Recorded images that are created as a personal or collective expression against political regimes during significant political changes are the counter-weight for those generated by the official media. The recorded document remains when the revolution is over and can often be interpreted not only by its content but also by the type of device used. On the more sophisticated level, video art and experimental cinema are continually using new approaches and forms of presentation. The viewer, shaken from accustomed visual habits, experiences new forms of perception and becomes more critical.
The geo-political context, the tools and their accessibility to artists and to the large public, and the means of diffusion have obviously changed through time and space. Videos and films included in the exhibition are not considered so much as a genre but more as a means to investigate the changing role and influence of visual technology and the different ways the moving image and its perception can be expressions of resistance.
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Recording Against Regimes will be held in Darb1718 in Cairo, Egypt in March 2013.
This project has been initiated by ARCHiNOS Architecture, Cairo, Egypt(www.archinos.com ) in cooperation with WRO Art Center, Wroclaw, Poland (www.wrocenter.pl).
This project is co-funded by the European Union as part of its annual Cultural Cooperation Programme in Egypt. Additional support has been gratefully received from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Cairo, and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Cairo.
Project director: Agnieszka Dobrowolska.
Curator: Klio Krajewska
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H.E. Mr. Piotr Puchta, the
Polish Ambassador to Egypt speaks at the opening of the public discussion in
the al-Sinnari House Cultural Centre in Sayeda Zeinab in Cairo.
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| Minister Counsellor Mrs Nataliya Apostolova, Deputy Head of European Union Delegation to Egypt, opens the Recording Against Regimes exhibition in Darb 1718 Art and Culture Centre. |
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| H.E. Mr. Piotr Puchta, the Ambassador of Poland, speaking at the opening ceremony. |
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ARCHiNOS Architecture director, Arch Agnieszka Dobrowolska speaks at the opening in the attendance of the mbassadors.
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ARCHiNOS Architecture director Agnieszka Dobrowolska addresses the guests at the Recording Against Regimes opening .
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The Exhibition Art Curator Klio Krajewska Speaks on the opening night.
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| ARCHiNOS Architecture director, Agnieszka Dobrowolska, interviewed by Egyptian national television presenter. |
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| ARCHiNOS Architecture director, Agnieszka Dobrowolska, interviewed by Egyptian national television presenter. |
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TV interview with artist Heba Amin, whose work is presented at the exhibition.
TV interview with artist Heba Amin. Jozef Robakowski’s 1985 video Cinema is Power is screened in the background.
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TV interview with Artist Heba Amin, and her presented films in the exhibition.
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| ARCHiNOS director Agnieszka Dobrowolska greets the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne W. Patterson arriving to visit the exhibition on the opening night. |
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U.S. Ambassador Mrs Anne W. Patterson and Dr. David Paterson viewing the exhibition.
The U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne W. Patterson, the Polish Ambassador Piotr Puchta, and Dr. David Patterson listen to
ARCHiNOS director Agnieszka Dobrowolska explaining the exhibition.
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| Polish and German filmmakers view Bassem Youssri’s 2011 video Pulse |
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| Mrs. Mai Shehab from Darb 1718 gives the opening speech at the Recording Against Regimes ceremony. |
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Projection of Piotr Bikont’s 1990 video Double Stumble.
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Recording Against Regimes movie of the Opening! Enjoy it now..!
The Exhibition
Józef Robakowski - Cinema is Power
Poland, 1985, 7,22’
This performative video explores the meaning and gradual devaluation of fetishes and signs. The artist uses communist props and slogans from everyday life the mass media. For example, we see the naked artist lifting a drill with his hand and calling out: '(Get) to work!'; in another instance he is holding a chainsaw shouting: 'Long live the peasant-worker alliance!' Cinema is Power provokes a critical reflection on the relationship between the construction of signs and the ephemeral nature of their ideological value.
Józef Robakowski is one of Poland’s most influential artists. Born in 1939, he became a pioneer in film and video art and an active member of the so-called Polish neo avant-garde of the 1970s. His work includes a variety of media such as photography, installation art, drawing, and conceptual projects. Throughout his career, which started in the late 1950s, Robakowski has acted as initiator of key events, exhibitions and artistic actions. He is also an editor and critic of contemporary art.
Zygmunt Rytka - Retransmission
Poland, 1979-1983, 20’
Retransmission presents an artist’s personal response and reflection on the political changes that occurred in Poland between the years of 1979 and 1983. Sampling images of a state TV programme over several years, Rytka, was able to distil the very essence of the aesthetics of the propaganda permeating official TV channels. The artist’s own symbols, which are painted on a pane of glass in front of the television screen, compete with the official iconography of Polish state media. Instead of remaining a passive receiver of images on the screen, the artist literally and metaphorically turns into a conduit for their ‘retransmission’. The period in which these images were recorded was of major importance not only for Poland, but also for the future of Europe and beyond. The birth of Solidarity, the struggle with Communist authorities and the martial law produced a very specific form of visual propaganda.
Zygmunt Rytka was born in 1947 in Warsaw. His inter-media practice includes photography, video and installation art. Since 1972 he has participated in over 150 exhibitions and has had 23 solo shows. His works are presented in many museums collections in Poland and in numerous private art collections. He lives and works in Warsaw.
Piotr Bikont - Double Stumble
Poland, 1990, excerpt 11,47’ (total 21,01’)
Double Stumble is a unique example an independent artist directly interacting with official state television. Bikont focused his camera on a monitor in the corridor of the official TV news studio in order to record the actual editing process going on somewhere else in the state television building. The title refers to broadcast footage from which an anonymous editor exercised the instance of General Jaruzelski stumbling twice while attending a political summit. This video reveals the essence of how television editing transforms a real event into a ‘Polish-ed’ news story.
Piotr Bikont was born in 1955. He is a Polish journalist, publicist, culinary critic and a theatre director. He translated Art Spiegelman's Maus to Polish.
Jacek Niegoda - The Dissenter
Poland, 1995-2005, 5:20’
In The Dissenter Niegoda recorded an event in an urban space that took place in 1995 in Gdańsk on an escalator between a train station and bus terminal – the only escalator in town at that time. Viewed from our perspective today, this video demonstrates the way in which order emerges, is imposed and regulated, be it literally on the street or metaphorically in politics. The artist commented: “It was supposed to be a ‘physical’ action; the intention was to show the mechanics and relativity of motion. But it turned out to be a political action, and it elicited the remark 'Oh, a dissenter!', from one of the onlookers. It wasn’t until 2005 that I finally got back to the tape with the material we’d recorded. I shortened it and added sound, but it’s an unedited recording”.
Jacek Niegoda was born in 1972 and graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 1998. He co-founded the independent artists' groups Wyspa Foundation and CUKT (Central Office of Technical Culture). In 2000 he co-authored the Viktoria Cukt project, the election campaign of a virtual candidate for the president of Poland.
Antal Lux - MAUERLÄUFER
Germany, 1991, 4,30’
In Mauerläufer (Wall Runner) the Berlin Wall is at once the subject of and projection screen for a pas-de-deux dance. Two animated figures perform a ballet referencing the different chapters of the history of the Berlin Wall. For West Berliners the wall was a ubiquitous symbol of the partition; at the same time it was also a kind of news sheet, a forum where everyone who had something to say could express themselves through writings and graffiti. Antal Lux is such a commentator. The fall of the wall was a big event for the media, which turned this event into a spectacle and transmitted it worldwide. From the point of view of someone who actually lived through the events, Lux adopts a quieter, more subtle tone.
Antal Lux was born in Budapest in 1935. In 1956 he immigrated to Germany where he studied at the Painting and Graphics Department of the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart. After pursuing a career in teaching, he worked as a freelance painter and graphic artist exhibiting his work internationally. Since 1980 he has been engaging with experimental media arts such as video, installation, and electro-graphics.
Egon Bunne - Everything Changes
Germany, 1990, 7,45’
The video Everything Changes (Alles Wandelt Sich) was made after the fall of the Berlin wall and is one of Bunne's most important works. Past and present appear next to each other in a collage-based montage of historical visual material and up-to-date images of current events. Inspired by Bertold Brecht’s poem Alles Wandelt Sich the artist re-combines old and new images creating a kaleidoscopic view of German history.
Egon Bunne’s was born in 1952 in Ahlen, West Germany. He studied film at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. He works as a practicing artists in new media and is professor at various art academies in Germany. In addition to his own artistic practice, he has been working as producer and editor of various projects ranging from the video magazine Infermental to the TV magazine VAMP.
Hartmut Jahn - A Double German Fantasy
Germany, 1988, 19’
This video examines the relationship between East and West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Two identical-looking girls lead the viewer through a collage of images relating to the two German states; the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall and TV pictures of such politicians as Richard Nixon, Walter Ulbricht, Willy Brandt and Ludwig Erhard. The film includes moments of wry humour, for instance when parts of the Wall fortifications on the Eastern side are revealed to be as flimsy as papier-maché. The motif of the double, introduced by the two girls, is taken up in formal terms elsewhere in the video, for example in mirror-image of pictures within pictures. The highlight of this video is the scene in which the dismantling of a fake wall that has been built for a movie set prefigures the real fall of the Berlin wall only months later.
Hartmut Jahn was born in 1955 in Hanover, West Germany. He studied art education and fine arts in Hanover and Berlin and started to make films, videos and installations in 1976. In 1982 he co-founded Confu Baja Video Studios in West Berlin with Gerd Conradt, Monika Funke Stern and Hanno Baethe. From 1988 he has been teaching at numerous universities. Recently Jahn returned to the subject of Berlin Wall in a photography project.
Heba Amin - My love for you, Egypt, Increases by the Day
Egypt, 2012, 6,18’
On January 27th 2011 Egyptian authorities succeeded in shutting down the country's international Internet access points in response to growing protests. Over one weekend, a group of programmers developed a platform called Speak2Tweet that would allow Egyptians to post their breaking news on Twitter via voicemail despite Internet cuts. The result was thousands of heartfelt messages from Egyptians recording their emotions by phone.
This experimental film presents a selected Speak2Tweet message of a man professing his love to Egypt on February 8, 2011 prior to the fall of the Mubarak regime and juxtaposes it with the abandoned structures that represented the long-lasting effects of a corrupt dictatorship.
Heba Amin is an Egyptian new media artist whose work seeks to map collective memory as it relates to the built environment. Her theoretical and studio-based work addresses themes related to urban planning, mapping, migration and language as an aesthetic database to explore junctures, failures, and flawed memory. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota and is a recent DAAD scholar. Amin currently lives between Cairo and Berlin and teaches at the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in Berlin.
(Heba Amin)
Bassem Youssri - Pulse
Egypt, 2011, 4’
Talaat Harb Street is one of Downtown Cairo’s busiest streets. It breathes constantly exhaling an excessive amount of energy resulting from the continuous movement of pedestrians and cars almost 24 hours a day. All this energy has been trapped for years within an extremely frustrating social and political reality until a huge roar shook the streets of Cairo on the 25th of January 2011: “Freedom! Freedom!”. About 200 meters away from Tahrir Square, Talaat Harb was one of the most eventful streets during the first weeks of the Egyptian revolution. Protesters coming from different parts of Cairo trying to get into the square came in numbers taking Talaat Harb. The street saw events ranging from battles between protesters and the police – or between protesters and thugs of the regime – to scenes of extreme celebration and joy. This video is a compilation of a succession of events and emotions that took place in Talaat Harb Street between January 25th and February 11th.
Bassem Yousri is an Egyptian visual artist and independent filmmaker. He was born in Algeria in 1980 and raised in Cairo. He currently lives and works in Cairo. Since 2000, he has participated in several collective shows across Egypt and the Arab world, USA, Europe and had four solo shows in USA. His multidisciplinary practice ranges between creating mixed media installations in art galleries, public and street art, awareness campaigns, and experimental documentary films. The Egyptian social and political situation, human rights, cross-cultural dialogue, stereotypes, mass culture, and the relationship between art and audience key concern in his work.
(Bassem Youssri)
Omar Robert Hamilton, Moisireen - The People Demand the Fall of the Regime
Egypt, 2012, 4,11’
This video was made as a piece of agit-prop in the lead-up to the first anniversary of January 25th using a range of material from the Mosireen archive.
Omar Robert Hamilton is an independent filmmaker, producer of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature and a founding member of the Mosireen Collective in Cairo.
Mosireen is a non-profit media centre in Cairo born out of the explosion of citizen journalism and cultural activism in Egypt during the revolution. Armed with mobile phones and cameras, thousands upon thousands of citizens kept the balance of truth in their country by recording events as they happened in front of them, wrong-footing censorship and empowering the voice of a street-level perspective.
Egypt’s march towards the future its millions demanded did not end with Mubarak leaving power, it began. Mosireen, which is a play on the Arabic words for ‘Egypt’ and ‘determination’ was founded in the wake of Mubarak’s ousting by a group of film makers, citizen journalists and activists who got together to found a collective space dedicated to supporting citizen media of all kinds. The Mosireen workspace is open to everyone, regardless of their level of experience. They see a big part of their role as helping network between a wide variety of initiatives and projects, especially those born out of a spirit of civic engagement. Alongside other groups they are also helping build and provide access to the archive of footage from Egypt’s ongoing revolution.
(Omar Robert Hamilton)
The Open Air Cinema Program
Andrzej Wajda - Man of Marble
Poland, 1976, 160’
Man of Marble is a 1976 Polish film directed by the legendary director Andrzej Wajda. It chronicles the fall from grace of a fictional heroic Polish bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut, who became the ‘Stakhanovite’ (a Soviet expression describing the legend of an efficient coal miner) symbol of an over-achieving worker, in Nowa Huta, a new socialist city near Kraków. Agnieszka is a young filmmaker who is making her diploma film on Birkut, whose whereabouts seems to have been lost two decades later. The title Man of Marble refers to the propagandistic marble statues made in Birkut's image. It is somewhat of a surprise that Wajda would have been able to make such a film, reveals the use of propaganda and political corruption during the period of Stalinism, and foresees the loosening grip of the Soviets that came with the Solidarity Movement. It has been acknowledged by Polish film historians that due to censorship the script languished in development hell since 1962.
Andrzej Wajda - Man of Iron
Poland, 1981, 153’
Man of Iron is one of Wajda’s most well-known film about the Solidarity labour movement and its first success in persuading the Polish government to recognize the workers' right through an independent union. The film continues the story of Maciej Tomczyk, the son of Mateusz Birkut, the protagonist of Wajda's earlier film, Man of Marble. A journalist working for the Communist regime's radio station, who is given a task of slandering Maciej who is a young worker involved in the anti-Communist labour movement, described as "the man who started the Gdańsk Shipyard strike", and. Maciej is clearly intended as a parallel persona to Lech Wałęsa, the real key initiator of the Gdańsk strike (who appears as himself in the movie).
The film was made during the brief thaw in Communist censorship that appeared between the formation of Solidarity in August 1980 and its suppression in December 1981, and as such it is remarkably critical of the Communist regime. The film won the Palme d'Or and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.
Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz - Children of the Revolution
Poland, 2002, 58’
Children of the Revolution is a documentary film describing parallel stories of dissidents from Eastern Europe and their struggle with totalitarianism. The author tempts to answer the question 'does the revolution devour its own children?' going beyond a strictly Polish viewpoint and presenting a number of stories set in Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Zmarz Koczanowicz has not only drawn a portrait of the moment of the revolution, and the everyday struggle in these countries but her film also addresses the new problems that came with freedom.
Wolfgang Becker - Goodbye Lenin!
Germany, 2003, 121’
East Germany in the year of 1989: a young man protests against the Communist regime. While his mother witnesses his arrest she suffers a heart attack and falls into a deep coma. Only a few months later, the GDR (German Democratic Republic) does not exist anymore – and the mother awakes. Since she has to avoid every form of stress, her son tries to set up the GDR again for her inside their flat. But the world has changed a lot. Goodbye Lenin! is one of the most successful German films dealing with the reunification of Germany. It is a prime example of the so-called ‘Ostalgie’, a pun on the term ‘nostalgia’ and ‘Ost’ painting a harmless, naïve portrait of East Germany, and avoiding the complexity of this particularly traumatic chapter in German history.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - The Lives of Others
Germany, 2006, 137’
At once a political thriller and human drama, The Lives of Others begins in East Berlin in 1984, five years before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately takes us to 1991, in what is now the reunited Germany. Five years before its downfall, the government of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) ensures its claim to power with a ruthless system of control and surveillance through the Stasi, the state security agency , which maintained a vast network of informers that at one time numbered 200,000 out of a population of 17 million. Their goal is to know everything about "the lives of others."
The Lives of Others was Donnersmark first major feature film. The film quickly rose to international fame and to this day is one of the most well-known German films. Combining an East and West German cast, the film accurately conveyed many aspects of the real Stasi, although some claim that it romanticises life in the GDR.
Cynthia Beatt - Cycling the Frame and The Invisible Frame
Germany, 1988, 27’
Germany, 2009, 60’
In 1988 the Jamaican-born, Berlin-based British filmmaker Cynthia Beatt embarked on a journey into little-known territory. Cycling the Frame follows the British actress Tilda Swinton on her bicycle tour along the Berlin Wall. On this journey Beatt captured the inward-looking West Berlin and the over-the-Wall views of East Berlin. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, in June 2009, Cynthia Beatt and Tilda Swinton re-traced the locations of the former wall – this time from both sides. In The Invisible Frame East and West Berlin are visually intertwined, but the trauma of partition gains a wider geo-political context: at the end of The Invisible Frame it is revealed to us that the film is dedicated to the Palestinian people.
http://www.invisible-frame.com
Heiko Lange - The Noise of Cairo
Egypt, 2012, 52’
The Noise of Cairo is a cinematic adventure, following the interplay between art and the revolution in Egypt. Protest of any kind was punished violently in pre-revolutionary Egypt and artistic expression was considered nothing but a threat to the status quo. But since the fall of the Mubarak dictatorship, the art scene in Cairo is flourishing once again. How did the revolution of 2011 change Egyptian artists and their work?
Twelve people from Cairo’s cultural scene lead us on a journey to understand the unique role artists played during the revolution in Cairo. This documentary bears witness to Cairo’s vibrant artistic underbelly, as it raises its voice once again. The artists of Cairo, who refused to quiet down, come together to be heard. These individuals create The Noise of Cairo.
Hanan Abdalla - In the Shadow of a Man
Egypt, 2011 In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, four women speak of their fight for the future and what it means to be a woman in Egypt.
In the Shadow of a man weaves through their worlds as they tell us their stories of marriage, divorce, love and resistance, mirroring their lives with Egypt’s greater struggle for freedom and self-determination.
“I’ve come to learn that small acts of resistance are not to be underestimated, especially when they are rooted in larger issues. They give me hope for the greater fight for emancipation. Deep down the women of Egypt know the future is theirs”.
Shorts by SEMAT productions
SEMAT was set up by a group of young filmmakers in October 2001, with the objective of providing a real space for independent cinema and filmmakers to realize their audiovisual creations and films without being limited by mainstream production houses and the pressures of the market. SEMAT has been supporting independent cinema and encouraging youth to create their own images, rhythms and thoughts on screen.
SEMAT's main goal is to capacitate a new generation of filmmakers. To reach this goal they have supported productions, held screenings, and issued a magazine specialized in the affairs of independent cinema.
