Sara Pathirane’s Holding Clouds (2018), Azar Saiyar’s Monument of Distance (2018), and Timo Wright’s Ex Nihilo (2018) are screened at Les Rencontres Internationales, held in Paris from March 5–10.
Sara Pathirane’s Holding Clouds will be screened on Tuesday, March 5, at 21:00 in Forum des Images. The short film is included in the screening “Mythologies contemporaines“.
Holding Clouds depicts a choreography on Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain in China. The mount Huang is famous from the old Chinese shan shui – mountain-water ink paintings. Still now the landscape gathers people to witness it. The view itself is often covered in clouds, only a peak of a mountain hovering in the sight. Still a thousand photos are taken there every day. People pose for photos in front of the landscape. The rythm of the visitors’ gestures, the reaching out, pointing, holding the air and touching the mountains formulates a choreography for the mountain. Chilean composer Fernando Munizaga’s piece Mi última palabra china (My last Chinese word) binds the poses into a broken language, an attempt to get hold of tones and diftongs hidden in the grayscale of the moving clouds. The music is based on discoveries Munizaga made in the field of phonetic analysis of Mandarin language. There is a constant movement, with rather simple materials and gestures.
Sara Pathirane’s work deals with the tradition of landscape painting and the problematics of taking a picture. As shooting locations for her videos she uses nature areas known from movies and paintings, shifting between the everyday and the fiction. She works with video, painting and live-installations. Pathirane lives and works in Helsinki. She has studied in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and Accademia Albertina in Torino. Her works have been shown for example at Taiga-Space, Saint-Petersburg (2016), Colombo Art Biennale (2016) and Kiasma (2010, 2013).
Timo Wright’s Ex Nihilo will be screened on Wednesday, March 6, at 14:00 in Le Carreau du Temple, as a part of the screening “Après-monde“.
Timo Wright: Ex Nihilo (2018)
Ex Nihilo is an experimental short documentary about life, death and our attempts to control them. It tells the stories of an advanced humanoid robot, a cryonics facility, where brains of deceased are held and of a seed vault, where crop seed from around the world are kept frozen.
Timo Wright is a photographer and media artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Wright has graduated with MA degree from the Aalto University School of Art and Design in Helsinki in 2012. He has participated in domestic and international exhibitions since the early 2000s including Gallery Forum Box in Helsinki (2014), Helsinki Art Museum’s Kluuvi Gallery (2013), Photographic Gallery Hippolyte (2008) as well as festivals such as Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo and Stuttgarter Filmwinter in Germany (2014).
Azar Saiyar’s Monument of Distance will be screened on Sunday, March 10, at 14:00, in the Auditorium du Louvre. The short film is included in the screening “Image-temps“.
Azar Saiyar: Monument of Distance (2018)
In Monument of Distance, Googoosh, a popular and loved iranian-azerbaijani singer, performs a version of the song Ayrılıq – Separation. The performance is from 1970s television show and it has been copied several times from one videotape to another. Ayrılıq could be a love song but it is told that composer Ali Salimi (who had migrated from Soviet Azerbaijan to Iran and left behind his home and loved ones) wanted to make music about his sense of longing.
Azar Saiyar is a Helsinki-based filmmaker and visual artist. She often uses archive materials and plays with images and words of collective memory to look towards ways of looking, remembering and storytelling. Her films have been screened at international film and media art festivals, galleries, exhibitions, museums and broadcast on television.
Les rencontres internationales, March 5–10 2019, Paris
More information: Les rencontres internationales