Hold Me TV: 01+02
Preview on Sunday Open 13.03.22
Opening: 17.03.22, 5pm
Exhibition: 17.03. – 20.03.22, 5 – 10pm
Scherben, Leipziger Str. 61, 10117 Berlin
Hold Me TV is a 4 day screening program featuring films and videos by 10 artists who work in a variety of ways with the embodied camera. In these works, the camera is an integral (body) part of the worlds the artists build – humorous, sensorial, uncanny, fleshy, kinetic, intimate, public, high stakes.
This screening series is a collective curatorial effort by writer and curator June Drevet, visual artist Sunny Pfalzer, and choreographer and artist Melanie Jame Wolf. They invite visitors to watch films together while thinking about the agency and possibility of bodies in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, and visual art. And to question what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those distinct formal systems intersect. Together the works produce a dynamic conversation with one another and about a cinematic sensuality through the formal, poetic, and political possibilities of the embodied camera.
The artists featured in the program are Jamie Crewe, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi , Malina Heinemann & Joseph Kadow, Barbara Kapusta, Sunny Pfalzer, Lynne Sachs, Stefanie Schwarzwimmer, Anna Spanlang, and Melanie Jame Wolf. The Display is developed by Luna Ghisetti.
Last Winter, a research grant made it possible to me to capture a research idea I loosely had in mind already since a few years. Now I spend a closer look to the body-and-lense-relation and how it is differently worked on in performative arts and visual arts. I invited the feminist performer, choreographer and video artist Melanie Jame Wolf and Sunny Pfalzer to organize a screening series out of this research, which takes place for 4 days from March 17th to March 20th in Berlin. The building that houses the gallery is situated in Berlin’s Mitte district, it was part of the major urban development project of Leipziger Straße, once designed as a socialist utopia.
Our program is looking at the idea of the ’embodied camera’. A concept developed by feminist film scholar Cybelle McFadden in response to film directors like Chantal Ackerman and Agnes Varda inserting/envisioning themselves within their cinematic frame. We are interested in questions around how bodies (‘the body’) are afforded – and afford themselves – different agencies and possibilities in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, the visual arts. We are curious about authorship and what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those 3 distinct formal systems intersect with the embodied camera: How do artists stage and inscribe their (in)visible bodies for the camera? What are the political and poetic implications of this? When is the camera an independent actor? When is the camera ‘choreographic’? How does the camera operate interactively with the body in the methodologies of visual artists? How do choreographic and contemporary performance methods instruct how one stages their own body on camera? What happens to affect on screen and through the lens? What is cinematic sensuality?
The three of us watched A Month of Single Frames before, but it came again into our minds during our research. Besides the images, this work is a great and careful work of editing. But what interested us most, is that this movie tells a story about the idea of handing over artistic material to another artist, to you.
We would love to screen your movie once in these for days. I would be more than happy, if you let me know how this teaser, become long letter, sounds to you / if you can imagine to contribute your movie for a screening.
My best regards from Marseille –
bien à vous,
June Drevet