Preview
BEIRUT: Compared to other
towns on the eastern Mediterranean coast, Beirut often seems
like a clearinghouse of festivals. More of these are dedicated
to the moving image, whether film for video art, than any
other medium. The International Festival of Film and Creative
Video: New images in movement (known by its French-language
acronym, FIFVC) is among the newest of these gatherings,
certainly the one with the longest name.
The brainchild of Ricardo
Mbarkho, a Lebanese video artist and instructor at ALBA (the
Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts), FIFVC is a sort of festival of
festivals or, more accurately, a festival of curators. Rather
than programming a selection of film and video art, Mbarkho's
team invites a selection of institutional and freelance
curators from around Europe and Lebanon to select works for
screening and discussion.
As its title suggests,
FIFVC's participants are interested in experimental film,
video and new media art - a catch-all phrase signifying
various technologically mediated forms, ranging from
conceptual to virtual art, performance to installation, that
may use computer graphics and animation, the internet,
interactive technologies or robotics.
FIFVC's 2008 guest list is
wide and varied. The festival opens Tuesday evening with a
pair of screening-presentations featuring Per Platou and
Alfred Rotert.
Platou is a Norwegian
multi-media artist and curator. Among the several creative
hats he wears is director of the Production Network for
Electronic Arts in Norway (PNEK), which facilitates the
production of electronic art in that country. His lecture,
"Media Art in Norway Today," will be illustrated by video art
generated in his country between 1993 and 2007, both before
and since PNEK's founding in 2000.
Rotert is the head of EMAF,
the European Media Art Festival. Regarded as one of the most
influential forums of international media art, EMAF attracts
artists, curators, gallery-owners and specialist audiences for
its yearly overview of experimental film, installations and
the like. His presentation, "Alone amongst friends," is a
collection of international video art works (many of them
prize-winners), that appear to have all been made in
2005 and 2006.
For the balance of the
week, FIFVC will present a bouquet of talks, screenings and a
roundtable discussion addressing matters of new media and
video art in the global context.
"Stirrings Still" is a
program of art videos from Spain curated by Ricardo
Echevarria. "Seasonal Cuts," a selection of Dutch video art,
is co-curated by independent curator Nat Muller and Bart
Rutten - whose several gigs include curator at the Stedelijk
Museum and adviser at the Impakt festival.
On the third evening of the
festival, ALBA professor Ghada Waked will present her lecture
"Des morts a la criee," an essay about photojournalistic
practice in Lebanon during the summer 2006 war, and
specifically the compulsion Lebanese felt to display the
bodies of their slain children on camera.
Romano Fattorossi, the
founder of Milan's INVIDEO (the International Exhibition of
Video Art and Cinema and Beyond), will present "Beyond the
mimetic image. The wabi-sabi image. Original characters and
search of identity." A lecture on representational and
non-representational film, it will be followed by a selection
of international short films screened at INVIDEO from 1988 to
2007. Lebanon's own "... Ne. a Beyrouth" festival will then
screen highlights from last year's edition of the festival.
Abdo Nawar, Lebanese
theater and film director and administrator of the SHAMS art
collective, will discuss the impact of digital tools upon the
creative process with his talk, "Artist, grab the Multimedia."
Dieter Wieczorek, director of Paris' Festival International
Signes de Nuit, will precede a screening of a selection of his
festival's shorts with the talk "The cultural potentialities
of cinematographic and audiovisual production: what it is and
what it could be." - The Daily
Star
FIFVC runs from May 6-9
at the Auditorium of ALBA, the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts,
in Sin al-Fil. Sessions runs from 6-11:45 p.m. For more
information, call +961 1 480 056 or see www.fifvc.com
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