Screenings and performances in July

e-flux is very pleased to announce that the fifth e-flux Prize in Oberhausen was awarded at the 65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen to German artist Maya Schweizer for her film L’Étoile de mer. Adeptly collaging clips and sounds from other films with text and aquatic footage, this film about film questions the slipperiness of images, which can be both familiar and enigmatic.

The e-flux Prize in Oberhausen awards 3,000 EUR annually to an exceptional film and video work which reshapes the poetic and electric potential of moving images in the age of planetary circulation of information. The 2019 international jury members were Clarissa Chikiamco (Singapore), Javier H. Estrada (Spain), Jörg Heiser (Germany), Adina Pintilie (Romania), and Salla Tykkä (Finland).

For this occasion, Bar Laika will present a special two-part screening of current and previous winners of the e-flux Prize in Oberhausen—featuring Maya Schweizer, Dimitri Venkov, Zhong Su, Louise Botkay, and Bruno Varela.

Also this month, join us at Bar Laika for screenings featuring Oleksiy Radynski, Zhou Tao, and Nikita Yingqian Cai, and a music performance in collaboration with Blank Forms featuring Onyx Ashanti and Dee Diggs.

Program

Bar Laika presents: Screening of winners of the e-flux Prize in Oberhausen - Part One
Thursday, July 4, 9pm

Join us for Part One of a special two-part screening of current and previous winners of the e-flux Prize in Oberhausen.

2019 winner: Maya Schweizer, L’Étoile de mer (The Starfish), Germany 2019, 11 minutes

L’Étoile de mer is an experimental navigation in the Mediterranean Sea, underwater shots, silent movies, the author’s own video archive and underwater shots, faded-in texts, and a sound collage. This image-and-sound essay is about forgetting and the sea as a point of reference and reflection. The sea is a flowing, immaterial space and thus seems conducive to forgetting.

2018 winner: Dimitri Venkov, Gimny Moskovii (The Hymns of Muscovy), Russia 2017, 14 minutes
To tell a history through architecture and music, the film matches the styles of Moscow’s 20th- and 21st-century buildings with electronic variations of the Soviet and Russian national anthem. The juxtaposition captures an aesthetic evolution driven by the evolution of ideology.

2017 winner: Zhong Su, Animal Year, China 2016, 7 minutes
Animal Year is a story about fate and has been inspired by my personal memory. This is my fourth work, and as usual, I finished the images, the sounds and the music all by myself.

Bar Laika presents: Screening of winners of the e-flux Prize in Oberhausen - Part Two
Thursday, July 11, 9pm

Join us for Part Two of a special two-part screening of current and previous winners of the e-flux Prize in Oberhausen.

2016 winner: Louise Botkay, Mains Propres (Washed Hands), Brazil 2015, 8 minutes
In the so-called post-colonial era, the poor countries continue to be subjected to the same group of countries that colonized them. In Europe everybody pretends not to know or to remember it. The very same international cooperation that “helps” the poorest countries leaves a scent of infinite dependency in the air.

2015 winner: Bruno Varela, Tiempo Aire (Air Time), Mexico 2014, 30 minutes
Tiempo Aire is a log of an inner journey, a personal aesthetic manifesto, and an organic revision of audiovisual material recorded between 1994 and 2013 in various locations that range from small communities in Oaxaca and the capital city of that state, to La Paz, Bolivia, or New York.

Bar Laika presents: Oleksiy Radynski, The Film of Kyiv
Thursday, July 18, 9pm

Join us for a screening of Oleksiy Radynski’s The Film of Kyiv, followed by Q&A with the artist. 

The Film of Kyiv (2017-2019) is a long-term episodic series formed around filmed observations of architectural locations and urban spaces in Kyiv, Ukraine. While the sites chosen by the filmmaker appear heterogeneous, the subjects in question are points of transition where capital and urban forms overlap in complex webs of past, present, and future. Through filmed observations of (and occasional interventions into) the city space, the ideological challenges that contemporary urban space faces are examined first-hand. The screening at Bar Laika will feature the first and the third instalments in the series. 

Bar Laika presents Satellite 8 in collaboration with Blank Forms: Onyx Ashanti and Dee Diggs
Sunday, July 21, 9pm

Join us at Bar Laika for the eighth edition of Satellite in collaboration with Blank Forms, featuring Onyx Ashanti and Dee Diggs. This event will include a performative demonstration of Ashanti’s Sonocyb, followed by Q&A with Ashanti and a DJ set by Dee Diggs.

Onyx Ashanti is a musician, performer, programmer, and inventor of the Sonocyb, a continually evolving, malleable interface of prosthetic synthesizer controllers that Ashanti 3D prints at home and uses to articulate electronic sound in conjunction with bodily motion. Growing up playing jazz saxophone in rural Mississippi, Ashanti was swept up by rave culture in the 1990s and transitioned to playing wind controller, with which he collaborated with Marshall Jefferson and Soul II Soul, performing in nightclubs around the world. Ashanti’s creative curiosity led him to, first, develop the Beatjazz controller as a music-making device for hands and mouth, before studies of cybernetics and an epiphanic discovery of free jazz ushered in his current devotion to Sonocybernetics.

Dee Diggs is a DJ and event organizer based in Brooklyn. Unapologetically black, queer and femme, she uses her DJ sets and influence to create a space for marginalized groups to express and organize themselves. Her non-linear style of mixing and the way she switches between genres playfully challenges the norms of genre DJs within electronic music. Diggs has a monthly radio show on Half Moon BK.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi. This event is organized by Adrian Rew, Curatorial Assistant, Blank Forms.

Free admission, RSVP encouraged and can be accessed here.

Bar Laika presents: Zhou Tao, After Reality, presented by Nikita Yingqian Cai
Thursday, July 25, 9pm

Join us for a screening of Zhou Tao’s After Reality (4:21 minutes, 2013), presented by Nikita Yingqian Cai.

Shot in Guangzhou and Paris, After Reality is characterized by its translocal ambiguity. In the abandoned, suburban areas located between cities, people plant trees and vegetables, mixed in with weeds and shrubbery. Under the intercity overpasses, wildly overgrown vines and vegetation have completely covered dilapidated walls and tightly wrapped themselves around the land. In a river that has almost been flooded by water hyacinths, a group of Dragon Boat rowers start their mornings with physical training. While the concealed, imperceptible traces of time reveal themselves as riddles, impromptu assimulation with the environment were at times enacted in proximity of the daily reality. 

Through bodily improvisation and editing, the temporal-spatial narrative of the film becomes misleading, as if the winter Paris and subtropical Canton swapped seasons and were located at the same latitude. With the human bodies merging with the disappearing nature framed by urban infrastructures, Zhou Tao challenges the subject-object duality by revitalizing the rituality of vernacular actions.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website; or subscribe to our events mailing lists for e-flux and Bar Laika.

For more information, contact laika [​at​] e-flux.com.