Program at Pula Film Festival

Curated by Branka Benčić

Exhibition Forum brings two artistic postions: Jasmina Cibic and Assaf Gruber  and their recent films – positions and practices of working with artist moving image and exploring  “new narratives”,  where boundaries and possibilities of representation, language, image, space for political speech, models of production, distribution and presentation are explored. The discursive space in which the works of Jasmina Cibic and Assaf Gruber meet, as forum, is, then, a place for the inscription of different ideas and positions. The artists endorse the approach in the comprehensions of the range and currency of artistic production, in the confrontation of past and present, the positions of history and theory of art, cultural policy and institutional critique, while the interests of exhibited artists in modernist tendencies, of the period of the avant-garde of the 1930s and of the high modernism of the 1950s and 1960s can be considered in the context of the ‘re-examination of the history of the utopian idea’.

Films and videos by Jasmina Cibic are constructed around the idea of architecture and discourse that she produces. The artist centres her exploration around the manners in which architecture can become an embodiment of national ideologies, identities and power representations. Her creative work is linked to a place and a context. It is performative and it uses a wide array of mediums and stage techniques in order to redefine and reconsider the exitsing environment and its policy. The film Tear Down and Rebuild (2015), shot inside the Palace of the Federation in Belgrade, centres around four female speakers. Each woman embodies a certain ideological position as a variation of the Mother State (nation builder, pragmatist, conservationist, and artist-architect). The films Tear Down and Rebuild and The Nation Loves It are part of the Spielraum trilogy. Jasmina Cibic is an internationally acclaimed artist born in Ljubljana. She lives and works in London.

Assaf Gruber’s film The Right is a part of the complex project The Anonymity of the Night which centres around the questions about the manner in which political ideologies of subjects are intertwined with individual, personal stories and about the way in which they form social relations within private and public spheres. The Right puts art and its institutions in the spotlight. The short length film, structured as a monodrama, is developed around a letter by a retired security guard at the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresdner to the director of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. The retired museum security guard is a 73-year-old woman who expresses her attitudes toward art and ideology in a letter by which she applies to volunteer in a Polish museum, an institution with a relevant collection of modern and contemporary art. Assaf Gruber (1980, Jerusalem) lives and works in Berlin.

Cinemanic / Think Film, explores the context of artists’ film, as a space”in between”, as a form of a critical practice that brings to discussion questions on the institutions of galleries, museums and cinemas, visual art and cinema.
Established in 2002 as a program of the Pula Film Festival, is a long-term research platform questioning the connection between moving images and contemporary art.  It presents recent Croatian and international production of artist film and video, experimental films and multimedia installations as well as the film heritage.
The project is curated by Branka Bencic.

Organized by Apoteka

Partner: Pula Film Festival