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German-Turkish Film and Video Culture in Berlin
Concept by Can Sungu
bi'baxchange aims to showcase cross-border collaborations with cultural actors, project spaces and initiatives. Based on interdisciplinary and transnational cooperation projects, bi'baxchange seeks to exchange ideas, perspectives and know-how. In lecture performances, pop-up exhibitions, readings and presentations, bi'baxchange focuses on the decentralized, rhizomic connection between art, design, academics, participation, urban space and local activism.
German-Turkish Film and Video Culture in Berlin
Concept by Can Sungu
Curated by Galit Eilat and Erden Kosova
Found Futures: A Series of presentations on precarious archival projects
Video installations on the facade
Gender and sexuality can interact with migrant and refugee experiences in a variety of ways. For people fleeing violence, poverty, and ostracization, as well as migrants looking for work or a new life, the search for better conditions means facing old and new problems. Queer identifying and gender nonconforming individuals are particularly vulnerable to multiple, intersecting forms of discrimination and abuse. These issues don’t end with the migrated person but emerge and complicate intergenerationally. Common Ground Presents: Queer & Migrant Narratives features two short films exemplifying these troubled routes.
Following the film program, the QueerBerg Collective will give a special hour-long drag performance.
The program is part of Common Ground Presents, a new series of events curated by Lisa Hoffmann and Adela Lovric, members of the initiative Common Ground at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Hazte Sentir
Dieter Deswarte / Casa Miga, Brazil, 2019, 26 min.
Casa Miga – Brazil’s first shelter for LGBTQI+ refugees – opened its doors in 2018 in Manaus, the largest city of the state of Amazonas. Hazte Sentir tells a candid and intimate story of three Venezuelan residents who face multiple challenges as they try to build a new life in a metropolis. Created together with the residents of Casa Miga, this documentary is the result of a collaborative filmmaking process that strives towards more ethical representation and acknowledges its therapeutic potential in supporting communities facing social stigma.
Jackfruit
Thùy Trang Nguyễn, Germany, 2021, 34 min.
Followed by a talk with Thùy Trang Nguyễn
Full of tenderness and quiet gestures, Jackfruit tells the story of Mít, a gender-fluid person standing between two worlds – the Vietnamese diaspora and queer Berlin. Struggling to reconcile their two seemingly incompatible identities, Mít takes on a journey to search for the connections between them. While being challenged by their traditionalist mother on one side and their love interest on the other, Mít discovers that queerness was always part of their history, and finds in it the strength to create their future.
QueerBerg is a BIPOC collective for queer and trans* dancers, performers, singers and musicians who together reflect on their position as artists affected by racism and violence against queer and trans* people. Since being founded by Prens Emrah in 2018, QueerBerg has provided a support system for refugee artists both on stage and through everyday challenges. The group consists of 15-20 people between the ages of 19 and 32 who come from the countries Syria, Palestine, Malaysia, Kurdistan, Turkey, Romania, amongst others.
Thùy Trang Nguyễn (*1993, Berlin) is a Vietnamese-German filmmaker. They studied directing and writing in 2017. The aim of their artistic work is to challenge normative viewing habits, to empower, and to preserve cultural heritage.
Lisa Hoffmann is a visual artist, filmmaker and researcher concerned with transitional states, everyday fictions & fragmented realities with a focus on ecological anxieties and the deconstruction of dominant narratives.
Adela Lovric is a writer and curator. Her ongoing research focuses on non-imperial imaginations and counter-narratives in film and art. As part of working groups and organizations, she develops publishing projects, organizes events, and experiments with politicized curatorial strategies.
Common Ground is a student initiative at the Berlin University of the Arts, It creates different opportunities for and assists disadvantaged internationals as they apply for study programs, organises social art events, and infiltrates postmigrant discourse into the university's paracurriculum.
OV with English subs
Film screenings + performance by Luïza Luz
Artists and filmmakers are finding new ways to tell stories of ongoing climate disaster and displacement. In speculative and metaphorical ways, the three short films presented here connect legacies of colonialism with environmental breakdown and the extreme, not fully predictable ways it will force migration. These different artistic approaches reflect a climate reality that is at once abstract and hard to grasp, yet vehemently obvious. They offer perspectives that confront and warn us of how climate decline will continue disrupting livelihoods on Earth—from elemental to human—and how it inevitably intersects with racial and other forms of systemic injustice.
Reclamation
Thirza Cuthand, Canada 2018, 13 min.
4 Waters: Deep Implicancy
Denise Ferreira da Silva/Arjuna Neuman, USA/UK 2019, 31 min.
Flores
Jorge Jácome, Portugal 2017, 23 min.
Reclamation
Thirza Cuthand, Canada 2018, 13 min.
Following the film program, Luïza Luz will present their live performance, ‘A Grounding Piece of Land.’
A Grounding Piece of Land – Luïza Luz
In this live performance, Luïza Luz presents authorial soundscapes, audio sampling collages, and lyrics they composed as a way of self-remembrance: of Planet Earth as an ever-changing living organism. A memory to be embodied by the collective experience. In times of climate and humanitarian collapse, this wisdom could be revealed as a grounding piece of land, in the middle of despair.
The program is part of Common Ground Presents, a series of events curated by Lisa Hoffmann and Adela Lovric, members of the initiative Common Ground at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Luïza Luz is a Bra𝓼ilian transdisciplinary artist addressing the binary nature-culture in language, identity, and institutions. Their poetics evolve from written and vocal words that become images, lectures, sound performances, installations, and collaborative (un)learning sites.
OV with English subs
Migrant laborers’ lives are permeated with struggles hidden in plain sight: from small but deeply alienating misunderstandings to brutal exploitation. Their precarity is a web of mutually reinforcing vulnerabilities that can be traced back to systemic forms of oppression. This film and performance program presents irregular ways of narrating such experiences — all of which are different, yet inextricably linked. It draws attention to critical conditions and inner lives of real and fictional migrant laborers via an intimate and empathetic look.
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Following the screening of four short films, Brazilian artist Laura Carvalho will present LAURA AkiÓ-> Pützfrau_trucke — a live interactive performance that reflects her experience as an immigrant domestic worker in Berlin while drawing a parallel between the artist and domestic worker.
The one-night program at the cinema will be expanded with What's my Line?, a series of experimental videos by Sugano Matsusaki and Pegah Kashmirshekan, which will be projected on Sinema Transtopia’s window screen from March 29th to April 3rd.
The program is part of Common Ground Presents, a series of events curated by Lisa Hoffmann and Adela Lovric, members of the initiative Common Ground at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Traana
Raphaël Grisey/Kàddu Yaraax, France/Senegal/Norway 2017, 27 min.
Radio Ghetto Relay
Alessandra Ferrini, Italy 2016, 16 min.
Agua Viva
Alexa Lim Haas, USA 2018, 7 min.
Blue Boy
Manuel Abramovich, Argentina/Germany 2019, 19 min.
Director Sina Ataeian Dena Iran/Germany 2015
100 Min., OV with English subs
Followed by a discussion with Sina Ataeian Dena
Paradise is Sina Ataeian Dena’s debut feature film and the first in his Tehran trilogy about violence. At its center is a young woman who works as a teacher in a girls' school in the suburbs of Tehran. The film depicts the everyday pressures of patriarchy that inevitably transform the main character and continue to affect younger generations. Paradise was shot without the official permission of the Iranian government. The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 68th Locarno Film Festival. It was shown at numerous international film festivals and won further nominations and awards.
The program is part of Common Ground Presents, a series of events curated by Lisa Hoffmann and Adela Lovric, members of the initiative Common Ground at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Sina Ataeian Dena is an Iranian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. He studied film directing at Sooreh University in Tehran and Art and Media at UdK Berlin. His work spanning video installations, photographs, paintings and performances has been exhibited at venues such as Hamburger Bahnhof, Villa Merkel and Kunsthalle Baden Baden, among others. Since 2016, Sina has been a scholar at the Goethe Institute. He is currently lecturing at UdK Berlin, DFFB Berlin and Film Universität Potsdam.
