophical and cultural foundations.
Lucia Nimcova puts together scenes taken from banned Slovak movies shot in the period between 1968 and 1989 to create her video installation entitled Double Coding.
“Gowanus Haze” is a short 16mm film shot over the course of a day in Brooklyn, New York. The film depicts a landscape known as The Gowanus Canal, which is often associated with grime and desolation. Other shots were taken along the artery of 3rd Avenue in South Brooklyn. The accompanying soundtrack is composed of recorded sounds of a lumberyard in Northern Vermont, wind, synthesizer, the projector projecting the film itself, my voice and excerpts of stories about New York from my demented grandfather.
Paris - picturesque and cosmopolitan, chansons and street art.„Paris Recyclers“ portraits the cultural, social and urban fabrics of this city by means of experimental animation. The viewer is guided to urban hideouts where little creatures dwell. These are digitally composed with collected trash and typical local products. The clatter of the limbs of these creatures interacts with the soundscapes of Paris.
Memento Mori is an art-project from the series of city-sketches devoted to the traffic jams. The project includes 7 biggest European cities during 7 consecutive years
Nothing seriously changed from Oswiencim times, but on the place of the Jews are now refugees, illegal immigrants, guest workers and all of us. “The Camp deeply implanted in the City – it is the new bio political nomos of the planet”. Vienna does not differ much from Moscow if we think that way. In such conditions I should only witness, as a participant. Modern citizen (especially in Moscow) is a werewolf who changes all the time. A homeless dog whose stomach can be kicked, turns into the one who kicks.
Surface II is a short experimental moving image work based upon the manipulation of 8mm celluloid. From destruction comes something new and beautiful. By using a complex sound i also hope this work has a new immersive sense, every little detail is given equal attention creating a heightened cinematic experience.
'The Only Way Down is Down' takes on the desperations of office boredom, machine horror, sex with strangers, concentration camp badges, cultural signs and symbols, and manages to bring an elegant and almost symphonic quality to themes that might otherwise incur a sense of drudgery and despair. Steadman teases and taunts us with the hidden dynamic of what goes on behind the closed doors of an elevator when anonymous strangers are forced to share a confined space. Through the tension and repetition of the opening and closing of elevator doors, the artist\'s interest in isolation is manifested as he follows a virtually invisible character up and down the empty shaft of what becomes a powerful reminder of the banality and anonymity of urban modernisation.
Stop action animation
NON-COPMETITION PROGRAM
Body as a mechanism: constant acceleration, motion, alienation and persistent tension. We always seek for an ideal and recognition, reaching the limits of our possibilities. A man-factory that never stops is forced to move further and further.
Plastic or plaster women built by humans as a perfect image of themselves, trapped in glass cages, looking at a city that looks at them. Enslaved objects that represent an enslaving ideal. Objects of desire and frustration. Industrial pieces trying to attract a look from the world, the world that gives them life, a useful life, until they are replaced by the next model. Stop motion video.
We witness a series of architectural transformations of the old building that loses its identity when interacting with everyday life. The inexorable intrusion of modernity into the flesh of historical monument awakens convincing in its absurdity object. Circular locomotive depot of the Nikolayev Railway that was built in Moscow in the middle of the 19th century has undergone many changes over of the years. From the depot, it has become a "rookery" which consists of shops, restaurants, warehouses, garages and just a dump. Now it is completely empty. Soon it may vanish into space.
The impossibility of love. Contemporary Snegurotchka of the polluted megapolis, calling for non-existent Lel.
Moscow Diary is based upon the diary that Walter Benjamin, German cultural commentator, wrote in 1926-27. The diary describes Benjamin’s efforts to get close to the woman he was in love with, his struggle to get around Moscow and the political debates of the time. Following Benjamin’s footsteps, and filmed on a mobile phone, Moscow Diary is an illuminating insight into the public and personal politics of early Soviet society, as well as a commentary on contemporary Russia.
Within our artistic practice, we take a lot of walks, we talk, we discuss our projects, we forget what we talked about, we become distracted, and all of a sudden we are home - for us to step outside is to step into a conversation. One becomes not only a keen listener and spectator, but a traveler attempting to enter a deep forest, then exit it, constantly stepping in and stepping out. The movement between what is accessible and what is inaccessible, between the comprehensible and incomprehensible is at the heart of this dual-channel video, which presents two synchronized spaces of miniature libraries (built itself out of books). As the camera moves mechanically, arbitrarily, through the twin spaces, one witnesses the changing scenery like a passenger, caught in its unyielding movement. The challenge is for the individual to negotiate their own level of engagement, to navigate this indefinite space.
A trip to India from the perspective of a stranger. A wave of impressions which aims to investigate the mind and its approximation to reality from a conditional state of being . A multitude of frames in less than one second, faces, objects, traditions, cities, landscapes ... Mass of sounds contaminating each other from the pagan to the sacred. Manipulation and recreation of the subjective perception from recorded and cataloged inputs. Erroneously decoded foreign symbols. Thousands stories from the city... Having a feeling of not facing reality. Being a victim of the condition itself: I see what I believe it is / What I believe I see, Is.
Travelling through the city of Las Vegas and the encircling desert, LAS VEGAS | THE MEADOWS examines the soul of a city both real and unreal. Jury
Video
Gallery |
Copyright (c) Now&After. International Video Art Festival in Moscow |
Download the booklet
I prize – BABYLON 2010
II prize - DOUBLE DREAM
III prize - PARADOX OF PLENTY (FUTUROLOGY)
Recep Akar, Turkey, “Rewind”, 2011, 4'33" 
Juliana Alvarenga , Brasil, “Born”, 2010, 4’43” 
Orit 
Oksana Chepelyk, Ukraine, “Collider”, 2012, 5’00”
Marina Chernikova, Russia, “INFO SURFING/ Moscow 2”, 2012, 1’30”
Alexei Dmitriev, Russia, “Abstract?”, 2009, 3’ 30”
Pedro Ferreira, Portugal, “Between Two Points”, 2011, 5’00”
Maria Kharitonova, Russia, “Warehouse”, 2011, 6’00”
Aditi Kulkari, India, “Insomnia”, 2012, 4’ 27”
Nina Kurtela, Germany, “Transformance”, 2010, 5’00”
Natália Magdalena, Brasil, “Home”, 2012, 4’ 33”
Roman Mokrov, Russia, “Never Ending Story”, 2011, 6’45”
Joas Sebastian Nebe, Germany, “Machine Fair”, 2010, 6’49”
Lucia Nimcova, Slovakia, “Double Coding’, 2010, 5’15”
Margaret Rorison, USA, “Gowanus Haze”, 2012, 5’34”
Nikki Schuster, Germany, “Paris Recyclers”, 2011, 5’39”
Natalia Skobeeva, Russia/UK, Memento Mori Moscow”, 2011, 3'33"
Haim Sokol, Russia, “Witness”, 2011, 3'50"
Sam Spreckley, UK, “Surface II”, 2012, 2’ 06”
Christopher Steadman, Germany, “The Only Way Down is Down”, 2011, 5’00”
Ezra Wube, USA, “Amora”, 2009, 2’ 27”
Tatiana Ahmetgalieva, Michaela Muchina, Russia-Germany, “The Apparatus of Fatigue”, 2010, 3’ 11”
Lucia Ferreira Litowtschenko, Uruguay, “Am I pretty”, 2009, 4’ 21”
Marina Fomenko “The Depot”, Russia, 2012, 5’00”
Victoria Ilyushkina, Maya Popova, Russia, “Sugrob”, 2010, 3’ 45”
Adam Kossoff , UK, “Moscow Diary”, 2010, 46’00”
Wojciech Olejnik, Sarah Jane Gorlitz, Canada, “Enclosed”, 2009, 2’ 28”
Noemi Sjoberg, Spain, “India”, 2009, 2’ 30”
Benjamin R. Taylor, Canada, “Las Vegas . The Meadows”, 32’22”