Red Dawns and Galerija Mizzart present

The opening of the festival information point and an exhibition

embroidery Dina Rončević (CRO) Four stroke

Dina Rončević is an artist and a puppet animator from Croatia. She graduated from Animation and New media department at Art Academy in Zagreb. For her graduate work she made a professional retraining to be a car mechanic. The name of the work is “suck, squeeze, bang, blow”. During this three-year-long project (2007-2010) she worked on issues of social identity and gender roles in masculine dominated socio-cultural niche. Project’s aim was also to deconstruct the categories of identity or to be more specific, questions of gender and sex roles. In her later works, Dina continues to deal with gender, importing traditional female handwork in her work.

Her needlework Four Stroke ironies situation where certain knowledge/job is prescribed to men or women.

instalation Tina Drčar (SLO) Umreti za življenje (To Die for Life)

Tina Drčar: the idea, costumes, scene
Ilija Terah: photography
Boštjan Novak: the torso

‘Umreti za življenje’ (‘To Die for Life’) is an installation of ten black and white photos, and a torso. It is a diary of similar and repetitive photographic motives, portraying the artist alongside her torso cast, which works as her remainder. The perspective of the viewer is being confused on purpose by kitschy gilded frames, the repetitive choreography, and costumized bodies and bodily transformations on the photos. Their purpose is to influence the viewer’s perception of facts caught in the photographic lens. The artist’s relationship to the facts is grotesque.
Tina Drčar’s work is about a dual transformation of the Self. The first one refers to the actual, physical changes in/of herself, as they happened chronologically. Each change is documented in three phases, or choreographies, entitled by the artist as ‘Recognition’, ‘Mourning’, and ‘Awareness’. The three phases, depicted on the photos through the costumes of a healer, death, and monkey, relate to the experience of personal reality, that is, the second of the transformations, involving self-awareness.
‘Umreti za življenje’ is a brave and sincere tale, stepping towards new roles in a humorous, active and affirmative way, not despairing, but rather questioning the very foundations of her own personality, as well as creating new paths for herself. Although the facts are masked and hard to grasp in this piece of art, its details reveal both its content and meaning. Its essence is very elusive – we can either look too attentively, or not attentively enough. Consequently, there exists a number of possible interpretations of the work. The artist herself happily encourages different readings and realities of her work. She says: ‘The reality on the photos is elusive, but this fact is permanent; after all, it’s about life itself!’.

Kindly welcome to discover your own truth!

Tina Drčar (1977, Celje) graduated from the School of drawing and painting; her supervisors were M. Butina and dr. T. Mastnak. From 2001 to 2005 she worked in tandem with another painter, Bine Skrt (Mala šola). Her work has been exhibited at home and abroad. She paints murals, makes mosaics, conducts children’s painting classes, and organizes humanitarian actions. The project ‘Defonija’, in which she participate with artistic posters, was in 2010 awarded with ‘Zlato gnezdo’ (‘Golden nest’), an award by Liberal Academy, Slovenia. She lives and works in Ljubljana, AKC Metelkova Mesto.

videoperformance Jelena Meek (NL) The Red Thread and Nivea Visage Young

Nivea visage young and The red thread are video performances by Jelena Meek that do do not leave the viewer indifferent. Made in a DIY manner they keep you glued to the screen without a promise of a revelation. The-red -thread-out of mouth-knitting keeps you wondering where and when will this end and instantly your find your thoughts transferred to a whole different level: finding yourself questioning where is the end to all hard work done by women, the end of women-only domestic labour, the end of  fights for equal rights and when the glass-ceiling will finally break. And a reassuring answer is not what you get. Instead, there is only  a promise of more hard work fighting against the inequalities of all sorts. But Jelena Meek keeps a positive and active approach: “Speak out from the heart and change your destiny. You don’t have to be the person the surroundings wants you to be. Just be yourself!”

Nivea Visage Young shows the artist gradually removing her abundantly layered makeup and smearing it all on a paper by her hand. The paper reveals her self portrait  made solely of her powder foundation, mascara, lip glos, blusher and eye shadower at the end. The video performance shows how physical and real the masks we are wearing and performing in everyday life actually become. Our identity and our roles in society are  never on “as is” basis, but rather constructed by ourselves with the “help” of our surroundings to fit in the culturally “prescribed” normativity as much as possible. In the end we are our own self-portrait. We decide what we want to show, and what to cover up.

Jelena Meek is a young artist who finished AKI Enschede – Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Enschede, Netherlands. She is a nominee for an award Embracing Our Differences 2012, her work was selected for the exhibition on Florida Beach. Her submission is one of 45 selected from over 2300 entries received from 48 countries and 38 states. She was also nominated for the Young Talent award Delta Loyd and was a winner of the Encouragment award Rabobank Amsterdam.

crowdfunding for the animation Signe Baumane (Latvia/USA): Rocks In My Pockets and trailer

Animation Rocks in my Pockets talks about depression through the eyes of Signe Baumane. In her words: »I am an independent animator who knows depression quite well and decided to make a funny film about depression for two reasons: first, to share my story with other people so that they know they are not alone in their suffering. Second –  laughter makes a distance between Self and suffering. To laugh is to heal. Lets laugh together.«.»I used to call it “a funny film about depression” but it is more complicated than that (funny, sad and then -funnysadfunny; honestly, how depression can be just funny?). If I had to put the description of the film in one sentence it would probably be very dark and dramatic: “A silent killer (depression) from my family’s secret past is trying to get me. Will I survive this fight?”.

Links:
film’s website: http://www.rocksinmypocketsmovie.com/
trailer: http://vimeo.com/47447449

Signe Baumane (Latvia/USA) is an animator, scriptwriter, director, illustrator and cel painter, she also designed puppets, costumes, and sets. She wrote children’s book The Book of the Tigers (Kniga Tigrov) which was addapted into her third film The Gold of the Tigers. After moving to the USA, she started to work as a production manager, color stylist, and cel painter for Bill Plympton, and together they made several short films. She made several films and won several international film awards for them (Tiny Shoes, Love Story, The Threatened One, Woman, Teat Beat Of Sex, Veterinarian). She worked also with Josh Rechnitz (Natasha), Austin Chick (XX/XY), Andrei Zagdanski (Sitnikov). She ilustrated several children’s books at Santillana Publishing House. In 1999 She received Permanent Resident Card as an Extraordinary Ability Alien. From 2000 to 2002 she taught animation at Pratt Institute, and is periodically publishing parts of a novel about her adventures in New York in Una, a Latvian women’s magazine. She is a 2005 Fellow in Film of the New York Foundation for the Arts. In the same year, she received an individual artist grant from The Jerome Foundation, and in May 2005 she became a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.
Signe has initiated and curated a number of independent animation programs and, along with Patrick Smith and Bill Plympton, is the organizing core of Square Footage Films, a group of New York independent animators that self-publishes and distributes DVDs of their own work.
More: http://www.signebaumane.com/

Co-organization: Galerija Mizzart

Free entry.

Map of ACC Metelkova