You Killed Me First: The Cinema Of Transgression.

Albtraumhafte Gewaltszenarien, dramatische Seelenzustände, perverse sexuelle Abgründe: Die bewußt auf Schock, Provokation und Konfrontation angelegten Filme des Cinema of Transgression zeugen von einer außergewöhnlichen Radikalität. In den 1980er Jahren ging eine Gruppe von Filmemachern in der New Yorker Lower East Side auf Kollisionskurs mit der amerikanischen Gesellschaft. Alle moralischen und ästhetischen Grenzen überschreitend, enthüllten sie in ihren Filmen eine soziale Härte, die auf gesellschaftspolitische Gleichgültigkeit trifft. In den teilweise mit geklautem Kameraequipment gedrehten Low-Budget-Filmen manifestieren sich scharfe Analysen des von Kriminalität, Brutalität, Drogen, Aids, Sex und Exzessen geprägten Lebens in der Lower East Side. Standphotos, Bildausschnitte, Flugblätter und die harte Typographie vermitteln perfekt die Ernsthaftigkeit der Künstler.

Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses – the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from the Lower East Side in New York went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low budget films reveal social hardship met with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the films contain strident analyses of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess. The catalogue is published on the occasion of the worldwide first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression, YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. The catalogue includes contributions by Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Jonas Mekas, Susanne Pfeffer, Jack Sargeant and Nick Zedd.

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Love Book by Aneta Grzeszykowska, published by Raster.

“Photography is the amorous fetish par excellence, a fragment of the present that, like the relation between two lovers, links and realizes both the past and the future and, in doing so, deranges time altogether.” Eduardo Cadava

The primary medium in which Aneta Grzeszykowska works is photography. However, she treats it instrumentally, as a tool for the realization of advanced, artistic and ontological exercises. The artist is interested in the role photography plays in creating and documenting a personal identity. Therefore, in her film projects or doll sculptures, the human figure acquires the shape and aura of a marionette. One of the main topics of Grzeszykowska’s works is her own identity, with which she plays on many levels: by erasing her own figure from a family collection of photographs (Album, 2005), or by impersonating Cindy Sherman in her classic cycle Untitled Film Stills (2006). Some projects by Grzeszykowska – like the cycle of illusionist portraits of non-existent people (Untitled, 2006) – take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital image manipulation, while others use photography and film in a classic way by emphasizing the performative dimension of the artist’s activities. The motifs which she obsessively returns to in her works are absence, invisibility, disappearing, and the confrontation of body and thought with non-existence.

Teksty / Texts: Krzysztof Pijarski, Walter Seidl, in both English and Polish
Softcover with 143 pages.

Available for distribution.

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Skalitzer 68. 04.08.2012
Camera Austria – Magazine presentation, drinks and BBQ
Natalie Czech – Book launch, presentation and Q&A
Starts at 7.00 pm.

The theme of Camera Austria’s new issue (#118) is “Photography_Text”, which ensues from the observation that contemporary photographic artists are increasingly associating text and image mediums; a practice at the base of German artist Natalie Czech.
At “Skalitzer. 68″ the magazine and the artist will plan a joint presentation, following the intense collaboration they had in the creation of this issue, where author Jens Asthoff discovers how Natalie Czech, through her photographs, investigates language as a space of contingency, probes boundaries of meaning, experiments with word-image relations, and encourages stratifications of intertextuality to intersect with and permeate one another. In his literary contribution, Barry Schwabsky poses exploratory questions about Czech’s work: “Is it possible to see her work as one enormous love letter: a billet-doux to poetry?” and notes that the last thing lovers want to give up is the possibility of gazing at the beloved: “Photographing poetry means gazing at it.”
In the same occasion, Natalie Czech’s recently published monography “Je n’ai rien à dire. Seulement à montrer. / Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen. / I have nothing to say. Only to show” (Spector Books, 2012) will be officially presented and open to discussion with the artist.

http://www.natalieczech.de/
http://www.camera-austria.at/
http://www.spectorbooks.com/

Further programme details

Mazdaznan – Health & Breath Culture (first six exercises) by Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish. M.D. Open Editions & Stanley Picker Gallery (Kingston University)

This book explores the intimate relationship between Mazdaznan, Johannes Itten and the Vorkurs (Preliminary or Foundation Course) at the Bauhaus, Weimar. It is a practical guide to performing the exercises that Itten taught at the Bauhaus and a celebration of a moment of mysticism at the heart of Modernism.

Illustrated and appended by Ian Whittlesea
Pages: 67
Size: 19 x 13 cm

D 20 €

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