Best Documentary Short Films - ikonoTV

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Short Documentaries

Abstract: The Art of Design | Christoph Niemann: Illustration

Abstract: The Art of Design | Christoph Niemann: Illustration

From New Yorker covers to Instagram sketches, illustrator Christoph Niemann plays with abstraction and interactivity and questions authenticity.

Duration : 46m
Maturity Level : all

Abstract: The Art of Design | Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design

Abstract: The Art of Design | Tinker Hatfield: Footwear Design

Tinker Hatfield’s background in architecture and athletics sparked his game-changing shoe designs for Nike, including the iconic Air Jordan series.

Duration : 41m
Maturity Level : all

Abstract: The Art of Design | Bjarke Ingels: Architecture

Abstract: The Art of Design | Bjarke Ingels: Architecture

Architect Bjarke Ingels unites function, fantasy and sustainability in “pragmatic utopian” designs like a clean power plant topped with a ski slope.

Duration : 44m
Maturity Level : all

Abstract: The Art of Design | Paula Scher: Graphic Design

Abstract: The Art of Design | Paula Scher: Graphic Design

Graphic designer Paula Scher paints with words, developing the visual language of iconic brands and institutions around the world.

Duration : 40m
Maturity Level : all

Abstract: The Art of Design | Platon: Photography

Abstract: The Art of Design | Platon: Photography

Platon’s fearless portraits capture the souls of world leaders and ordinary people. A shoot with Gen. Colin Powell provides a window into his process.

Duration : 43m
Maturity Level : all

Abstract: The Art of Design | Ilse Crawford: Interior Design

Abstract: The Art of Design | Ilse Crawford: Interior Design

Interior designer Ilse Crawford creates spaces and objects that engage the senses and promote well-being, from high-end hotels to Ikea furniture.

Duration : 41m
Maturity Level : all

Isaac Julien | Lessons of the Hour

Isaac Julien | Lessons of the Hour

In collaboration with the Edinburgh Art Festival, Isaac Julien, and the Scottish National Galleries, Shifting Vision created a bespoke film which premiered on July 29 in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Following in the footsteps of abolitionist and freedom fighter Frederick Douglass throughout the city of Edinburgh, the film brings to life Isaac Julien’s visionary ten-screen installation ’Lessons of the Hour’ through the insights of the artist.

Duration : 17m
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

Ron Arad - Reverse Again

Ron Arad - Reverse Again

Shifting Vision produced a short film, directed by Giulia Magno, exploring the artistic process behind the creation of celebrated artist, architect, and designer Ron Arad’s first NFT artworks. Shot in the artist’s London home and studio, the film retraces Arad’s long-standing fascination with the iconic Fiat 500 — from the childhood memories of his father’s car to the idea of crushing Fiat 500s into “paintings” (or Pressed Flowers as he affectionately titled them). The film focuses on the evolution of Arad’s practice from physical to digital processes in light of the current discourse around the impact of NFT technology on the art world.

Duration : 9m
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

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

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

Antarctic Traces

Antarctic Traces

Michaela Grill Approaching the mysterious, inaccessible realm via the few traces that are currently available. At the same time, revolving around the desolation and devastation that humans have left in their treatment of it. Michaela Grill devotes herself to these two tasks in Antarctic Traces, a splendid, thoroughly composed study of the most mysterious of all continents, or rather, the supplements of it that are accessible. For one, there is the rough landscape of the coast of South Georgia, a group of islands located off of Antarctica, which Grill examines in what are mainly still frames. For another are the (largely black-and-white) archive images in which the thematic focus of the film, the history of whaling since the late nineteenth century, are historically embedded. And there is also a narrative elaborately woven from numerous literary sources, spoken from off screen and interlaced with subtle sound inserts, that allows this highly abject episode in humanity´s exploitation of nature to become present: the industrial slaughter of seals, sea elephants, and primarily whales until into the 1970s, which took its brutal course in the waters of the south Atlantic. In an alternating rhythm of still images, minimally moving pictures, and individual camera pans, Antarctic Tracess divulges a mosaic-like tableau of a "dead, chilly world": glaciers, skeletons, industrial ruins, and rusted ships bear witness to the uncompromising eagerness for power of the "whaling industry." Presently populating the landscape of "scarred" wasteland are penguins and seals as hangers-on who just won´t die. As a whole, Antarctic Traces creates a disturbing portrait of a deadly peace that humans have caused in a remote area of the earth and seas. Traces of a ruinous freedom, which is profoundly rooted in nothing. (Christian Höller)

Duration : 29m
Maturity Level : all

The Studio

The Studio

Found objects into art: an up-close look around David Cass’ workspaces. Here is Cass’ first concern – that we must care for our resources, that we must recycle and repurpose.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Rising Horizon

Rising Horizon

From the studio, to the gallery. Highlights of a talk between David Cass & Professor David Reay of Edinburgh University, offering two takes on Cass’ exhibition ‘Rising Horizon’: from a creative perspective, and a scientific one. ‘Rising Horizon’ introduces the topic of rising sea levels to Cass’ art practice.

Duration : 11m
Maturity Level : all

Frida Baranek

Frida Baranek

Frida Baranek has a background in Architecture and Industrial Design. Since the beginning of her career, the relationship the artist has established with the materials she uses in her works has been to challenge her resistance to achieve her metamorphosis: to build with and against herself. “Unclassified”, the sculpture approaches nature as a forest of industrial debris with its strength, fragility and uncertainty. It was created in the USA for the exhibition “The Latin American Artists of the 20th Century” at MOMA in NY. The piece is made of industrial waste stainless steel, which supports and interacts with aircraft parts, leftovers from the American military industry. At the time, there was a lot of talk about the excess that existed in the American military industry. The artist asked the US State Department for permission and provided these airplane parts to be used in the work. Frida Baranek, 1961, born in Rio de Janeiro, works and lives between Rio, Brazil and Lisbon, Portugal.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Georgia Kyriakakis

Georgia Kyriakakis

In her work, Georgia seeks to explore situations of strength and fragility, balance, and instability, present in nature, politics, social relations, and the world of work. Such relationships arise from visual poetic approximations with Geography - a wide and comprehensive area of knowledge that animates the artist’s creative impulse and determines the choice and variety of means and materials used in her works. Objects, materials, words, spaces, and the meticulous articulation between the elements of the work are ways of highlighting the relationships between the virtuality of the image and the concreteness of the world. "Gaza Strip" is a set of rows of rounded stones on which a red line is drawn. It can be said that the Gaza Strip is a drawing on stone. But the title, the (military?) arrangement of the stones, the circular shape of the design and the same height at which it is made on the stones, suggest an articulation. It stimulates the mark left by a red liquid (blood?) on the surface of the stone. As the title itself indicates, the work refers to the violence and the historic war waged between Palestinians and Israelis in this small region of the Middle East. Just like the memory of historical facts and the conflict itself, the red line drawn on the stone, exposed to the weather and the passage of time, gradually fades, becomes almost imperceptible, but never completely disappears. Periodically it reappears, just like the conflict that seems to never end... It reappears strong and forcefully to remind us above all that the marks of violence are always indelible. Geórgia Kyriakakis,1961, born in Ilheús, lives and works in São Paulo.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Hugo França

Hugo França

Hugo França is a self-taught artist designer, who speaks about his furniture-sculptures coming from the forest waste. He has been the first who encouraged the creation of the Usina de Arte Art project and to have organized creative and artistic workshops and environmental education with the neighboring community. Hugo França’s work is to transform trunks, roots and parts of trees that are usually rejected. With this raw material, he draws directly on the wood following the paths that were created by nature. In production, he reframes the use of the chainsaw by carving trunks and roots and giving the works a sustainable and sculptural content. It is very represented at Usina by numerous Mobiliarios 2016-2019, a series of around 30 benches in jackfruit that one can easily find around which are scattered throughout the park. Arvore geometrizada, 2016, is a different sculpture he created and installed in one of the little lakes representing the structure of a tree. Hugo França, 1954, born in Porto Algre, works and lives between São Paulo and Trancoso.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Iole de Freitas

Iole de Freitas

Iole de Freitas immediately absorbs the transformative urgency of the environment to which she reacts in her films, Photographs, performances, and sculptures. For this ex-dancer (during 25 years), all her creations are about movement, enlarging the area of the body, speaking of light and shadow, lightness and weight. “O Peso de Cada Um”, 2015 (The weight of each one): sculpture in stainless-steel sheet, was part of the MAM exhibition in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. Despite the specificities of the material, however, some sculptures have been suspended in the air (like the one which is presented today on the ground at Usina de Arte), evolving in space like an imponderable aerial dance, opposing the idea of lightness and movement to their original weight with a tenuous line between the gestural and the geometric, or between expressiveness and formal precision. Between the cloudy mirroring on one side of the plate and the concrete opacity on the other, the very materiality of this steel sheet is outlined as a simultaneously rigid and fluid body, which at times absorbs and reflects the exterior, at times asserts itself as a radical obstacle to the eye. The work of Iole de Freitas implies, at the same time, line and volume, body and membrane, tension and distension, wall, and air. Her sculptures seem to want to constantly go beyond their perimeter, go further, leave their borders, and evolve towards other spaces, dialoguing with the architecture and the landscape. Today at the Usina Iole also loves the way her sculpture dialogue with the other of the collection. Iole de Freitas (1945) born in Belo Horizonte, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Jose Spaniol

Jose Spaniol

Jose Spaniol uses everyday objects, and establishes an exchange between utilitarian and poetic functions. Since the 1990s, he has explored the relationship between his works with architecture and exhibition spaces. "Tiummmmtichamm", 2018, is a flat sculpture, built in marquetry of granite and marble. On its surface we see, on the one hand, a thin layer of water flowing over the stone, on the other hand, the representations of this movement are translated by the contrast between the white of the marble and the black of the granite. As in a mirror, the work creates a bridge between real and virtual space, bringing these two dimensions together. Its flatness contradicts the idea of volume linked to sculpture, which is why the whole aesthetic experience linked to the work takes place while the observer wanders around or even above the object, starting from the image of water movement and sound. José Spaniol 1960, born in São Luiz Gonzaga, RS, works and lives in São Paulo

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all

Juliana Notari

Juliana Notari

In her visual and theoretical research, Juliana Notari has created a body of works that face their singularities, moving between biography, the confessional, catharsis, or relational practices. With a multidisciplinary approach, she works with the most diverse languages: performance, installation, intervention, video, photography, drawing, and object. For years, the artist has been conducting research on gender and sexism. Questions regarding the presence of the female body as opposed to a society that prides itself on virility and phallocentrism have always been part of his poetics. However, in addition to issues related to the feminine and feminism, her work also encompasses issues related to certain important themes: birth and death, sexuality, the relationship between fiction and confession, trauma, relationships of complicity/testimony and encounters between animality and humanity. In his work, these themes are always crossed by the question of sexuality and death. “Diva”, 2020. vulva wound Intervention in the landscape, Reinforced concrete, resin, and pigment. It is a “prospecting-hole-sculpture” embedded in a land devastated by sugarcane monoculture and its social traumas. A deep abscess, the work reveals the historical violence on female bodies that continue to be daily injured in many – and, depending on their color or gender, in different and asymmetrical ways – just like Gaya’s body, our Mother Earth. In addition to these bodies, Diva brings to light the immeasurable colonial traumas that, against invisibility, continue to fight for reparation. While wounded, the Diva herself continues to re-enact – since she turns over open wounds – the racial inequalities on which Brazil is based. Juliana Notari,1975, born in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil where she lives and works.

Duration : 4m
Maturity Level : all