11: Brameshuber / Magdy / Fowler
SELECTION 2015
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
Courtisane is een platform voor film en audiovisuele kunsten. In de vorm van een jaarlijks festival, filmvertoningen, gesprekken en publicaties onderzoeken we de relaties tussen beeld en wereld, esthetiek en politiek, experiment en engagement.
Courtisane is a platform for film and audiovisual arts. Through a yearly festival, film screenings, talks and publications, we research the relations between image and world, aesthetics and politics, experiment and engagement.
SELECTION 2015
A dialogue between new audiovisual works, older or rediscovered films and videos by artists and filmmakers who work in the expanded field of moving image practice.
A remote and long-abandoned industrial site located in a densely wooded Austrian hinterland has been given a new function by Nigerian scrapmasters. Engines, axles and cylinders that cannot be resold in Europe are being prepared for shipment to Africa. Directly across their garage lies a paintball field, where young people pursue their hobby. Brameshuber is interested in these different realities – a working world and a gaming world – and their visual, acoustic and symbolic relationship.
Dinosaur eggs, elephants and futuristic architecture from real cities are the elements of Magdy’s imaginative and surreal tale of an unknown city dreaming of being the host of the Olympic Games. Shot throughout Europe and North America, the geographical locations lose their specificities. Subtitles, image and sound manipulations enhance a sense of displacement.
Right before the BBC outsourced the caretaking of their television archive to Getty Images, Luke Fowler got one last shot at rummaging through it. Depositions attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 1970s and ’80s. Nostalgia for ancient folkways, traditional song and the romance of freedom, all get undercut by scientific rationalism and the pressures of normativity bringing law to bear on lives resistant to conformity.