Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival (NEMAF) is held in South Korea from August 19–27. Four artist videos distributed by AV-arkki were selected for the Glocal Propose competition: Eeva-Mari’s Cries etc. (2020, in featured image) by Eeva-Mari Haikala, Liquidity (2020) by Timo Bredenberg, Monitor Man in the Time of Pandemic (2020) by Yassine Khaled, and Atomic (2020) by HNV Collective.
Liquidity and Monitor Man in the Time of Pandemic will be screened on Friday, August 20, and on Sunday, August 22. Eeva-Mari’s Cries etc. and Atomic will be screened on Saturday, August 21, and on Tuesday, August 24.
In Eeva-Mari’s Cries etc., the artist listens to a c-cassette found from her late parents’ belongings. Her mother has recorded various situations of her first year on tape. The video work was shot in a single shot, and she hears the tape in front of the camera for the first time without knowing its contents in advance.
Atomic is a poetic journey, which tells the story of one particular jewel. The jewel was commissioned by the US army in 1945. The ornamental stone is radioactive Trinitite, which was born as a side product of the first nuclear test in New Mexico. In this small object merge total violence, beauty, precious, sublime ja particular materials and human incompleteness.
Liquidity examines the meta-structures and language of economics. It centres around figures of speech and sayings related to the concept of fluidity, which are used to naturalise economic phenomena. The visuality of the work, created with photogrammetry, refers to both the video game Pipe Mania (1989) and J.G. Ballard’s science fiction novel The Drowned World (1962). In Bredenberg’s work, Pipe Mania’s innocent game mechanics transform into metaphors for phenomena hidden within complex systems such as tax evasion and money laundering.
Monitor Man in the Time of Pandemic explores global crisis from the time of COVID-19 to the social instabilities in the Western world. Yassine Khaled’s Monitor Man concept aims to transgress national and physical borders by enabling new kind of interaction across virtual meeting points with six participants from three continents.
Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival, August 19–27 2021, South Korea
More information: NEMAF