21.02. – 14.03
[ 07:00-24:00 Everyday ]
AFI: SOLIDARITY #5
Artists’ Film International is a partnership of 15 international organisations that celebrates moving-image. Every year, each organisation selects a film from an artist connected to their region, based on a collectively agreed theme.
Branching out from the theme of SOLIDARITY, the films selected reflect on the act of coming together; in friendship, community and resistance.
Common to all these works is an exploration of labour often rendered invisible by those in power. They explore those who are impacted and the historic and contemporary ramifications of this power imbalance.
Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst many Black Boxes
Aarti Sunder, 2023 (Selected by Project 88 Mumbai)
22 mins
Ghost Cut draws from conversations with remote workers, contracted through the Mechanical Turk platform and their relationship with its politics and the varying levels of transparencies and opacities that make the platform what it is. Focusing on the backend of AI and machine learning processes, Sunder asks what kind of (human) labour is required for the smooth functioning of an automation? Who does this backend labour, where does it take place, and what does it entail?
Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India (Chennai). She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics.
The Fine Line
Mary Sullivan, 2022 (Selected by Crawford Art Gallery, Cork)
4:10 mins
The Fine Line depicts the resilient work of island women that often goes unnoticed while also taking into consideration of what goes unseen behind closed doors and in one’s head.
Mary Sullivan (1968) is a visual / performance artist living on Bere Island, working with a variety of mediums including film, installation, performance and sculpture. Her most recent work, The Hold, documents the lives of twenty-four Bere Island residents throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. A graduate of TU Dublin BA (Hons) Visual Art (Sherkin Island), Mary Sullivan received the RDS Taylor Art Award for her work At Home, At War in 2018.
Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you
Milica Rakić, 2021 (Selected by Cultural Center of Belgrade, Serbia)
20 mins
Rakić’s experimental film focuses on the issue of female emancipation in post-war Yugoslavia, and on the critique of patriarchal coded interpretations – both in the historical and contemporary context. The observations of the artist’s alter ego friend Rakič, performed in tandem with the art historian and performer Vladimir Bjeličić, are contrasted with archival materials related to the activities of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front. Through the leftist-utopian narrative of women’s emancipation, the artist develops her own model of criticism, pointing to revolutionary action and the creation of a new utopia, without which there is no art.
Milica Rakić was born in 1972 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She has presented her work in 30 solo and more than 400 group exhibitions in the country and abroad A member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, her work examines the way in which language and culture form personal identity.
We are grateful for funding from Tromsø Kommune and Norsk Kulturrådet to build and programme KINOBOX and support from Tromsø Havn/Havneterminalen in housing it. This project would not have been possible without the help and support of Tromsø Kunstforening and Polar Film Lab.