PIXELS OF REALITY: What do you Know, What do You See? 
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PROGRAM:__________________________________ (18th May - 18th June 2006)
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ARTISTS PRESENTATIONS, LECTURES & DISCUSSIONS:


 
> Saturday, May 20  - 2pm


	Rainer Ganahl (artist Talk)
	Jon Kessler (artist Talk)

	(Break)

	Steve Rushton: Re-enactment and Substituted bodies (Lecture)

	(Break)

	REBOND POUR LA COMMUNE: Debate around the questions that raise from 
	the film "La Commune (Paris 1871)" by British Film Director Peter Watkins
	

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> Sunday, May 21  - 2pm 

	Tjebbe van Tijen: ART ACTION ACADEMIA 1960-2006: social and technical 
	context of collective creativity (Lecture)

	Sagi Groner (artist Talk)

	(Break)
		   
	Thomas Elsaesser: The future of "art" and "work" in the age of vision 
	                   machines
	Wael Shawky (artist Talk)
	
	
	(Break)

	Open discussion: Present artists and participants
	Moderator Noa Roei
	
	
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FILM SCREENINGS & LECTURE:


> Sunday, May 28   3pm 

	William Kentridge: Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory 
	(1994 animation, 6 min, film)

	Zelimir Zilnik: Kenedi, goes back home (2003, 74 min, film)
      				Kenedi, Lost and Found (2005, 26 min, video)

*The program is subject to change __________________________________
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ARTISTS AND PARTICIPANTS Ð SHORT BIOS:

Thomas Elsaesser is a professor at the University of Amsterdam, and 
Chair of the Department of Film and Television Studies (1991-2001), 
now Research Professor, Department of Media and Culture, and responsible 
for a PhD Programme ÔCinema EuropeÕ, offered in conjunction the Amsterdam 
School of Cultural Analysis, of which he is a Founding and Executive 
Board Member. He is also General Editor of the series Film Culture in 
Transition, published by Amsterdam University Press. His essays on film 
theory, film genre, film hisÂtory and television have appeared in well 
over two hundred collections and anthologies, with essays translated 
into in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, 
Polish, Serbian, Slovenian, Czech, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He 
lecÂtures widely in the USA, Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain, Denmark, 
Norway, France, Austria and the Far East. 

Rainer Ganahl is an artist based in New York City whose work addresses 
language, learning systems, media and politics. After early forays into 
video animation work, Ganahl became involved in the forms and languages 
of computerized spaces and databases. His critical approach to post-colonial 
theory led Ganahl to create a set of works beginning in 1994 which turned 
the laborious process of learning an ÒexoticÓ language into an art project. 
In the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 1999, he presented his 
most recent works in conjunction with five other individual artists and 
teams. Most recently, Ganahl has been working again in cyber space. 
Thus, Das Unbehagen in …sterreich (The Discontent in Austria) has been 
available since the year 2000 as an online forum of discussions where 
changes in the culture and powerful new phenomena such as the resurgence 
of racism can be debated. He has recently exhibited his most comprehensive 
solo-exhibition at Wallach Gallery (Columbia University).


Sagi Groner is an artist based in Amsterdam who has exhibited in the 
various art institutions internationally. Control in society has been 
for Groner a subject of almost obsessive pursuit, both in observing and 
figuring out the more hidden corners of how it works and inventing forms 
that manifest the yearning to break free from it. These explorations 
manifest sometimes in poetic images and sometimes in rather noisy sound 
installations, often involving piracy of one kind or the other (pirate 
radio, plunder-phonic projects, sound pollution). The observation of 
social control is on a broad spectrum ranging from political and power 
structures to the very personal "pains" of the individual trapped within 
them. A special interest in technology and its relation to these "pains" 
is also a recurring "theme" both in the content and in the usually 
complex technical systems constructed to manifest these ideas.
 

William Kentridge is an artist, theatre and filmmaker. In 1976 he 
graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with majors in Politics 
and African Studies. From 1976 to 1978 he was a student at the Johannesburg 
Art Foundation, where he taught etching for two years thereafter. 
During 1981 and 1982 he studied mime and theatre at the ƒcole Jacques Lecoq 
in Paris. Kentridge has worked extensively in theatre as an actor, designer, 
and director, and was a founding member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company. 
In 1989 he created his first animated film in the Soho Eckstein, Felix 
Teitlebaum series, titled "Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City After Paris". 
In 1992 he staged his first theatre project in conjunction with Handspring 
Puppet Company, "Woyzeck on the Highveld".


Jon Kessler is an artist known for kinetic mixed-media and found-object 
sculpture, installation, and as an art educator. Since 1983, he has exhibited 
widely in galleries and museums through the United States, Europe and Japan. 
A retrospective of his work ÓJon KesslerÕs AsiaÓ was mounted at the Kestner-
Gesselshaft in Hannover, Germany in 1994 and traveled to Graz, Austria. He 
is the recipient of a Guggenheim grant, the St Gaudens Sculpture award, and 
several National Endowment of the Arts grants. His works are in many public 
collections including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American 
Art and MOCA. He is a Professor in the Visual Arts Division of Columbia 
UniversityÕs School of the Arts. For his solo exhibition, ÒGlobal Village 
IdiotÓ at Deitch Projects in 2004 he began a new series of video sculptures 
which led to his first New York museum exhibition, ÒThe Palace at 4 AMÓ, at 
PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in 2005/2006. This show will be opening at the 
Phoenix Kulturstiftung / Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg in June.


Stefan Majakowski is a filmmaker and a composer, director of The Shadow 
Festival in Amsterdam. The Shadow Festival, founded in 2000, screens 
documentary films as an independent fringe or ÔoffÕ festival during the 
annual International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). The Shadow 
Festival brings unusual documentaries that cause questions to arise, rather 
than films on relevant issues or politically correct subjects. The 
filmmakerÕs signature is spotlighted, whether it be in the form, way of 
telling, or in the curious relationship a cineaste has to his or her subject. 
PSWAR invited Majakowski to select and present films in a way that is reversed 
from his usual practice: he is asked to present art films that have documentary 
elements, rather than documentaries with artistic characteristics. Through 
selected pieces (by Watkins, Godard, Resnais, Farocki, van Alphen, Marker, 
Karlin, Jansco, Franju, and Decostere), Majakovski will put allegory in 
opposition to realism, in order to show how Òthe cinema exploits the Modernist 
ingredient of the elsewhere to accentuate change and a future epoch. Editing 
that result in hiatus, undefined identities, the inability to plot history, 
are some of the techniques that lead to the allegoricalÓ.

REBOND POUR LA COMMUNE is an association for the promotion and distribution 
of the film " La Commune (Paris 1871)" by British film director Peter Watkins. 
It sets itself the objective to develop communal experience by creating places 
and spaces where discussions proposing thought, reflection, and organization 
against the abuse of power by the dominant mass media can take place. It aims 
to initiate, propose and organize collective projects and debates around the 
questions, which " La Commune (Paris 1871)" raises for the viewer. 
http://www.lerebond.org/english.htm

Noa Roei received her MA Cultural Analysis (2003-2005) from the University of 
Amsterdam. In 1999-2002 she was an undergraduate student in Art History and 
Psychology at the Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, Israel. She is currently 
working on a PhD research project provisionally entitled Politics on Display. 
Focusing on contemporary Israel, this project examines how artists, exhibitions 
and art objects face the challenges that arise from their interaction with 
national politics, and how the concepts of voice, framing, performativity, 
and commitment can work as tools for the mobilization of artÕs critical 
potential.

Steve Rushton is a writer, editor and filmmaker based in London and Rotterdam. 
Recent publications include: Experience, Memory, Re-enactment (2005); The 
Milgram Re-enactment - Essays on Rod Dickinson's Re-enactment of Stanley Milgram's 
Obedience to Authority Experiment (2003); Hurts So Good (2003). As part of the 
artistÕs group everything Editorial he initiated and co-edited everything 
Magazine (1992-2002). His films include: The Milgram Re-enactment (with Rod 
Dickinson, 2002); The Blue Studio (2002); Kaplan (2002); The Circles (2001). 
Steve Rushton was a guest lecturer at the Piet Zwart Institute for the lecture 
series Experience, Memory, Re-enactment in 2004.


Wael Shawky is a video artist based in Egypt. He completed his BFA at The 
University of Alexandria, followed by an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. 
He is a winner of numerous national and international grants and awards. 
Shawky has participated in workshops and projects in Egypt, Turkey, Cuba 
and the USA, and most recently took part in a residency program in Istanbul 
based at Platform Garanti of Contemporary Art. 


Tjebbe van Tijen has studied sculpture in Den Bosch, Milano  and London. 
He is the author of various happenings and expanded cinema projects in 
London and cities in the Netherlands 1965-1968. He has founded and curated 
the Documentation Center of Social Movements at the University Library of 
Amsterdam, 1973-1998 (now at the International Institute of Social History 
in Amsterdam). In the seventies and eighties, he designed exhibitions in 
Vienna, Milano, Copenhagen, Dortmund and Hamburg about ecology, urban 
conflicts and alternative culture. Interactive installations dramatizing 
historical subjects since mid-eighties: Imaginary Museum of Revolution 
with Jeffrey Shaw (1988-1989), Orbis Pictus Revised with Milos Vojtechovsky 
(1994-1996) and Neo-Shamanism with Fred Gales (1997-1998), Digital Papua 
with Fred Gales (2003) shown in Paris, Linz, Karslruhe, Amsterdam, Prague 
and Tokyo. His current research projects and lectures are on Ôliterary 
psycho-geographyÕ, aerial bombing, mapping human violence, visual language, 
media history and education systems. Frequent guest lectures and tutorials 
at art academies, media centers and universities. Van Tijen, working under 
the name of Imaginary Museum Projects, lives in Amsterdam.


Zelimir Zilnik is an independent Serbian filmmaker. He was first noticed 
by the end of the sixties for his visually expressive and critical films, 
and recognized both in his home country Yugoslavia and internationally 
with the documentary "The Unemployed" (Grand Prix at Oberhausen Festival, 
1968) and the feature "Early Works" (Grand Prix at Berlin Film Festival, 
1969). In the early seventies, Zilnik was heavily criticized on ideological 
grounds, since his films were part of the "Black Wave" movement. 
"Early Works" & "Freedom or Cartoons" were censored and banned. Since 
1980 he has been formulating a specific language of docu-dramas, 
successfully presented on various television networks, and at local and 
international festivals. Several of his next projects were regarded as 
highly innovative and provocative: the feature "Pretty Women Walking 
Through the City" (1985) predicts that nationalistic tensions will lead 
to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and a cataclysm at the Balkans.



For further questions mail to : pswar@xs4all.nl_____________________
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