"The Greenroom" at Vera Center, New School University (NYC)

TWO NIGHTS, ON THE HEELS OF MEMORIAL DAY

"The Greenroom"
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 - 6:30 to 9:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
New York City Admission: $8 each night, free for all students, as well as New School and CCS Bard faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID, and members of the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art

Two evenings of special screenings introduce The Greenroom, a
large-scale exhibition exploring the “documentary turn” in recent
contemporary art practice and its heritage in relation to the history of film, documentary photography, and television. Set to open in Fall 2008 at the The Hessel Museum of Art and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The Greenroom, curated by CCS graduate program director Maria Lind, will feature works by more than forty artists and extend beyond the exhibition format to include a long-term research project and related publications. The research project is a collaboration between the CCS, Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College, and the artist and
theoretician Hito Steyerl.

These preview screenings, organized by curatorial assistant and CCS
Bard graduate student Fionn Meade and presented in collaboration with the Vera List Center at The New School, include selected works from artists participating in The Greenroom exhibition. Co-sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

PROGRAM 1, Tuesday, May 27, 6:30-9:00 p.m.
[for program notes scroll down.]

Yael Bartana, "Mary Koszmary" (2007, 11 minutes)
Rosalind Nashashibi, "Ambassador" (with Lucy Skaer), (2004, 5 minutes)

Matthew Buckingham, "Situation Leading to a Story" (1999, 21 minutes)
Chantal Akerman, "D'Est: Au bord de la fiction" (1993, 110 minutes)

PROGRAM 2, Wednesday, May 28, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
[for program notes scroll down.]

Anri Sala, "Dammi I Colori" (2003, 16 minutes)
Harun Farocki, "Workers Leave the Factory" (1995, 36 minutes)
Hito Steyerl, "November" (2004, 25 minutes)
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, "We Will Live to See These Things or
Five Pictures of What May Come to Pass" (2007, 47 minutes)

PROGRAM NOTES
Program 1
Tuesday, May 27, 6:30-8:30pm

Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (2007, 11 minutes)
Recently commissioned by the Foksal Foundation and Hermès, Mary
Koszmary considers the complex legacies and realities of European
anti-Semitism and xenophobia. A young man, played by Polish leftist
author and politician Slawomir Sierakowski, enters an empty stadium and entreats the three million Jewish Poles who left Poland to return to their homeland while a troupe of Boy and Girl Scout-like youths stencil a message of hope for reconciliation across the stadium floor.

Rosalind Nashashibi, Ambassador (with Lucy Skaer) (2004, 5 minutes)
Playing with the rules of ethnographic framing, this monochrome study of the British Consul moving about his Hong Kong residence presents the enigma of a representative figure within an un-exoticized, quotidian context.

Matthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story (1999, 21 minutes)
Buckingham uses the cinematic space of film and video to stage
personalized narratives that question the relationships between the
living presence of the viewer, the phantasms of history, and the
politics of institutions, archives, and cultural memory. Situation
Leading to a Story recounts and complicates the artist’s having found four amateur movies dating from the 1920s in an abandoned box on a New York street.

Chantal Akerman, D'Est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction) (1993, 110 minutes) D’Est retraces a journey from the end of summer to deepest winter, from East Germany, across Poland and the Baltics, to Moscow. It is a voyage Akerman wanted to make shortly after the collapse of the Soviet bloc "before it was too late," reconstructing her impressions in the manner of a documentary on the border of fiction. By filming "everything
that touched me," Akerman sifts through and fixes upon sounds and images as she follows the thread of a subjective crossing.

Program 2
Wednesday, May 28, 6:30-8:30pm

Anri Sala, Dammi I Colori (2003, 16 minutes)
Dammi I Colori accompanies artist and Mayor Edi Rama on a slow tour of Tirana, attentive to Rama’s ongoing narration as the camera visits various projects throughout the city that attempt to offer a new direction for its residents, including the geometrical painting in rich and primary colors of various housing complexes in the most impoverished areas.

Harun Farocki, Workers Leave the Factory (1995, 36 minutes)
“Workers Leaving the Factory” was the title of the first cinema
film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurry out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. But where are they rushing? In his documentary essay, Harun Farocki explores variations upon this scene right through the history of film, exploring how the space before the factory gates has always been the scene of contested social conflicts and narratives.

Hito Steyerl, November (2004, 25 minutes)
A short film loosely based on the life of Steyerl’s close friend,
Andrea Wolf, who, prior to her assassination as a suspected Kurdish
terrorist in 1998, was accused of being a member of the Red Army faction in Germany. November is an elegy to a distant friend, an essay on the construction of mythic identities, and a commentary on the defunct ideologies of revolution.

Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, We Will Live to See These Things or
Five Pictures of What May Come to Pass (2007, 47 minutes)
Shot in 2005-06 in Damascus, Syria, We Will Live deals with competing visions of the future. Each section-the chronicle of a building in Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew-offers a different perspective on what might happen in a place caught between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.

• * *

TICKETS:
In person purchases can be made at The New School Box Office at 66 West 12th Street, main floor, Monday to Friday 1:00 to 7:00 p.m. Ticket inquiries can be sent to boxoffice@newschool.edu or 212.229.5488.

EVENT INFORMATION: 212.229.5353, specialprograms@newschool.edu, or
www.newschool.edu/publicprograms.