TURNING THE INSIDE OUT
THE 60TH ROBERT FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR
JUNE 14 – 20, 2014, COLGATE UNIVERSITY, HAMILTON, NY
PROGRAMMER: Gabriela Monroy & Caspar Stracke
The Flaherty’s 60th Anniversary Seminar probes the essence and frontiers of the form that inspired its beginnings: the documentary. Turning the Inside Out examines the state of documentary as it travels between the art gallery, the cinema, and the interactive screen. In an era of colliding genres and mediums, what holds documentary together from the inside out? What can a radical, Godardian, focus on the form of documentary reveal about the politics, poetics, and ethics of making media today?To answer these questions, we turn to a unique group of documentary artists—some of whom produce new aesthetic idioms for documentary beyond the black box, and others who move seamlessly between media without changing their vocabulary. Together they ask: which genre (essay film, autobiography, docufiction) and exhibition form (gallery installation, web-based platform) best supports the expression of an idea? That is, how can form optimize documentary’s potential to connect us to unfamiliar places, objects, or situations? In confronting the effectiveness of form, these works amplify new and unexpected tensions: between the need to participate and the desire to withdraw, between aesthetic expression and direct action, between staying inside or going out.
2014 Seminar Programmers - Gabriela Monroy & Caspar Stracke
Caspar Stracke is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and curator from Germany, living and working in New York City and Helsinki. His work deals with architecture, urbanism, media archeology and the social aspects of cinema. Stracke’s films, videos and installation works have been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions, retrospectives and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Stracke’s work has been shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in New York City, the Yerba Buena Art Center in San Francisco; the Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France and the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, among others.He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Media Art fellowship and currently finalizes a film project on various notions of time reversal in philosophy, science and cultural theory. He is an active member of THE THING, a NY-based nexus for contemporary art and net culture. Since 2012 Caspar Stracke is a professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image at KUVA Art Academy Helsinki. Caspar Stracke is represented by Video Data Bank, Chicago and Lightcone, Paris.
Gabriela Monroy is a Mexican video artist and video curator living and working between Helsinki and New York. In 2001 she received a Masters in Film and Video from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. The same year she was awarded Mexico’s National Foundation for Culture and Arts Fellowship for Young Emerging Artists. Her video installation work was selected as part of the 10th National Biennial of Photography of Mexico. In 2009 she was selected as one of The MacDowell Colony’s National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipients. In 2011 she was awarded the NYFA/ Deutsche Bank America’s Foundation Fellowship in Digital and Electronic Arts. She had been invited as juror for Transitio - International Festival for Electronic Arts and Video. She has participated in exhibitions in Mexico, Europe, Korea and the US, and her work is part of the INBA collection, Mexico’s National Institute for Fine Arts.Since 2002, she has been working in collaboration with the German video artist Caspar Stracke under the name MOSTRA. In 2004 they were awarded a NYSCA Film and Media Production Grant for an Interactive video installation for cinema space and this year they received an EMARE residency at FACT (Liverpool).Since 2005, Gabriela and Caspar are the directors of video_dumbo, an annual festival/exhibition of international contemporary moving image art in New York. Video_dumbo has been presented at Loop (Barcelona), Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico), Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn), MMX (Berlin), Space Bandee (Busan) and The Banff Centre, among others. This year video_dumbo presented 106 artists from 29 different countries at Eyebeam, Art + Technology Center in New York.