Fall-winter exhibitions

Rojava Film Commune 
Forms of Freedom
December 1, 2018–February 2, 2019
Opening: November 30, 7:30pm
Curator: iLiana Fokianaki & Rojava Film Commune

Trinh T. Minh-ha
State Affairs Folder #4: Assume your own representative space
December 1, 2018–February 2, 2019
Opening: November 30, 2018, 7:30pm
Curator: iLiana Fokianaki

State of Concept Athens presents the exhibitions of film collective Rojava Film Commune and artist, filmmaker and theorist Trin T. Minh-ha.

Founded in 2015, Rojava Film Commune is a collective of filmmakers that live and work in Rojava, which means “West” and refers to the Western part of Kurdistan (present-day Northern Syria). The Commune tasks itself to represent the values and ideals of the Rojava Revolution, but also to mediate and depict the daily struggles in the Syrian civil war and Rojava’s collective attempt to build a new society. Rojava Film Commune stimulates local film culture by producing new films, educating a new generation of filmmakers, and organising film screenings and discussions about the role of film within contemporary society. Following the 1960 fire in Rojava’s only cinema in Amude, which saw the deaths of 298 children, the Commune aims to reclaim cinema and film as a central space through which we can reimagine society. After presenting their work in various film festivals, “Forms of Freedom”, is the Commune’s first solo exhibition in a contemporary art institution, consisting of a selection of works from the vast archive of collectively produced films, together with a newly commissioned work. The films presented, arrive after a dialogue between iLiana Fokianaki and the Commune, aiming to highlight the methodologies, thinking process and radical imaginaries of the collective.

Hugely influential in the fields of feminism and postcolonial studies, Vietnamese-born writer, theorist and filmmaker Trinh T Minh-ha presents three films from her filmography through the exhibition Assume your own representative space. Minh-ha has consistently challenged the traditional documentary format and has been deconstructing normative ways of looking at different cultures, whilst being dedicated to questioning totalising systems of knowledge and categories of identity. She considers each work to exist as a “boundary event,” eluding labels such as documentary, fiction or experimental film, instead positioning her work between these designations. Presented here are: Reassemblage (1982), documenting the lives of women in rural Senegal through what Minh-ha describes a process of representation that “speaks nearby” rather than “speaks about,” Surname Viet given name Nam (1989) examining the status of Vietnamese women from 1975 onwards, and her newest work Forgetting Vietnam (2016), unfolding the legacy of the Vietnam war on contemporary Vietnamese society. 

Anna Daučíková, 1978–2018, curator: Michal Novotny
Petra Bauer, State Affairs Folder #3:Those that will be heard, curator: iLiana Fokianaki
On view until November 20, 2018.

Anna Daučíková’s exhibition presents her new film In Their Shoes (2018) co-produced by State of Concept as well as Three Curtains (2014), Portrait of a Woman with Institution - Anča Daučíková/Catholic Church, 2011, Portrait of Woman with Institution / Muda Mathis and Sus Zwick/Zweisamkeit, 2011, and fragments of the seminal work Thirty-three situations, (2015). Curated by Michal Novotný, the show is an incomplete attempt to summarise some of the most important topics in Daučíková’s work, characterised by a de-linear testament on trajectories side-tracked by patriarchal, normalising societal structures. 

Petra Bauer’s exhibition Those that will be heard underlines the artists efforts to use the medium of film as a political tool that can challenge contemporary social and political events and processes. Much of Bauer’s work focuses on how women have collectively self-organised within and beyond art, as well as on the consequences of the colonial world order, shown here through the films Sisters! (2011), Der Fall Joseph (2003) and Choreography for the Giants (2013–15).

The exhibition of Anna Daučíková is co-produced with Futura Prague and is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

More in 2019: Sanja Iveković, opening March 1.

Click here for further details on the program.

State of Concept Athens is institutionally supported by Outset.