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Video - Forum ǀ Video collection of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in Iași

tranzit.ro/ Iași, Al Lăpușneanu St. 7-9
Sunday, September 20, 7:30 p.m.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila - If 6 Was 9, 1995
Katya Sander - Exterior City, 2005
Ursula Biemann - Performing the Border, 1999

This is the third presentation taking part of a 7 selections from Video-Forum (n.b.k.) which is also the oldest collection of video art from Germany. The project is taking place from July to October 2015.

The selection that will be screened on Sunday, September 20 is realized by Dan Acostioaei.

This programming, designed as a triptych of video essays, invites the viewer to follow a narrative route, from the pure fiction imbued with the sexual fantasies of adolescence (Eija-Liisa Ahtila), through the mapping of an imaginary city governed by the relationships generated by capital flow, workforce and desire (Katya Sander), up to the investigation of dark facts, in which state borders are both discourse and physical space sexualised through the gender division of labour and through prostitution (Ursula Biemann). Although the videos have different topics, what unites them, from my point of view – apart from the fact that they were made by women artists and their gender is reflected in their approach – is the connection between maturation, production, consumption and the expression of desire in the public sphere.

The works of Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b. 1959, Finland) elaborate narrations focusing on human dramas, highlighted in a syncopated manner by the editing, doubled by a tense, sometimes overpowering soundtrack. Most often, the videos she makes are presented as part of installations, with multiple screenings.
"If 6 was 9" shows, in a docu-fictional style, the fantasies, dreams and daily activities of five teenage girls from Helsinki who feel the need to possess in a tactile manner the world around them.

Katya Sander (1970, Denmark) investigates the symbols in architecture, the display of power in the relationship between the public sphere and the civil society, presenting them often in the shape of meaning subversions, or explores the potential of forms of communication hidden in the gaps of language and of the mundane.
"Exterior City" has at its centre a woman walking through residential areas Vienna and Malmö, distributing posters addressing workers, business owners, lodgers, landlords, sympathizers, citizens etc. in German and Swedish, as if she were planning a vast social movement.

A visual artist, theorist and curator, Ursula Biemann (b. 1955, Switzerland) has produced numerous works on the topic of migration and the mobility of the workforce on the backdrop of technologisation and gender inequality. The artist's practice is based on research and involves the exploration of themes such as the environment and the exploitation of resources in distant parts of the globe.
The action of "Performing the Border" takes place at the border between the United States of America and Mexico, in Ciudad Juarez, where American multinationals assemble electronic components that come from El Paso, Texas. Biemann combines archive material and text/type images with interviews with factory workers, journalists, activists and sex workers from the area in a captivating experimental essay.