11/04/2024, 6:00 pm,

Path Widens (Short film programme): Sherko Abbas, Einar Henriksen, Clara Jost, Shambhavi Kaul, Rose Lowder, Leyla Yenirce

, Kunsthalle Münster

The paths become wide. Earth, sand, rocks and rubble, concrete and tarmac. We always walk differently. – Within an hour, six experimental films come together in which different relationships to the land and soil unfold. Across rivers and lakes, by waterfalls and fountains. Sometimes silence spreads. Then a sound, a noise, a melody.

In response to Leyla Yenirce's sound installation Ich krieg Geschwindigkeit (2023), Theresa George, who investigates cultural anthropological issues and themes with the help of film, has curated a programme of international short films that reveal our active ecological and political relationship to the land on which we walk and live. George teaches visual anthropology and develops films, video art and performances with Leyla Yenirce, Azin Feizabadi, Helena Wittmann and Luise Donschen, among others. She also programmes for the Hamburg Short Film Festival (since 2016) and the Kassel Dokfest (since 2021).

Turbulence (Turbulenzen), France, 2015, Rose Lowder, 7:18 min.
Turbulence was filmed in the medieval town of Alet les Bains, in the Department of Aude. In the middle of the peaceful city, with a warm and relaxing climate, known for its thermal baths, one can see in the river Aude a small waterfall, the images of which as well as the title of the film refer to the present state of the world today.

Rose Lowder (born 1941) is a French-Peruvian experimental filmmaker based in Avignon. She studied and lived in Peru until the late 1950s and continued her training in London. There she worked as an editor in the film industry and developed her artistic practice. Since 1977 she was active programming rarely shown films, and in 1981 she co-founded the Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon (AFEA) with the aim of acquiring 16mm films and paper documents, as well as to publish several books. From 1996 until 2005 she was an associate professor (practice, history, theory and aesthetics), at the Université de Paris I. – In focussing her research on visual perception in relation to the cinematographic means of expression, Lowder concentrated on the different ways one can modify the graphic and photographic visual features of the image as it transforms in time. This work led her to compose the image in the camera, usually by interweaving the frames as the film strip passes the lens several times. This way of working is relatively meticulous and complex as it means recording a succession of images, frame by frame, in the camera, so that they appear simultaneously when seen projected on the screen.

Meine Liebe, Portugal, 2020, Clara Jost, 6 min.
A tribute to a tomato plant that only gave one tomato.

Clara Jost (born 1997 in Lisbon, Portugal) studied film editing and directing at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon), and holds a master's degree in Audiovisual Arts from KASK (Ghent, Belgium), which she attended as a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation fellow. Author of several short films, she also works as an editor, having collaborated with Teresa Villaverde, Tomás Paula Marques, Salomón Pérez and João Onofre, for example. In 2020, her film Meine Liebe won IndieLisboa's National Short Film Competition and circulated in countries such as France, Canada, Italy, Spain, Scotland, Mexico, Argentina. Bringing her thinking closer to the visual arts, in 2022 she wrote the thesis Au hasard, cinema: thoughts on the location of cinema in space and time, in which she reflected on the points of (dis)encounter between video art and cinema. She's currently working on her first installation piece.

Slow Shift, India/USA, 2023, Shambhavi Kaul, 9 min.
The film is shot in Hampi, India in the remains of a 14th century city that is also a World Heritage site in the state of Karnataka. This city, strewn with ancient ruins and massive boulders, some of the oldest in the world, is also said to be the mythic monkey kingdom of ancient lore. Currently, the site is overrun with langurs, a genus of “old world monkeys” native to the subcontinent. They contemplate their world as it changes around them and are entangled with humans, music, and rock in dialogue.

Shambhavi Kaul (born 1973 in Jodhpur, India) is an experimental filmmaker whose projects speculate on the possibilities for cinematic storytelling to build worlds. Her films make temporal and spatial demarcations porous by reorganizing cinematic space and layering historical, mythical, geological, ecological, and cultural timescales. Eventually, audiences consider their own time and space in relation to survival, the environment, and these filmic worlds. She has exhibited her work worldwide at film festivals such as the Toronto, Rotterdam and Edinburgh International film festivals, the New York and London film festivals, the Oberhausen Kutrzfilmtage, and Experimenta in Bangalore among others. She has presented her work at museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate in London. She has had two solo gallery shows at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai. She was born in Jodhpur India, and lives in the United States where she is a professor at Duke University.

Path Narrows, USA/Germany, Leyla Yenirce, 6 min.
On the way back, it all came down in torrents and it was warm. I walked through the rain. The streets were almost empty, my feet wet from the water. Slightly disgusted by the dirt mixed into the soup my shoes were swimming through, the lights looked so beautiful and the buildings were so tall and there were so many people I didn't know." (Leyla Yenirce)

Leyla Yenirce (born 1992 in Qubine, Kurdistan) studied Culture of the Metropolis at Hafen-City University Hamburg. She then continued her studies in Fine Arts at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. In her artistic practice, Yenirce uses multimedia to explore the representation of wealth as well as cultural, media and military dominance structures. She shows the fine line between glorifying ideology and resistant emancipation. She often combines seemingly contradictory elements such as feminism and war, pop culture and genocide as well as desire, longing and irony. Her video works, installations and performances deal with multilayered aspects and themes such as cultural and media dominance structures. She often creates cinematic, staged works based on found footage that are very politically and critically charged. A central aspect of her work is the deliberate use of sound in her visually powerful work. In 2020, Yenirce was awarded the Karl H. Ditze Prize. In 2021, she received the Federal Prize for Art Students, the 2021 Exhibition and Catalog Prize of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation and the Playground Art Prize. She is also a scholarship holder of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Yenir-ce's works have been shown in selected group exhibitions, including at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (2021/2022), the Kurdish Film Festival Berlin (2020), the Kunstverein Hamburg (2020) and the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg (2019). In fall 2022, the Kunsthaus Hamburg showed her work in her first solo exhibition entitled SO MUCH ENERGY.

Skoglandskap, Norway, 2023, Einar Henriksen, 19:26 min.
Skoglandskap is a meditative landscape film inspired by forests from childhood that have since been cut down. Exploring the impermanence of landscapes, and the relationship of place and memory, while longing for a shift in how people perceive nature.

Einar Henriksen (born 1995) is a self-taught filmmaker based in Trondheim, Norway. He is interested in slow cinema and landscape film. Skoglandskap is his short film debut.

Silence Along the River, Irak, 2021, Sherko Abbas, 7:02 min.
This footage is part of an old archive taken by the filmmaker’s father Abbas Abdulrazaq, a former Kurdish fighter and cameraman. In 1985 he accompanied a group of Peshmarga to document their activity during a mission to attack one of the army’s camps in the north of Iraq. They took the Sirwan river by a small raft to cross the area which was controlled by the Iraqi army. Despite all the risks they have taken, the battle didn’t happen. Consequently, my father filmed them when they were singing a song.

Sherko Abbas (born 1978) is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist. He was born in Iran, where his family lived as refugees. They returned to Iraq when he was two years old. Abbas studied Fine Art in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015. His work explores sonic and visual memory, with a focus on modern memory that relies on archive. Additionally, Abbas is in-terested in the current geopolitical situation in Iraq. His works have been exhibited and his moving image works were screened worldwide. Abbas also works as a curator, organiser, and coordinator of cultural events. He was the operations manager for the project Post-war Culture in Irak (2010) and curated the Clamour project (2016). In collaboration with curator Aneta Szyłak, he researched and coordinated the project In-between Worlds: Kurdish Contemporary Artists. This resulted in a collection of artworks from over 30 Kurdish-Iraqi artists and a book (Imago Mundi collection).