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Contemporary Art

What makes us Human? by Nikita Kravtsov

What makes us Human? by Nikita Kravtsov

Ukrainian artist Nikita Kravtsov is sharing his statement on "What makes us human" in times of war. With his drawing practice, we meditate with him and reflect on the actual dramatic situation in his homeland. This original drawing is for "The War of the Mushrooms", a book launching in English and very soon in German. Together with writer Andrei Kurkov, they were inspired by the eponymous folk tale, a popular classic in Slavic cultures. They both reimagine the tale with scenes from Russia’s current war on Ukraine. The revenue from the book’s sale will be sent to support the defense of Ukraine.

Duration : 15m
Maturity Level : all

Angela Lyn, On the Edge of Time by Michael Schindhelm

Angela Lyn, On the Edge of Time by Michael Schindhelm

Film director Michael Schindhelm features the work and life of Angela Lyn, a Swiss artist of Anglo-Chinese origin, in the advent of her major exhibition held at Villa Arconati-FAR, a baroque palazzo situated on the outskirts of Milan. The artist’s journey weaving past and present, east and west, art and life - unfolds within the time-worn rooms focussing on what connects rather than what separates us as human beings. Camera and editing Yawen Yeo. Post-production Stefano Cravero. Text and voice Angela Lyn.

Duration : 15m
Maturity Level : all

What makes us Human? by Vadim Zakharov

What makes us Human? by Vadim Zakharov

In “BAFF BAFF! What Are The Politicians Talking About”, Vadim Zakharov reads out loud more than 1000 non-verbal words, most of which have been found in the magazines “Mickey Mouse” (German editions) and also taken from the books “Tintin The Mysterious Star” and “Asterix & Obelix The Laurels of Caesar”. The words collected in the non-verbal vocabulary have no meaning, but only phonetically reflect certain events: someone has fainted (BLIEP!), a glass has broken (CRACK! CLIRR!), a helicopter has crashed into a cupola (KAROMMS!), a museum has collapsed (CRACK! THUNDER! CRIME!). The Reader (Vadim Zakharov), wearing a white shirt and a tie, recites these words seriously and forcefully. The image of a politician is created, a public figure who professionally and convincingly is ready to say something on any occasion. At the same time, we see that these are just empty words - bubbles that float away as soon as they reach our ears. The film highlights the absurdity of what we see and hear every day on television and the internet. At the same time, reading non-verbal words can be perceived as reading poetry… The original Exhibition version is 65 min long.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

JARDIM DO ÉDEN by Joana Vasconcelos

JARDIM DO ÉDEN by Joana Vasconcelos

Discover once more the magic of Joana Vasconcelos’ very special Garden of Eden. The glowing field of flowers is made from compact fluorescent light bulbs, plastic flowers, synchronous micro-motors, transparent polychrome acrylic discs, and a low-tech electric system. The artificial flowers emerge from cylinders that are coated in black Lycra. Inside the black Lycra cylinders, there are lights, motors, and rotating discs that activate the lights and give them a similar appearance to the glowing and flickering displays of optical fiber lighting.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Vadim Zakharov’s concept

Vadim Zakharov’s concept

Introduction by Vadim Zakharov on the project "What I do not understand in contemporary art today"

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Land of the Jaguar

Land of the Jaguar

A short movie by Oto Hudec portrays a simple performative painting in hills above the Jaguar-Land Rover factory in Nitra, Slovakia. Slovakia is the biggest producer of cars per capita. However, although creating jobs, the negative side of the car industry is its high emissions, taking into account produced vehicles, especially SUVs. The Jaguar Land Rover factory in NItra is built on fertile soil close to a pittoresque forest of Zobor mountain. In a video, a painter is covering the image of the factory with layers of paint, until there are no traces of civilization- the urbanisation is turned back to forests and grassland- as this landscape might look thousands of years ago.

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

INTERACTIONS

INTERACTIONS

When Cinema Looks to Nature. ART for The World continues its commitment to the global effort to increase awareness of the effects of Climate Change and the Environment by producing twelve International Filmmakers who create connections between Humans and Animals through Biodiversity, Climate Change, Environment, and Water Risks. Stay tuned;-)

Duration : 1m
Maturity Level : all

Bruna and Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz

Bruna and Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz

Rooted in a cultural philanthropic tradition, the Pessôa de Queiroz family has been supporting and leading the Usina de Arte project since 2015, transforming a former sugar cane factory into an Anthropocene art-botanical park, near Recife in the northeastern Brazilian region of Pernambuco. Proud of the thirty or so works already produced, Bruna Pessôa de Queiroz, its president tells us about this ambitious project.

Duration : 9m
Maturity Level : all

Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz, Founder

Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz, Founder

Rooted in a cultural philanthropic tradition, the Pessôa de Queiroz family has been supporting and leading the Usina de Arte project since 2015, transforming a former sugar cane factory into an Anthropocene art-botanical park, near Recife in the northeastern Brazilian region of Pernambuco. Proud of the thirty or so works already produced, Ricardo Pessôa de Queiroz, the founder of the project, tells us about it.

Duration : 6m
Maturity Level : all

Marc Pottier, curator

Marc Pottier, curator

Marc Pottier, a French curator based in Brasil have been appointed in 2021 as the new curator of Usina de Arte. He told us about the project and its future, the importance of creating site-specific works according to the local History, including exchanges with the local community, and how to open it to an international scale. Marc has these words: "To be part of the Usina de Arte adventure is, above all, to understand the importance of a project designed for the community of Santa Terezinha, a cultural project that must integrate the memory of the place and the history of this historical part of Brazil. Here, bridges must be created between the public and the art world, as education is a fundamental part of the project. With more than 40 works installed, those involved are responsible for making the Usina a reference in art in the public space. And the idea of ​​inviting foreign artists aims, in addition to provoking a fruitful dialogue with national artists, to present an exciting and inspiring region to be transposed into their works. We are just at the beginning of something very promising. The first steps already speak for us!"

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Artur Lescher

Artur Lescher

“Your Eyes”, 2012, 3 meter high, is part of the Elipse series (started in 2000) showing how a certain geometric shape that links the body issue and the eye, in particular, is capable of acting on the environment in which it is inserted. These ellipses have a shiny, reflective surface that captured and reflected the surrounding landscape, creating a hole and cut like a passage in the landscape. This work establishes a dynamic relationship with the place, sometimes borrowing images from the surrounding landscape, sometimes reflecting unexpected views. The presence of the audience completes the work, as the shapes that are produced by the geometric form are continually redrawn by the viewer and their visual perception of the work. The shape is also how our eye sees the world, a cone of vision, the ellipse is for Arthur the place where reality meets fiction. Artur Lescher stands out in the current panorama of Brazilian contemporary art for his three-dimensional works. For over thirty years, he has been presenting the result of research on the articulation between matter, form, and thought. These are works that go beyond the character of sculpture and cross the languages ​​of the installation and the object, to modify the understanding of these and the space in which they are inserted. Lescher suggests narratives, sometimes contradictory or provocative, that make room for myth and imagination. Born in 1962 in São Paulo where he lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Bene Fonteles

Bene Fonteles

Activist, plastic artist, writer, art curator, poet, shaman, and Brazilian composer, Bene Fonteles also produces works linked to mail art and research into new artistic expressions. Ecological militancy is a striking feature in his work, being the creator of the "Artist Movement for Nature", which since 1986 promotes ecological awareness and environmental education through art. Much of his work dialogues with the aesthetics and poetics of indigenous cultures. Tempo Templo’, 2018. is a round installation with six 19th-century English iron columns topped with stones found on the property. They themselves support iron sculptures symbols of African culture, seven baobabs, and various medicinal and aromatic plants... the work must be regularly activated by performances involving the neighbors of the Usina and visitors. It is a tribute to the African people who were humiliated and enslaved in the sugar cane mills during colonization. Now the symbols of their Orixás triumph in the capital-stones over the English iron columns of a country that both enslaved and “colonized” cultures. They triumph like samba and other arts not only in the so-called Brazilian popular culture, through the voice of its Afro-descendants and the mestizo people from Brazil. Bené Fonteles, 1953, Born in Bragança/ Pará, lives and works in the country in Minas Gerais.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Carlos Vergara

Carlos Vergara

‘Natureza como Matéria’ 2013, three sculptures in Corten steel. (2,50m, 1,50x1,50 each), are born from the interest that Vergara has in nature; in the sculptures in cut steel, the passage that this material undergoes over time conveys the idea of ​​a living and pulsating organism to the sculpture. All sculptures have a mutability character, as they share a continuous transformation. Like nature, steel is an index of time. They are like the organic and, symbolically, almost vegetal form of the sculptures. They are shadows or projections of a place that can be directly associated with the transitory instance of nature itself. Carlos Vergara, 1941, born in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, lives, and works in Rio de Janeiro) engraver, photographer and painter, known as one of the main representatives of the New Figuration artistic movement in Brazil.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Claudia Jaguaribe

Claudia Jaguaribe

Claudia Jaguaribe is a photographer who develops work focused on the issue of urban landscape, the environment, and especially issues on the representation of the real as a conceptual record, mixing reality and subjectivity. The materiality of her works questions the very nature of photography. It expands the traditional formats of photography, transforms images into photo-sculptures, and integrates and uses video and the internet in her installations. Her work presented is a creation of the public benches (2022), each one in tiles of a different model using images of references from the culture of Pernambuco. Different sizes. “Since I was a child, I have lived with tiles as a strong expression of art. In my house there was a wall right at the entrance with modernist tiles and every time I traveled to the Northeast, I visited relatives’ houses, churches, and squares where I saw all kinds of tiles. It always fascinated me to see symbols, drawings, and stories in this format. Today contemporary photography includes several forms of printing, among them on the tile. In this project, I continue this visual research with tiles, proposing dialogues between contemporary and a traditional support. To dialogue with Usina de Arte, I proposed the project of a set of tile benches, in an appropriation of the traditional Portuguese tile art that so influenced Brazilian art from the colonial period, through the baroque to the contemporary. The work is composed of a body of images that range from references to local popular art to historical images, maps, and photographs, images of the sugarcane culture, composing a visual narrative of the history of the Usina region and the city of Recife.” CJ Claudia Jaguaribe, 1955, born in Rio de Janeiro, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Denise Milan

Denise Milan

Banquete da Terra, 2021, is like a telluric feast, resulting from millions of years of Earth formation and invites us to contemplate our origins. Composed of of Brazilian stones, table, and mirrors… into a container. Stones are in different stages of transformation, which the artist collected and cooked, the banquet emerges, a metaphor for an art and its processes, a representation of nature in its becoming. In the installation, set up around a table – a space for everyday meals and affective dynamics – dishes made from “earthly” ingredients are served, such as crystal, pyrite, ammonite, gold, silver and bronze, presented in different textures. . “It is a planetary table, which evokes the Earth. It is a space-time open to conviviality, where dialogue is still possible, and inspired by the mysteries and knowledge of nature”. Denise Milan, 1954, born in São Paulo where she lives and works, uses different media, and collaborates with specialists in science and technology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and music.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Flavio Cerqueira

Flavio Cerqueira

Cerqueira uniquely explores personal, historical, and sometimes fictional narratives to problematize issues of class, identity, race, and gender. The presence of everyday objects creates tension with the off-scale bronze human figures to blur the boundaries between the sculpture, the architectural space, and the viewer. "Tinha Que Acontecer" (Cabeça de Bandeirante), a 2016 sculpture in bronze weighing 800 kilos, 25 meters in diameter. Flavio decided to turn the founders of São Paulo into anti-heroes. Here he “decapitated” the pioneers from the body of history and one of the heads of São Paulo fell. “It is necessary to analyze the story and tell it again”, observes the sculptor. “Despite the monuments that exist in the city in honor of the pioneers, they were barbarians. They exterminated, enslaved the Indians, and annihilated the quilombos.” Born in 1983 in São Paulo where he lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

The Utopians

The Utopians

Filmmakers Frederick Bernas and Nico Muñoz follow the artist and scientist Joaquín Fargas as he embarks on a quest to reveal the environmental impact of extracting lithium, a key component of electric cars – which aren’t necessarily as sustainable as some would like you to believe. Fargas has created the “Rabdomante” robot, a solar caterpillar that collects condensation in arid deserts. Its name is derived from “rhabdomancy,” a supposedly divine ability to discover hidden water sources or minerals; but how many thousands of these machines would be needed to produce a real change? It seems absurd to think about – but doing nothing at all would be even worse.

Duration : 0s
Maturity Level : all

Panorama

Panorama

Panorama is the first chapter of a trilogy on the city created by Gianluca Abbate. The video is a review of a polis that stretches away over an infinite global space with no more uninhabited places or frontiers where we can take refuge. In this landscape, we cannot see any way of readmission for those who have once been excluded, and this recalls imaginary worlds in search of a balance.

Duration : 7m
Maturity Level : all

Like Aliens

Like Aliens

Artist Joaquin Fargas creates little worlds from the dump and makes us rethink our role in the universe. Fargas creates natural ecosystems isolated inside sealed containers that only allow the external influence of heat and light. These systems, like our planet, depend on light as a source of energy for the development and continued existence of the life cycles that take place inside of them. These orbs represent our planet on a miniature scale, highlighting its fragility and the care its inhabitants should be taking.create little worlds from the dump and makes us rethinking our role in the universe. Film by Nico Muñoz

Duration : 5m
Maturity Level : all

No Water

No Water

During spring 2022, a year of drought, Italian Prealps, and kilometers of rivers without water, artist Pietro Gardoni decided to walk inside to wave a blue flag. Soundtrack by Luca Formentini Drone shooting by Ettore Zorzini

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Goldilocks

Goldilocks

When temperatures across Ontario dropped to record breaking lows and Niagara Falls partially froze, the filmmaker Su Rynard was able to capture the three states of water in the singular image of the falls. This work wants to be a remainder of the extraordinarily unique set of circumstances required to create a climate equilibrium supportive of life.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

The Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the Earth

This video by Virginia Zanetti is a part of an ongoing series of shot and video in several parts of the world. Action transforms perspective: does a human being along with others follow historical cycles? Or do we support the Earth, changing the fate of history? “The Pillars of the Earth” explores the concepts of rebirth and revolution through a reversal of our vision. Collective action can present a new view of the possibilities for human emancipation. We should aim towards reversing the point of view, sharing our experiences with people from different areas of the world, creating a community in search of newly found ethics or spirituality, and reaching tops from which you may “see” better. We talk, exchange ideas and spontaneously create a growing community of people.

Duration : 2m
Maturity Level : all

Purple Haze

Purple Haze

The scenarios in Paul Rosero Contreras’ Purple Haze come from a dystopian future. A future in which the ocean has become acid due to carbon dioxide contamination of the atmosphere, thus preventing the normal growth of certain sessile marine organisms. The artist, together with biologist colleagues, study some species that inhabit the area of the volcano Roca Redonda, in the Galapagos, where the volcano activity naturally acidifies the water.

Duration : 11m
Maturity Level : all

Floodtide

Floodtide

Ian Gibbins wonders how does a city cope, what does it look like, after years of drought, rising sea levels, and relentless storms? To create this vision of a city responding to climate change, nearly every scene has been composited from more than 500 individual sequences originally recorded at various locations around Australia. As a result, almost none of these scenes actually exists. Although these scenes might be imaginary, as the world careers into a now unavoidable climate emergency, the reality is not far off...

Duration : 8m
Maturity Level : all