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Artist Talk: Martin Krenn “Films on art and activism”
Born in 1970, in Vienna, Martin Krenn attends the University of Applied Arts and the Conservatory. He is particularly interested in art in public space and multimedia art, his work focusing on questions regarding the civil society and its confrontation with recent history. Krenn also teaches at the University of Art in Vienna.
Martin Krenn’s movies are situated at the border between documentary, participation and political action.
“In Between the Movements”, his latest video series, started in 2007, focuses on the global relational phenomenon and its impact on the theory and practice of leftwing resistance. Its goal is neither to offer a complete picture on the “anti-globalization” movements, nor to deliver prefabricated concepts on the configuring of an “alternative world”, but to debate concrete questions, at the crossroads of major global projects. For instance, the possibilities and the difficulties that arise in communicating with groups of different backgrounds are discussed.
Conversations led with different protagonists are the starting point of films created in collaboration with them. All the participants were invited to influence the creation of the film, both in the filming as well as the editing process. Cooperation with the films’ subjects, coming from different geographical and activist contexts, enable the discovering of different perspectives on opposition and represent an example of production of collaborative knowledge.
“Notes on opposition” (2006) is a documentary film on the resistance movement against fascism in the ’30s and ’40s in Austria, France and Spain. The main character is the Austrian Harry Spiegel, that fought in Spain in the ’30s alongside the republicans that opposed Franco. Adopting the method of recreating old photographs and film sequences, the documentary tries to focus on filmic representation and the transmission of history.
The photographic series and the short film “Tirana Tours” (2007) discuss a communist photography album, edited in 1990 in Tirana, in four languages. Seventeen years later, Martin Krenn took pictures of the locations shot in the album. An interview with the photographer of the original images, Petrit Kumi, completes the photographic series. The theme of the project are the rhetorical and ideological image mechanisms and the way they continue to influence the present.
Martin Krenn will be present at the screening of the film fragments mentioned above and will be available for a questions and answers series.
Pavilion Unicredit Bucharest: Thursday, 25 February 2010, 19.00
This project is supported by the AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM. Special thanks Karin Cervenka.
PAVILION UNICREDIT – Center for contemporary art & culture
Sos. Nicolae Titulescu 1 (Piata Victoriei)
Bucharest 011131 Romania
T: + 4 031 103 4131
E: pavilion(at)pavilionmagazine.org
www.pavilionunicredit.ro
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PAVILION UNICREDIT is a center for contemporary art & culture, a work-in-progress independent space, a space for the production and research in the fields of audiovisual, discursive and performative. It is a space of the critical thinking, and it promotes an artistic perspective implying the social and political involvement of the art and of the cultural institutions.
This is a project by PAVILION – journal for politics and culture.
www.pavilionjournal.org
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PAVILION, BUCHAREST BIENNALE and PAVILION UNICREDIT are projects devised and founded by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu
