Seizure – Rewriting counter-histories
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid
Medium: Video (2015)
Issues: Black Histories, Decolonial Move, Eastern Europe, and Genocide
Project Links
Description
Seizure is about stratified, but publicly invisibly constituted relationships that constantly reconfigure our art and theoretical practices, and our knowledge about what and who are the constitutive elements in contemporary art today. The principal question is what kind of decolonial processes we can detect today in these paradigms, and how they serve or conflict with current artistic and cultural processes. The question is also if it is possible to subvert, to turn around and to re-think some old and new relations in film and political activism.
Seizure is about rewriting counter-histories in film and video productions. It is an inquiry about democracy, knowledge, State politics, and about film histories and their present. We can think about counter-histories that attack the hegemonic, discriminatory, and racialized power regime of whiteness and the naturalization of nation-state citizenship. Mapping knowledge, practice and power is, maybe, the outcome.
In this very dry and minimalized video work four film and video positions (in the order of appearance) are being discussed: Adela Jušić, Anja Salomonowitz, Heiny Srour and Nevline Nnaji.
Seizure – Rewriting counter-histories
25.00 min, color, sound, 2015
Commisioned by: Transformale 15 + K3 FILM FESTIVAL, Austria, 2015
Produced by: Fund for Art Video (non-profit), Ljubljana, Slovenia 2015
Prior showings in Vienna, Austria; Villach, Austria; Linz, Austria
Bio
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid are involved in video from 1982. They have collaborated in more than 40 video art projects; they made a short feature 16 mm film and numerous video and media installations; independently they directed several video documentaries and television productions. Gržinić and Šmid in their decades long collaborative engagement presented and exhibited their video works and video installations in more than 100 video festivals in the world and have received several major awards for their video productions.
Marina Gržinić (1958) is Doctor of Philosophy and works as researcher advisor at the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She also works as a freelance media theorist, art critic and curator. She is Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria). Marina Gržinić has published hundreds of articles and essays and several books.
Aina Šmid (1957) is Professor of art history and has been for a long working as editor of a design magazine in Ljubljana, Slovenia. At the present she is free-lancing writer.