The Film Club

Gilbert & George
England, 69 min

The feature-length film ”The World of Gilbert and George” is written and directed by Gilbert & George. Poetic narration combines with vivid imagery that moves between the startlingly beautiful, the humorous and the absurd. Church spires and city streets, youths and drunks, dancing and tea drinking all take on an affecting symbolism when viewed from the unique perspective of Gilbert & George.

Gilbert & George are two men who together are one artist. For more than five decades, Gilbert & George have been creating works that challenge the conventions of art and society with a blatant disregard for any notions of “good taste”. Dressed in near-matching impeccably well-pressed suits, Gilbert & George have resided in the same London neighbourhood since the 1960s.

Read more about Gilbert & George and the exhibition on show at Moderna Museet spring 2019: Gilbert & George: The Great Exhibition

Ingela Johansson
Sweden, 41 min

”Andrei’s Maria” is an artistic film essay about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Swedish produced film ”The Sacrifice”, shot in Närsholmen, Gotland in 1986. In ”Andrei’s Maria”, the Icelandic actress Guðrún Gísladóttir returns to Närsholmen thirty years after the recording of Tarkovsky’s film. With her is her daughter Vera Illugadóttir, with whom she shares recollections of the production. It is an interpretation and a homage to the character Maria, a witch destined to save the world from nuclear disaster. The film explores Tarkovsky’s critique of civilization while simultaneously telling the behind-the-scenes story from the unique perspective of Gísladóttir.

Ingela Johansson is a Stockholm based artist, writer, filmmaker, whose research-based artistic practice often responds to site-specific issues with an interest in social history and collective memory. ”Andrei’s Maria” has earlier been shown at Tranzit Bratislava, Gotlands konstmuseum, Kunsthall Trondheim (2017) and in Kalmar Konstmuseum (2018).

Conversation participants

Olivia Eriksson is a PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies. Her current research project focuses on moving image art and contemporary film installation in a gallery setting and explores the notion of embodied spectatorship in relation to the specificities of the gallery space. Olivia holds a BA and an MA in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University.

Didem Pekün
Turkey/Greece/Bosnia & Herzegovina, 43 min

”Araf” is an essayistic road movie and diary of a ghostly character, Nayia, who travels between Srebrenica and Sarajevo to Mostar in Bosnia. She has been in exile since the war and returns for the 22nd memorial of the Srebrenica genocide. The film is guided by her diary notes of the journey which merge with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus – Icarus being the name given to the winner of a bridge diving competition in her home country.

The story of Icarus and Daedalus, a myth symbolic of man’s over-ambition and inevitable failure, is weaved throughout the film as a way to think about exorcizing the vicious cycle of such events happening in the future and of a possible reconciliation.. ”Araf” thus traces paradoxes through Nayia’s displacement and her return to her home country post-war – that of a constant terror and a permanent standstill, and the friction between displacement and permanence.

Didem Pekün’s work explores the production of subjectivities within violent geographies, displacement, and the different forms they take on-screen. Pekün is born 1978 in Istanbul, and her studio practice includes documentaries and video installations. Her films have been screened internationally and received awards.

Pekün is a founding member of Center for Spatial Justice (MAD). She holds a BA in Music at SOAS, an MA on Documentary at Goldsmiths, and a practice-based PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths. After being a faculty member at Media and Visual Arts Department at Koç University, she is a Research Fellow at Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths and a Teaching Fellow at CEU, Budapest.