BackNear Me » Events » Hanoi Events Blog » 80 Ngày Vòng quanh Thế Giới: art videos / Kran Film Collective @ Hanoi DocLab

The screening and artist talk is a part of Hanoi DocLab's "ImageLab 2018" project sponsored by the Cultural Development and Exchange Fund (CDEF) of the Danish Embassy in Vietnam.

“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” (Walter Benjamin “On the concept of history”)

Curated by Kran Film Collective, this little collection of art videos examines the possibility for change in societies. Specifically, each piece examines how potential breaks with the status quo are often subsumed and absorbed in a hollow void of time, what the French philosopher Michel Foucault would call the ripples in the waters.

In the film Sound from the Hallways we are waiting for the ruptures to happened inside the Museum while the Arab Spring takes place outside in the street of Cairo, and in the video work Years of Saturdays the local activists hold a routine protest every Saturday for a decades. In The Wave by Sarah Vanagt & Katrien Vermeire we follow the reopening of unmarked graves, the remains belonging to opponents of Franco executed in 1939. When will the moment for change arrive? What are we all waiting for? This selection looks at past moments in time.

Years of Saturdays,
By Benj Gerdes
Video / HD / 11’ /2015 / United States
English spoken
Intermittently since 1967 and consistently since shortly after September 11, 2001, a group of activists has met every Saturday morning to continue to protest the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in front of a small-town post office and former federal courthouse in rural Pennsylvania (this is one of many such sites). At the height of anti-war mobilizations, and later during the spread of Occupy movements, one reportedly witnessed a large crowd. Now, this has dwindled to a handful of elderly activists, no one younger than seventy and one in his nineties. The artist returns to the scene of his original political upbringing as a 13 year-old protesting the first Gulf War (1991). Instead of staying behind the camera, making the portrait he’d intended to shoot, the filmmaker faces the awkwardness of filming a four-person protest, and becomes, briefly, a participant.

Sound from the Hallways
By Lasse Lau
Video / 16:9/ 25’/ 2012/ Denmark
No dialougue
This video documents the atmosphere of one of the most classic and visually dense collections on display in the world before its buildings and modus operandi becomes history. Sound from the Hallways revisits history through the collections of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in attempt to challenge concepts of historicism and museology, from a time of the early 20th century when history was still seen as universal, and man believed in its abundant truth, to a time where several histories and narratives challenge each other for the semblance of reality.This cinematographic work takes us through a series of the museum’s antique collections, as objects of men, women, faros, animals, and armies slowly glide pass the gaze of the viewer something intrusive is on the verge of happening.

The Wave
By Katrien Vermeire and Sarah Vanagt
Video / 16:9 / 20' / 2012 / Belgium
Spanish spoken, with English subtitles
The archaeological gaze of the viewer is set in motion: a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) opens and closes itself. In 2011 Katrien Vermeire and Sarah Vanagt placed a camera above the spot where nine victims were buried after their execution by Franco’s supporters in June 1939. On day one of the excavation, a digging crane gently loosened the top layer of soil, until the archaeologists came across a skull with a bullet hole. Then the archaeologists continued their work by hand. The skeletons appeared, then disappeared, as if a strong wind blew that removed the sand and uncovered death, a primal truth.

 

Thursday, 30 May

7:00pm - 10:00pm

Hanoi DocLab | 11, Lane 378/12 Thuỵ Khuê, Tây Hồ, Hanoi

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