n.paradoxa
online, issue 5
November 1997
Editor: Katy Deepwelln.paradoxa online issue no.5 Nov 1997

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Published in English as an online edition

by KT press, www.ktpress.co.uk,
as issue 5, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal
http://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue5.pdf
Nov 1997, republished in this form: January 2010
ISSN: 1462-0426
All articles are copyright to the author
All reproduction & distribution rights reserved to n.paradoxa and KT press.
No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form orby any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying and recording,information storage or retrieval, without permission in writing from the editor ofn.paradoxa.
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and not necessarily those of the editor or publishers.
Editor: ktpress@ktpress.co.uk
International Editorial Board: Hilary Robinson, Renee Baert,
Janis Jefferies, Joanna Frueh, Hagiwara Hiroko, Olabisi Silva.
www.ktpress.co.uk

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List of Contents
Katy Deepwell Profile of Ostranenie : Women Filmmakers from
Eastern EuropeInterviews with Dragana Zarevac, Odiliya Yankova,
Branka Milicic-Davic and Ulrike Ettinger
4
Katy Deepwell The Cyberknitting event at Ostranenie,
Bauhaus, Dessau and 2nd interview with Branka Milicic-Davic

12

Katy Deepwell Interview with Irina Aktuganova of Gallery
21, St Petersburg

17

Catherine Elwes The Pursuit of the Personal in British
Video Art

22

Rose Issa 'Re-Orienting our Views': A rediscovery of Iranthrough its cinema and women filmmakers

39

Mali Wu
Wu: A Profile

45

Linda Jaivin ‘Consuming Texts: the work of Mali Wu’

54

Mare Tralla T.Est.Art : A View of Estonian Feminism

57

Diary of an Ageing Art Slut

66

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Women Filmmakers at Ostranenie
Katy Deepwell

While there were many films presented at Ostranenie, these pages are dedicatedto profiling the women film-makers whose work was show there. A part of the festival
was dedicated to examining the legacy and achievements of media pioneers, MoholyNagy, Tesla, Schriabin, Oscar Sala, Lev Theremin; this was a section from which
women innovators were notable by their absence.
This is the third Ostranenie festival designed to exhibit work and bring together
artists from Eastern European countries who work in film, video, multi-media,
electronic music and electronic arts in installation, internet and CD-Rom forms.
This year's Ostranenie was organised by Stephen Kovats and Nina Czegledy andtook place in five main sites in Dessau. Most of the video screenings were at theformer Bauhaus building in Dessau with an internet cafe at K.I.E.Z e.V, an arts centre
in the city. There were exhibitions installed on both sites and in the Marienkirche.
A special programme ‘Women at the End of the Millennium’ was introduced bycurator Bojana Pejic.
* Milla Moilanen Scale (8.25 mins, Finland,1996)* Dragana Zarevac Ocaj-Le Deuil / The Despair (5.20 mins Yugoslavia, 1996)* Olga Tobreluts Game or 2 Love Stories (10.00mins, Russia, 1997)* Natalia Borisova Tri Verlibra/Three Verlibrs (3.30 mins, Russia, 1996)* Infiniti Evil (3.30 mins, Russia, 1996)* Anna Kucysnka/Katarzyna Radkowska Nazarieff (11 mins, Poland, 1993/1994)* Elena Patoprsta Love on the End of the Millenium/ Liebe am Ende desMilenium (3.00 mins Slovakia, Germany, 1996)
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* Elena Patoprsta Attention, Love! / Vosicht, Liebe!(3.00 mins Slovakia,
Germany, 1996)* Biba Vickovic Demokrata / The Democrat (5 mins Yugoslavia, 1994)* Perry Bard My Little Box of Nazis (3.36 mins, USA, 1997)
Also in the programme, but not screened on the day, Rotraut Pape Nicht nur
Wasser/Not Just Water (25.47 mins Deutschland,1995)
Women videomakers featured strongly in the Crossing Over programme whicharose from a series of workshops sponsored by the Soros foundation in Sofia.
The ‘Crossing Over ‘programme included:* Darij Kreuh Blind Wish (3 mins, Slovenia,1997)* Odiliya Yankova I,RNG(00.53 mins, Bulgaria, 1997) (see interview below)* Kassimir Terziev In Search of..... (3.30 mins , Bulgaria, 1997)* Elena Belova Impressions of a Mirror (2.50mins, Bulgaria, 1997)* Ivan Mudov Simon Says.... (2.00mins, Bulgaria, 1997)* Tsvetelina Gancheva The Virgin (3.26 mins Bulgaria,1997)* Branka Milicic-Davic Dream (3 mins Yugoslavia, 1997) (see interview below)* Denis Neimand Here (3.43 mins Russia,1997)* Collaborative Documentary Terra Nova (7.21mins Bulgaria, 1997)
A programme of Video Documentaries by
women film-makers was also shown.
In addition to these special events, women
also featured in the general programme whichhighlighted work from former Eastern
European countries and for the first time
included work from Albania, Moldova andBosnia-Herzognovina.
This included a new videowork by a young
Albanian woman, Erjona Daka, 'Kotesi /Vanity' (15 mins, 1997). This video shot in a Above: videostill from Erjona Daka,'Kotesi / Vanity' (15 mins, 1997)
storage shed, featured only one actor. A young Below: Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck's
man who typed on a typewriter with no paper 'Busby' (3.18 mins, 1997, Germany)a series of reflections as he slowly picked up
and considered the objects around him ; achild's shoe, a woman's shoe, a boot. The
objects seemed to cover a spectrum of life
events. At the end of the film, he covers up thetypewriter with plastic, hides it away. The film
alludes to hidden and secret thoughts but it
also suggests that storing information for theself - as an unproductive activity - can be a vainand selfish act.
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On a lighter note, a very cleverly crafted and ironic film shown in anotherprogramme was Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck's 'Busby' (3.18 mins, 1997, Germany).
A parody of Busby Berkeley's routines in an almost Bauhaus-manner using theabstract qualities of hands to form the shapes and movement of dancing. . Ulrike
Ettinger's film Elena Stanciucu: Verusch eine Portrait Germany, 1997 (17 mins)
formed part of the Video Documentary Programme shown in the Ostranenie Festival,
November 1997.
The other films in the same programme were:* Russian Umarov/ Natalya Petrova Chechentsey Drevnyaya Zemlya/ The
Chechens Ancient Land (25 mins, Russia, 1997)* Iurie Suiu Labyrintul/The Labyrinth (24.30 mins, Moldova, 1992)* Olivera Milos-Toderovic: S Puta u Nemoguce/ From the Road to Impossible(14.50 mins, Yugoslavia, 1996)* Ema Kugler Postaja 25/Station 25 (30 mins, Slovenia, 1997)* Marina Preda Sanc Zidul Din Turn/The Wall in the Tower (34 mins. Romania, 1997)* Julja Loginova Vegetatio(n) uber die Russiche Kunst (22mins Russia, 1997)* Marina Grznic/Aina Smid Postsocialism + Retroavantgarda + Irwin (22.05
mins, Slovenia, 1997)* FIA ART : Made in Serbia (26.51mins. Yugoslavia, 1997)
Extracts from an Interview with the Dragana Zarevac on her film OcajLe Deuil / The Despair , Yugoslavia, 1996 (05.20) at Ostranenie, November 1997.
Dragana Zarevac: I came across the material in this film accidentally. It
was meant to be training material for the Yugoslav army and it was about the
war in Croatia. My husband was asked to make some copies of it by some friends.
He came home and told me he had seen a terrible thing and that I must see it.
When I saw it, I couldn't sleep for weeks and I wanted to make some work about
it. It is connected to my previous work in some ways and on the other hand it isnot. I started as a performer of electronic music and with video about elevenyears ago. I mostly deal with traditions. What I like are the common points
between different cultures and traditions and I really am enchanted to see thesame or similar cultural traces in different cultural traditions and that is mostly
what I deal with and study. I also have an education as a singer but I have neverbeen an opera singer or a traditional or classic performer. I always do the musicfor everything I do as a performer or on video. I make music, do the singing,record it etc.
The topics I have usually dealt with have been the topics of traditions as welland this is why this piece is rather different as well. It deals with a contemporary
topic but it is also connected to the tradition because I use this traditional wayof singing/ mourning there and I use the lyrics of medieval Serbian poetry. The
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lyrics are about the woman who saw her nine sons dead in the war with the Turks.
It's a very powerful sad epic song. So I put these different elements together andcut out all the elements that would show the present moment or national
belonging or particularity in the sense of situating it in this time and space. I
just took elements which would show suffering – looking over the dead, mourning
the dead. It's not just something I feel, it is a fact that mourning the dead iscommon to all traditions. We have always had two groups of people fighting
over one piece of land and that is what wars are all about. That is what I also felt
at this time. On the other hand, in our war, there was a terrible suffering. I could
not be in all the spots at the same moment, but I know Serbians were also killing
Serbians, Muslims killing Muslims, Croatians killing Croatians, not only othernationalities. Everybody suffered and everybody committed crimes and that was
terrible and too many people were in this situation. So this is the suffering andpaint I wanted to express – it goes through the centuries but is found in thepresent day. The training film last 45 minutes and shows different pieces offilm of people being terrorised, tortured and killed. Different people in different
places but also it shows different funeral in totally another context and withanother text accompanying it. So I took parts from this 45-minute documentary
and took one scene from 1941-1942 of people from a concentration camp at
Yasanitza in Croatia. This is the only image from the past. This is not to highlightthe suffering of Croatia but a general historical image of suffering. It is a link
across time, not a link with a place. You see the image vanishing and it is likeany piece of land people fighting over a piece of land. I wanted more to makethat connection through history so to say we have the same suffering repeatedover the centuries. You would not know where it was from, except that it was notfrom Africa.
The film emphasises the mourners but I wouldn't like to put a different value
onto the different sexes but I do see the differences especially the different rolesin the tradition. Men fight the wars, women mourn and bury the men. It is anothersort of general view of death, but in this film there is also a man mourning, afather. That is another archetype alongside the old women dressed in black andmourning.
Odiliya Yankova interview about her film I,RNG Bulgaria , 1997 (00.53 mins)
Odilya Yankova: My experience of video before the Crossing Over workshop
was limited. My approach to modern art started with a short course in conceptual
art at the Art Akademie in Budapest in 1993 where I was studying sculpture.
This was only a short period after the big change which we all had to get through.
It was a time of confusion for me because my point of view was completely
disordered and my values were changing fast. Before this period we had a veryn.paradoxa online issue no.5 Nov 1997

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defined area of art and were able act within it and then everything changed. And
it was very strange because there were many things existing simultaneously
which we didn't know about – a very big area of artistic life – and at once thiscame to us and we had to learn to live with it and to make our art with it and tolearn new terms, and a mew way of living. Conceptual art was very comfortable
for me because its essence really closed the philosophy which is basic humanknowledge so it could be transformed into any situation. I think it was a goodstart. I always had this desire to come closer to the moving image, the moving
reality. So to me the cinema was something very close to me and at once I
understood that I could stay an artist and make movies at the same time. So
video art was a saving. I was happy that I changed to explore these things more.
The first thing I made was a video documentation as this was more clear tome as it was based on facts just transformed into the moving media. After that I
started thinking how I could express a concept using these ways of expression.
So the second thing I made was a ten minute video without sound, a performancein video. That was how I first appeared in front of the camera.
After that I dared to take the camera in my own hands and tried to advancethe other point of view, the point of the viewer. The world consists not only of
two sides but even more. Making video gave me more possibility to change myplace. When you can easily move your point of view it cam be moving to any
topic, you learn to be flexible. I, RNG is based on a concept. The world goes on
about the problem of identity which is a very basic problem for me. An internal
problem. Every person born in Eastern Europe has to cope with this change andthis is well known. I've never been into the political side of things so to me theproblem of identity was always very personal and I tried somehow to enlarge it
and this is how I came to the philosophical understanding of identity. The title
is an abbreviation of the computer term, random number generation and thisfilm puts the question of difference between our desire to be something that wewish and the facts of outer reality, the facts of our bodies and our minds as themedium of our person because actually we live first inside our bodies and ourbrains and them we live inside the world. These are two spheres incommunication all the time but it is not a simple process.
I chose about 20-25 people I know and shot their faces turning around and at
the end of the sequence I shot my own face because you always have to find apoint to stop. It's easy for everyone to find the end point inside themselves. Thereis the area where you put all your questions inside your heard. The possibility
that others are within you is implied but the sequence tells you I might be anyone
and everyone but I'm not a separate different thing, why do I have to be?

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Branka Milicic-Davic interview
about her film Dream Yugoslavia,
1997 (3.53mins)
Branka Milicic-Davic: This was
my first video and I made it from film
I shot with my performance group,Group Baza. I actually planned tomake a long documentary of theperformance we did last year which
dealt with the situation in Yugoslavia
on two levels : 1) how a person meets
their own limits in work and in
Branka Milicic-Davic Dream Yugoslavia, 1997
(3.53mins)
communication and 2) how a person
feels about the borders around thecountry or society in which they live. As you realised in the video we are dealing
with the body, no words are spoken, neither in the video nor in the performance.
I used the sound of my own breathing as the only possible sound. I had quite a
lot of material but I just decided to make a short film, partly because of time andpartly because I wanted to make a dream/nightmare where you cannot realise
Katy Deepwell: The people appear as if they are asleep
quite what is going on.Katy
because of the breathing sound but as the camera slowly moves around theimages turn into what they are dreaming about and the piece takes on avery dark atmosphere of a nightmare.
Branka Milicic-Davic : The conception is done in such a way that you cannot
realise whether this is a dream or a reality. My personal experience in the last
few years living in Yugoslavia is that you cannot realise it as a bad dream or asa reality. You just cannot understand why just simple things cannot be realised
and you cannot find any reason for this. Everything is just somehow surrealistic.
The film captures this and is also surrealistic. There is nothing happening in
the film, but everything is happening at the same time. You never see the wholebody. Sometimes you do not even recognise parts of the body. It's just a kind ofcolour. You cannot see which is male or which is female. There is also an attempt
to show what you see or realise in a performance - in the performance I shot, I
am on the floor and I see it from another perspective to the audience. I see things
which the audience cannot see -sweating - small pieces of the body which maybe
do not tell much to the audience but it's like when you see your friends or someone
in front of you, you realise small things which tell you something about theperson and that's what I like.

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Katy Deepwell: There is a poignant moment in the film where a bandaged
arm drops against a larger mass of body. The images appear like an adultand child.
Branka Milicic-Davic : No, there is no child but its interesting you see it.
Maybe its unconscious but I never planned it that way. The performance ‘4’,which iswhat was filmed, played at several international festivals. 4 is a symbol of women's energy
and at the same time the four walls of a cage/room. The fifth wall which you cannot see isthe ceiling - it is that which you are trying to reach your whole life, reaching higher andhigher.
Ulrike Ettinger Elena Stanciucu:
Verusch eine Portrait Germany, 1997 (17mins). Extracts from an interview withKaty Deepwell at Ostranenie after viewing
the film
Ulrike Ettinger: This is my first workin video where I tried to make a
documentary. My other videos have been
completely different in that I knew what I
wanted to do before I made them. This
video has the subtitle 'An Attempt of a
Ulrike Ettinger Elena Stanciucu: Verusch eine Portrait' and during the making of thePortrait Germany, 1997 (17 mins).
work I tried to find out what would be myvision and how I could realise it.
I was impressed by Elena Stanciucu as a subject because of her work as a weaver,and her attempt to use techniques and ideas of folk art which were starting todisappear. It seemed to me she lived a good life with this passion. She made a lot ofwork and she found a way to combine this with her family and her work in the village
where she lived in Romania. The work became part of her life.
Elena Stanciucu died three years before I decided to make the film but I didn't
know this when I went to the village to make the film. I decided to try and show
the situation as it is and the things which are still there in the way they are. I
grew up in a big town in Romania and there are a lot of things about life in thevillage which are closed to me and I look at them with completely different eyes.
What I tried to do was to find a way to get the people watching this film to gain
an approach but always with the question: is it possible to know this person andplace by film and by images like this with a video camera? So I decided to show
the places in the village where she would have been, some of her house, photos
which offer information about her and a context for her growing up. The
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are a lot of details about her life and what was important to her.
Part of her family in the village keeps all her things in boxes and they broughtthem out specially for me and for the camera. There are no museums or collections
for this work. People don't trust the collections of the Romanian state and have hadbad experiences with them so they want to keep these pieces even though they haveno possibility to show them. They know they are valuable. In their everyday life,
they have so completely different problems but they keep the work with care.
My other work has been different to this kind of documentary. In my next project,
I want to put a monitor in a shop window of a travel agent. I am asking a lot of people
through the net to describe in words their place of birth and will add a text naming
the town, place, country. It will be just text passing on the monitor, no sound. This
could be said to be another approach to autobiography. The place of birth is always
something very connected with your sense of self. I am again exploring whether or
not it is possible to show meaning fully using a different method of presentation,
the texts on a monitor.

Copyright © : Katy Deepwell,1997
n.paradoxa : Issue No.5, November 1997

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