Shorts

How to communicate the distance and proximity we feel to archived materials, especially photography? Why do we archive ourselves and our communities, and what do these archives do to us and for us? In these five short films, the artists dig into archived visuals to explore their invitations and trace their barriers as they create stories, meanings and affects. The following short films will be on view:

Techno Gender: Pyramid Revealed By A Sandstorm     
2017, Raju Rage, 7 min
Techno Gender is an audio-video sonic collage focusing on the emotional impact of hormones on the body through self-injecting, surveillance and sensation. Bridging the gap between science, health, politics and art, it questions the role of hormones in social determination of sex and gender, binary ideas of gender and sex. Inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, online testimonials and grassroots health activism, the video explores what it means to be an object/subject as a racialized and gendered body.

Memórias Reveladas   
2019, Quentin Worthington, 23 min
Memórias Reveladas follows different founding members of the Archivo De La Memoria Trans Argentina, a collective of trans women survivors of the Argentine dictatorship, who initially started to assemble their photos on a Facebook group. With the help of professional photographers and archivists, mostly queer allies, they have learned the practice of photography archiving.

Touching Feeling
2019, Aykan Safoğlu, 13 min
The friendship between Aykan Safoğlu and Nihad Nino Pušija began in 2014 in the nGbK, an artists’ association in Berlin, where Pušija has been active as a curator and photographer since the 1990s. Pušijas recordings show queer life in Kreuzberg, the life of the Romani in the former Yugoslavia and in German refugee shelters; everyday occurrences, but also scenes of flight and migration. Pušija’s photographs form the base of the film which Safoğlu uncovers on the black screen. The scratches on the picture’s surface turn into contours and fragments: prompting Safoğlu’s reflection on his role as observer, the defiant beauty of everyday life, and the terrible rupture that war and destruction left in their trail in the 1990s across the Balkans

This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past
2019, Cana Bilir-Meier, 16 min
Two persons wander through a mall being goofy together. A day like any other, this could be any place, at any time, but the date on a memorial plaque allows us to place the scene. We are at the Olympia Shopping Centre in Munich, where nine people were killed and injured in a racist attack on July 22, 2016. The photos – plucked, as so often in Bilir-Meier's work, from her family archive – show scenes from Düşler Ülkesi (Land of Dreams), a play Bilir-Meier's mother helped put on whose 1982 premiere was delayed by a bomb scare.

She Was a Full Body Speaker   
2016, Evan Ifekoya, 18 min
The short film combines found footage from video artist Evan Ifekoya’s personal archive with that of Liverpool-based filmmaker Sandi Hughes (Rewind/Fast Forward). It explores cycles of trauma, mourning and celebration through an investigation into spaces of sociality past, present and still to come.

Quentin Worthington, film director and producer, was born in Strasbourg, France and currently lives between Paris and Marseille. Inspired by cinematic works that highlight the transmission of LGBTQI+ His/Herstory, Quentin’s works document past, present and future collaborative experiences to produce a LGBTQIA+ memory.

Cana Bilir-Meier is an artist, filmmaker and art educator. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, art education and fine arts, at the Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film in Vienna and at Sabancı University in Istanbul. Bilir-Meier's cinematic and cinematic-performative works move at the intersections of archival work, text production, historical research and contemporary media reflexivity or even archaeology.

Part of the Utopia/Dystopia event series curated by Todd & Zoya. for C/O Berlin as part of the exhibition Queerness in Photography.