An exhibition by Johanna Bruckner and Discoteca Flaming Star

curated by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

Opening: Saturday, 20 August 2016, starting at 18:30h

with a performance by Discoteca Flaming Star at 20:00h.

Saturday, 20 August 2016 - Friday, 23 September 2016


Opening Hours / Öffnungszeiten
Wednesday / Mittwoch, 15:00h – 18:00h
Thursday / Donnerstag, 16:00h – 19:00h
Friday / Freitag, 15:00h – 18:00h
Saturday / Samstag, 14:00h – 16:30h
(Closed on Thursday, 15 September 2016)


[English below]

Die Ausstellung #work #dance #labor #movements vereint die Installation und Performance Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End von Discoteca Flaming Star mit den Research-Prozess-basierten Video Installationen Rebel Bodies (Episodes I & II) und Total Algorithms of Partiality von Johanna Bruckner.

Beim Ausstellungsprojekt geht es um die Freude am Anderen, und darum, aus polyphonischen Melodien und gemeinschaftlichen Rhythmen einen unpersönlichen Refrain zu erzeugen. Die Ausstellung bezieht bewusst die aktuellen post-fordistischen Bedingungen und die prekäre Lage kreativer Arbeiter_innen und immaterielle Aspekte der Produktivität heute ein, um auszumalen, wie wir alle als Agent_innen in einem Netzwerk von Beziehungen dringend unsere materiellen Körper am Limit tanzend erfinden müssen. Das veranlasst jede_n von uns unweigerlich, unsere Beziehungen zum Anderen neu zusammen zu setzen. In dieser Bewegung des Zusammenspiels, in der man sich um den Anderen sorgt, „kann das Limit nicht ausgeschöpft werden.“ Das, was Franco „Bifo“ Berardi als für die Produktion von Affekt und Potentialität notwendiges Limit definiert, für ein positive und aktive Verfremdung, die es erlaubt, der technologischen Entfremdung zu entgehen, die auch eine soziale ist. In der Überschneidung der Praktiken von DFS und Bruckner zeigt die Ausstellung Techniken der Bewegung, die für das tägliche Proben in unserem Alltag verwendet werden können, um ihr Publikum linguistisch, affektiv und politisch einzubeziehen. Dazu sind keine besonderen Tanzfähigkeiten vonnöten. Es kann experimentiert und improvisiert werden, um einen „Mutationspunkt“ der Bewegungen eines Körpers zu finden, der präzis eine Praxis des Tanzes definiert – eines Tanzes, der nichts Exklusives verlangt. Die Arbeiten von DFS und Bruckner gehen alltäglichen Praktiken von Tanz und Bewegung nach, Praktiken, die der Wiederholung und der konsistenten Imperfektion bedürfen. Die Probetechniken der Improvisation sind molekulare Werkzeuge, die dazu dienen, Sand ins Getriebe der Kontrollapparate und der kognitiven Automation, die sie im Sinn einbetten – Werkzeuge zur Herstellung anderer Dynamiken in der Beschleunigung der Alltags im maschinischen Kapitalismus. Die flexiblen tanzenden Körper, die wie ein Fischschwarm Bogen schlagen zwischen persönlicher und sozialer Zeit, entrinnen den üblichen Koordinaten des Bodens.

#work #dance #labor #movements ist ein Ausstellungsprojekt in Bewegung, das Tanzbewegungen als persönlichen/sozialen Prozess betrachtet, der den sozialen Körper neu zusammen setzt, einen Körper als besonderes Ding, als temporär stabile dauerhafte Konstruktion aggregierter Teile, eine Konstruktion, die niemals ausserhalb ihres Wesens als Beziehung erfasst werden kann. Sie ertastet, wie der konkrete Körper kollektiv hergestellt wird in Bezug auf Bewegung und Ruhezustand seiner zusammengefügten Teile und deren affektive Resonanzen. Die Bewegung hat ihre eigene Präsenz, schreibt Simone Forti, eine individuierende Kraft des unpersönlichen, verkörperten sozialen Wissens, das es in biopolitischen Begriffen, also mit dem Körper zu denken gilt. Affekt ist eine andere Art, über Macht und die innerliche Konstruktion des Körpers, die Macht zu affektieren oder affektiert zu werden. Der Affekt ist die Macht des widerständigen Körpers, des tanzenden Körpers, von Körper-Kämpfen. Der Affekt verteilt die Körper über einen grossen Raum, offen gegenüber mannigfaltigen Dauern. Der Affekt ist eine Körperpolitik. Foucault stellt fest, dass in Machtkämpfe immer „Körperaktionen“ wirken, und affektive Macht ist produktiv, da sie „die Wirklichkeit ebenso postuliert und herstellt, als sie ihr Grenzen auferlegt.“ In Deleuzes Worten: “Was ein Körper tun kann, entspricht dem Wesen und den Grenzen seiner Fähigkeit, affektiert zu werden.“ Am Limit zu tanzen, affektiert den Körper mehr, als es die Repräsentation tut. Es gibt uns den Schlüssel zum Verständnis affirmativer Politik. Der tanzende Körper vermag es, Negativität zurück zu drängen, sich von ihr zu entflechten.

Affirmative Praktiken betreffen alles, was zum Sinn gehört, affektive Resonanzen zwischen den Teilen der Körper und ihre Differenz, alle Mannigfaltigkeiten und ihre Variabilität und Intensitäten totaler Freude im körperlosen, immateriellen und unpersönlichen Ereignis. „Die Frage des Sinns wird eins mit der Politik.“ Die Ästhetik und Politik des Sinns, in Bezug auf radikale Metaphysik und Bio-Macht gedacht, erotisiert den Körper sowohl in seiner Alltags-Existenz, als auch in der digitalen Sphäre, unregelmässige Körper miteinander verbindend, um die wettbewerblichen Prinzipien in jedem Fragment des sozialen Lebens zu hintertreiben – sinnliche Körper der Solidarität, der Gerechtigkeit und des Rechts. Die Art und Weise, wie sie in ihren künstlerischen Praktiken die Ästhetik des Sinns und die Biopolitik angehen, überschneidet sich in den Positionen und den Arbeiten für diese Ausstellung der Künstler_innen Discoteca Flaming Star und Johanna Bruckner.

Auszug aus dem kuratorischen Text von Dimitrina Sevova und Alan Roth.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

The exhibition #work #dance #labor #movements brings together the installation and performance Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End by Discoteca Flaming Star, and the research-process-based video installations Rebel Bodies (Episodes I & II) and Total Algorithms of Partiality by Johanna Bruckner.

The exhibition project is about the pleasure of enjoying the other, and sets out to produce an impersonal refrain made of polyphonic tunes and collaborative rhythms. It consciously considers the current post-Fordist conditions and the precarious situation of creative labor and the immaterial aspects of productivity today, to outline how all of us as agents in a network of relations, urgently need to invent our corporeal bodies dancing at the limit. It inevitably prompts each of us to recompose one’s relation to the other. In this movement of interplay, when one takes care of the other, “the limit cannot be exhausted.” What Franco “Bifo” Berardi defines as the limit necessary to the production of the affect and of potentiality, for positive and active estrangement to overcome technological alienation, which is also social alienation. At the intersection of the practices of DFS and Bruckner, the exhibition dis-plays techniques of movement that can be used for rehearsals every day in our daily life, to linguistically, affectively and politically engage its audience. It does not require particular dance skills. One can experiment and improvise, to find a ‘mutation point’ of a body’s movements that precisely defines a practice of dance – a dance that does not require something exclusive. The works of DFS and Bruckner trace the everydayness of practices of dance and movement, practices that need repetition and a consistency of imperfection. The rehearsal techniques of improvisation are molecular tools for putting a spoke in the wheels of apparatuses of control and the cognitive automation they embed in the sensible, tools for introducing other dynamics in the acceleration of everyday life in machinic capitalism. The flexible dancing bodies that arc as a fish swarm between personal and social time, elude the usual coordinates of the floor.

#work #dance #labor #movements is an exhibition project in motion that considers dance movements as a personal/social process that recomposes the social body, a body as a particular thing, as a temporally stable, durational construction of aggregated parts, a construction that can never be conceived outside its conjunctional nature. It probes how the concrete body is collectively produced with respect to motion and rest of its conjoined parts and their affective resonances. The movement has its own presence, writes Simone Forti, an individuating power of impersonal, embodied social knowledge, to be thought in biopolitical terms, i.e., thought with the body. Affect is another way to talk about power and the body’s internal construction, the power to be affected and to affect. Affect is the power of the resisting body, of body struggles, of the dancing body. Affect distributes bodies across a larger space open to multiple durations. Affect is a body politics. Foucault asserts that power struggles always involve ‘body actions,’ and affective power is productive since it “posits and produces reality as much as it sets limits on it.” As Deleuze put it: “What a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected.” To dance at the limit affects the body more than representation. It gives the key to an understanding of affirmative politics. The dancing body can de-limit negativity, disentangle itself from it.

Affirmative practices concern everything that belongs to the sensible, affective resonances between the bodies’ parts and their differences, all multiplicities and their variabilities or intensities of total joy in the incorporeal, immaterial and impersonal event. “The question of sensibility becomes one with politics.” The aesthetics and politics of the sensible, thought in terms of radical metaphysics and biopower, eroticizes the body both in its everyday existence and in the digital realm, conjoining irregular bodies to undermine competitive principles in every fragment of social life – sensible bodies of solidarity, justice and rights. The way they treat, in their artistic practices, the aesthetics of the sensible and biopolitics, intersects in the positions and the works for this exhibition of the artists Discoteca Flaming Star and Johanna Bruckner.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.



Johanna Bruckner

Rebel Bodies
Episodes I & II

The artist Johanna Bruckner continues her research on the organization of collective bodies with “Rebel Bodies”, part II. This large-scale work picks up the Workers Dance League’s inquiry into the possibilities of forming subversive embodied collective subjects. Bruckner’s research based approach sets off from an approximation to marginalized archives of knowledge, and thus creates space for the enunciation of matters which were excluded from hegemonic historiographies. Yet, this process can in no way be reduced to a purely discursive revision or alternative representation (of historiography). “Rebel Bodies” does not only present past (labor) struggles corporeally, but also calls them into the present performatively. Bruckner’s work transposes aspects of subversive choreographic approaches and of worker struggles from the 1930s, the times of industrial capitalism, into the present post-crisis phase of “cognitive” finance capitalism, temporally and spatially; to be more precise, to the Hafencity, which is a prime example of neoliberalism and proceeding gentrification.

(Marius Henderson)


Total Algorithms of Partiality

Hamburg’s Hafencity is currently characterised by continuous transformation. Interest in the most ʻintelligentʼ possible management of the districtʼs infrastructure is being tested by the introduction of new monitoring systems in Hafencity. The concept of logistics is becoming increasingly centralized, to enable optimal co-ordination of commercial, digital and social interactions. In Total Algorithms of Partiality dance scores examining the potential of an altered social logistics in Hamburgʼs Hafencity are developed, during the course of which I look at the current role of contemporary labour organisation and its possible course of action as it is confronted with the controversial developments in Hamburg’s Hafencity. What stance does the trade union take in relation to the complex, unstable situation in the new ʻghost townʼ and what forms of co-operative resistance are set in motion? The artistic work is to be presented in the form of a video installation, a performance, and research material.

This project is concerned with the possibilities of understanding art as an affirmative practice within society and its interwoven infrastructures, deriving from an intensive artistic and scientific examination of the complex logistical developments in Hamburg’s Hafencity and its significant international position.




Discoteca Flaming Star

Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End



Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End is a spatial installation and dance performance construction in two different planes. Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End is a dance piece in which no one ever appears to dance, like in Dance Construction Clothes by Simone Forti. The fabric and its surface are the interiority of the movement itself, which produces an immersive environment not only to look at, but one which the audience walking in the space can feel or inhabit through their moving bodies. Pieces of fabric cut to different sizes, cut across the existing space other temporalities. They are part of the long-term practices of Discoteca Flaming Star with banners, pieces of fabric, glued together and painted or collaged with text which appears irregularly on their surface in poetic lines that make another movement to that of the freely folding, hung fabric. They serve both as backdrop curtains for performances and as an independent, formless architecture within the existing architecture that unframes the space. The movements of the banners shuffle the space; they are a spatial deterritorialization whose disorder forms into words. The interplay between the words makes a sensitive bricolage of Discoteca Flaming Star’s own reflections and the cryptic thoughts that pass through them on everything they are interested in at the moment, which they sometimes carry around with them for months. Sometimes they are concepts, or poems. In the words of DFS, they are think-text-iles.

For their live performance dance construction Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End, Discoteca Flaming Star take the case of the little girl Esther who trained ambitiously to become a rhythmic gymnast. She wishes to develop to the extreme in her exercises her athletic excellence, to display perfect physical agility, coordination and grace. As it turns out, under the pressure of her parents, Esther eventually left the field of gymnastics to undertake another education that would give her a better future. Now Esther is a woman who graduated from university, which has indeed given her greater opportunities in her life. Her memory has retained, inscribed in her body, the rigorous training of the movements of rhythmic gymnastics. These inscriptions in her body remind her that she did not manage to realize her childhood dream. In the duration of the performance, the dance movements bring her back to the time of her childhood, as they evoke her memory through her body. They follow the dance score of Esther’s 90 seconds of multiple becoming in its imperceptible time, becoming child, becoming animal – A-ESTHER-BECOMING-DIVINE HORSEWOMAN, becoming an imperceptible-impersonal molecule, becoming one and many at the same time in the vanishing time of a 90 seconds duration. A molecular becoming of one/many, to the event of the groundless and infinitely small milieus of a collective action. Esther does not designate a proper name. Esther does not represent a subject, but a desiring assemblage, a collective persona of three and more, as everything written above in capital letters. She is a collective enunciation. The instruction is to love any out of these 90 seconds. To love. A verb in the infinitive! To mark processes like to walk, to love, to dance. The infinitive marks movements of deterritorialization.

Esther dances together with Cristina, and Wolfgang sings. Their dance supposes proximity and distance at the ground level, but in the proximity of their dancing bodies they do not necessarily follow each other’s movements. Their disjointed movements start to intersect more and more often to modulate an invisible diagram of individuation. “I am you” in this passage, with all its intensive components of variability at once. Their movements are at the limit of their bodies and at the limit of their language. Logomotions and body movements interrelate. They double in the becoming of Esther. She is an assemblage – a material production of desires. Esther starts betraying her own memorized techniques of rhythmic gymnastics, displacing them with more improvisational and free movements, eluding the repressive apparatus and disciplining process to lose control, to push her desires to the real life experience, with the sensible quality of emotions and the fabulating movements coming from language. Cristina’s movement techniques are elaborated on the basis of Maya Deren’s and Simone Forti’s systems of movements and techniques, and philosophy.

Love Any Out of (90 Seconds) End opens a new path of imaginary/experience in order to give her a score to become conscious of her difference, embodied in the singularity of the therapeutic process. It is not remodeling Esther’s subjectivity. It is a new production in the dance movements “to recompose her existential corporeality and to get out of her repetitive impasses.” It is both a politics and an aesthetics of irreversible duration.

Love makes the movements a dance of refusal. Love is not work! “dance! no work!” Dance forms life! Dancing molecules, disconnected and at the same time all together. Every movement becomes a joyful autonomous event in a mass tune that gives the courage to Esther to traverse the abyss of the 90 seconds of death, of non-being and crying. “I die. I die.” Which means, paradoxically “I leave. I leave.” And give her the power to fight for the world. “I am you.”

Excerpt from the text on DFS's work in the exhibition, by Dimitrina Sevova and Alan Roth.

[English see below]

Corner College führt seine Veranstaltungsreihe The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?) fort.

In der fünften Veranstaltung lädt Corner College das Künstlerinnen-Kuratorinnen-Duo peekaboo!, bestehend aus Lisa Biedlingmaier und Bernadette Wolbring, sowie die Künstlerin Erica van Loon ein, ihre kuratorische Praktiken vorzustellen und untereinander und mit dem Publikum zu diskutieren.

Das kuratorische Konzept der Veranstaltungsreihe von Dimitrina Sevova in Zusammenarbeit mit Alan Roth (auf Englisch): http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html


[Deutsch siehe oben]

Corner College is continuing its series of events The Artist as The Curator as The Artist (The Art of Curating or How about a Paracuratorial Turn?).

In the fifth event, artists das Künstlerinnen-Kuratorinnen-Duo peekaboo!, consisting of Lisa Biedlingmaier and Bernadette Wolbring, as well as artist Erica van Loon are invited to present their curatorial practices and discuss them between themselves and with the audience.

Curatorial concept of the series of events by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with Alan Roth: http://materials.corner-college.com/2016/201602/201502-the-artist-as-the-curator-new-series.html



peekaboo! (Lisa Biedlingmaier & Bernadette Wolbring)

Welche Stellung nimmt man als KünstlerIn im urbanen Raum, der fortwährend von Gentrifizierung bedroht wird, ein? Dieser Raum, der immer auch ein politischer und sozialer Raum ist? Lässt man sich als KünstlerIn für die Aussenwirkung Anderer instrumentalisieren? Beteiligt man sich durch künstlerisches Handeln aktiv an politischen Prozessen?
Neben diesen Fragestellungen, die die Künstlerinnen Lisa Biedlingmaier und Bernadette Wolbring dazu gebracht haben ihre künstlerische Arbeit mit kuratorischen Formaten zu erweitern, werden Erfahrungen über das Arbeiten in Kollektiven und über Synergien, die sich zwischen künstlerischer und kuratorischer Praxis ergeben, ausgetauscht.

Das Künstler-Kuratorinnen-Team peekaboo!, bestehend aus Lisa Biedlingmaier und Bernadette Wolbring, hat sich zusammengetan um gleich einer Band, die an verschiedenen Orten Konzerte spielt, in verschiedenen (Kunst)räumen aufzutreten – in Form von Publikationen, Screenings und Ausstellungen. Da beide in jeweils zwei Ländern leben (Stuttgart / Zürich und Stuttgart / Stockholm), bieten sich dafür internationale Kooperationen an.
2014 bis 2016 lud das Künstler/Kuratoren-duo zu einer Reihe von drei internationalen Gruppenausstellungen ein, in der Absicht einen am Rande des Städtebauprojekts Stuttgart 21 stattfindenden Gentrifizierungsprozess zu thematisieren. 2016 stellte peekaboo! ihre bisherige Tätigkeit im Künstlerhaus Stuttgart im Rahmen des Post-Graduate Program in Curating der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste vor.



Erica van Loon



With her recent work, Erica van Loon reflects on the physical interconnection between the human body and that of the earth, but also searches for ways to relate to their less tangible inner worlds, that we access almost exclusively by the mind; like processes inside our planet or the human (sub)conscious.
She often works with repetitive actions or visual and auditory rhythms, that she sees as an instrument for creating a state of mind that intensifies our sensory perception, and with that, our ability to connect with what is outside and inside of us.

In June 2016 Van Loon took this ambition to sharpen the sensory perception, as a starting point for curating the Breakfast Show at project space PuntWG in Amsterdam.

Breakfast literally means ‘breaking the fast’ of the night. During night-time our attention turns inward and almost all input from the outside is paused. We temporarily shift to another state of mind.
Most of the time, an encounter with an artwork is preceded by a multitude of sensory, emotional and intellectual interactions. What happens if an exhibition is the first thing we are exposed to after waking up, when we have had little sensory activity and almost no interactions with our surroundings.
By moving the usual timeframe in which we look at art, the viewer has a slightly altered state of consciousness. Does this result in a different susceptibility, a different reflection on the works? Does it affect how we perceive the succeeding reality of a day?
The shown video works by Charlotte Dumas, Priscila Fernandes, Rosie Heinrich, Erica van Loon and Timmy van Zoelen each in their own way, could be connected to the above questions. At the same time they allowed for a broader reading, leaving scope for one’s own interpretation and for discussion at the breakfast table.
As the exhibition was only open in the early morning, from sunrise (around 5.20 AM), visitors were invited to see the video works before engaging in other activities. And indeed people took the effort to get up early; some of them even arrived earlier than the curator (or was she a performing artist?) who was racing the sun to get to the exhibition space every morning. Where she served breakfast, which stimulated visitors to reflect in dialogue.

During The Artist as The Curator as The Artist on 4 September, Erica van Loon will reflect on these mornings and how she links them to her artistic practice.

[English below]

In Tritonics+ erzeugen Akteure einen Performance-Raum aus zeitgenössischer Praxis rund um das Saxophon, wobei das Saxophon der gemeine Gegenstand ist, der Leute vom Hauptbild addiert oder subtrahiert. Dies erlaubt es, unterschiedliche Formen des Repertoires aber auch Improvisationen vorzubringen. Tritonics+ zielt darauf ab, einen Raum zu erzeugen, in dem Leute offen interpretieren können, unterschiedlicher Sound-Formationen und Urbanisierung des Raums ausgesetzt sind.

Corner College stellt einen Raum zur Verfügung, in welchem Tritonics+ einen Bereich für gegenseitige Zusammenarbeit mit den Arbeiten Johanna Bruckners und Discoteca Flaming Star erzeugt.

Beteiligte Akteur_innen sind Kay Zhang, Manuela Villiger, Vera Wahl, und Benjamin Ryser.


[Deutsch siehe oben]

In Tritonics+, actors create a performance space made up of contemporary practice centered around the saxophone, the saxophone being the common object that adds and subtracts people from the main picture. This allows putting forward different forms of repertoire but also sound improvisation.
Tritonics+ aims to create a space for people to openly interpret, be exposed to different sound formation and space urbanisation.

Corner College provides a space in which Tritonics+ creates an area for cross-collaboration with works of Johanna Bruckner and Discoteca Flaming Star.

Actors involved are Kay Zhang, Manuela Villiger, Vera Wahl, and Benjamin Ryser.


Program

Two Pieces (1983) 5’ – Edison Denisov
Rough Winds Do Shake the Darling Buds (1999) 12’ – Eric Moe
Impro 5’
Reed Phase (1992) 6’ – Steve Reich
Next to Beside Besides (2003-2006) 5’ – Simon Steen-Andersen
Megaphone Duo featuring Benjamin Ryser

Durational performance on 27 - 28 - 29 September.

Open to the public during the following hours:
Tuesday, 27 September: 12:00h - 17:00h (streaming 14:00h - 15:00h)
Wednesday, 28 September: 12:00h - 17:00h (streaming 14:00h - 15:00h)
Thursday, 29 September: 16:00h - 21:00h (streaming 20:00h - 21:00h)

Link for the streaming, for those who cannot attend in person:
https://youtu.be/KLJbdMmpzeM (27 Sept)
https://youtu.be/79Gj5rkqPjY (28 Sept)



Followed by a public live event on Thursday, 29 September at 20:00h.

One hair is trash. Million hairs is a woven record of my self.

I regularly lose a lot of hair.

Often, I’d get lost in thoughts while twisting it.

As hairs slide off, small rings form around my finger.

I started collecting the rings.

I decided to take this ritual into a public performance.

One Hair One Purpose is a 3-day long-durational performance taking this daily ritual into a conscious act of transformation.

Losing myself, repurposing myself, I invite the audience to co-experience and participate in the destruction and rebuilding of (my) physical transformation.

One hair, the simple, single element that makes any transformation possible. It always starts with one thought, one action, the celebration of one disposable event.

I regularly lose a lot of hair.

Often, I’d get lost in thoughts while twisting it.

As hairs slide off, small rings form around my finger.




I started collecting the rings.




I decided to take this ritual into a public performance.

Losing myself, repurposing myself, I invite the audience to co-experience and participate in the destruction and rebuilding of (my) physical transformation.



This public event follows three days of a durational performance with streaming.

The main topic of my videos could be defined as immigration, and following transformations of a personality. I think each immigration takes a minimum of 5 years of your life till you start to feel connected to a new place, understand the language, unspoken rules, and so on. So it’s a traumatic process for everyone.

Somehow the fact that the Soviet Union (where I was born) doesn’t exist anymore reduces any possibility of going back, makes me look forward and try to adapt myself to an always new reality and new places. It became an important issue for me to learn a lot about the place where I live (first Tel-Aviv, and now Zurich) and try to build a dialog through my art practices (video and painting). The longer I live in Western Europe, the more interesting it becomes to analyze certain things about Soviet life. Sometimes the Soviet, Eastern European utopia I grew up with becomes thus a distorted reality in the West.

The earlier videos, filmed in Israel, were all based on one principle. I was filming people doing some similar action. That trick is now widely used in cinema, advertisement and music clips. But at the end of the nineties, when I made those films, it looked quite fresh and original. I did quite many short videos with the same people, mostly Russian immigrants in their first years in Israel. It wasn’t a random choice: these people were my friends. They were artists, musicians, actors, fashion designers, etc. That created a special mood and atmosphere.

Filming the raw material for my Trilogy documentary about the perception of beauty, fears and happiness, I had to travel to Tel Aviv and back to Zurich, and Moscow was initially in my mind as well which led me back to my roots. Trying to answer a question, where do I belong, I realized that there is no answer and I just have to let myself flow with stream of life and not be obsessive about the past.

Esther Eppstein über Maria Pomianskys Trilogie

Maria Pomianskys Film «Glück это глюк» (Happiness is a trip) ist der letzter Film aus der Trilogie (Beauty 2006, Fears 2009), einer Langzeitstudie über die Frage menschlicher Zustände, Sehnsüchte und Ängste. Maria Pomiansky ist im sowjetischen Moskau geboren, emigrierte Anfang der neunziger Jahre als Jugendliche nach Israel und lebt heute, seit bald zehn Jahren in Zürich. In diesen drei Städten ihres Lebenslaufs befragte Maria Pomiansky für ihre in 2005 begonnene Trilogie Bekannte, Freundinnen und Freunde über deren Einstellung zum Leben, zur Kunst, zur Liebe, zum Rausch, zur Ewigkeit und zur Vergänglichkeit. Jugend in Moskau, in Tel Aviv, in Zürich ... Die Künstlerin reist zwischen den Städten, findet das Verbindende, das Einzigartige und das gegenseitig Fremde zwischen Nahem Osten, West- und Osteuropa. Es wird Russisch, Hebräisch, Deutsch und Englisch gesprochen. Die Filmemacherin ist die kosmopolitische Weltbürgerin und distanzlose Beobachterin, wobei auch immer wieder unvermittelt ein diffuses Gefühl der Heimatlosigkeit, Verwirrung und Melancholie mitschwingt. Die Künstlerin führt ihre Protagonisten und die Zuschauer von leichten, verspielten Plaudereien zu tief berührenden existenziellen Gesprächen, die Kamera zeigt komponierte Bilder mit Gesichtern und Landschaften. Die Trilogie, während eines Zeitraum von fast zehn Jahren entstanden, zeigt die Veränderung und die Entwicklung der jungen Freunde. Die stark autobiografisch gefärbte Filmsprache bewegt sich zwischen Dokumentar- Reise- Experimental- und inszeniertem Kunstfilm. Maria Pomiansky sucht in ihrer Filmreise Antworten auf ihre ganz persönliche Frage der Zugehörigkeit. Der Film zitiert und mischt in Inhalt und Ästhetik das Kino jüdischer Diaspora, den russischen und sowjetischen Pathos und die Popkultur des Westens. Musik spielt in allen drei Filmen eine wichtige Rolle, ist für Maria Pomiansky ein Verbindungsglied zwischen den Kulturen in denen sie sich bewegt und die sich neben vieler Ähnlichkeiten, Gemeinsamkeiten und der Universalität menschlicher Bedürfnisse und Ängste doch auch sehr unterscheiden.


The text above by Esther Eppstein, along with a text about Maria Pomiansky's work more generally by Vadim Levin, is also available in printable layout as PDF (106KB).