19 Jul 2008

cinemaniac 2008

CINEMANIAC 2008

Babette Mangolte – Aneks Gallery

Ana Hušman / Dora katanic – MMC Gallery

curated by: Branka Bencic / Anke Kempkes



MMC Luka , Istarska 30, Pula, Croatia

20 July – 10 August 2008



The Cinemaniac exhibition is the title of a sidebar program organized as part of the Pula Film Festival / Croatia since 2002. The exhibition presents innovations and ideas concerning the presentation of film and video projects in the context of a gallery, for which the infrastructure of the film festival provides a contextual and organizational platform.



From the very beginning, the exhibition has understood an active exploratory context which enables the presentation of works of art. It is a meeting place in which social, cultural, technological, media, and aesthetic aspects are integrated, as intersections on which art, artists, institutions, and the audience meet and create new forms of cooperation. The exhibition tackles the issues of the relationship between film and visual arts by presenting recent Croatian and international production, as well as anthological videos, experimental films and multimedia installations.



Apart from an independent exhibition presenting for the first time the work of Babette Mangolte (Aneks Gallery) in Croatia, the MMC Gallery presents two artists of the younger generation – Ana Hušman, winner of this year's Days of the Croatian Film, and Dora Katanić, final year student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Their work is linked with a certain aspect of their attitude towards social norms and culture codes, as well as inclination towards citations and film references.



One Song a Day Takes Mischief Away painting cycle by Dora Katanić parts from the text on which the script for the film with the same name was based, and which is part of our popular culture and film heritage. Ana Hušman's installation includes some of the movie props used during the shooting of the film Lunch and creates an atmosphere of a bourgeois saloon – living room. Furthermore, the use of humour and criticism for the interpretation of etiquette in the film ironizes rules for good manners.



Babette Mangolte



Babette Mangolte was born and raised in France. As a cinematographer, director and photographer, she has been present in the contemporary art, film, dance, theatre and performance scene since the 1970s. In the course of her move to New York City Mangolte started directing films based on experimental narrative in her first features What Maisie Knew (1975), The Camera: Je, La Camera: I (1977) and in the two short films (NOW) and Richard Serra Film Portrait (1976). In the following decades she continued with conceptual documentaries in e.g. Sky in Location (1982) and Les Modeles de Pickpocket (2003).



From the beginning of her practice on, Babette Mangolte did groundbreaking camera work in her collaborations with film director Chantal Akerman and performance artist Yvonne Rainer. In 1978 she directed the legendary dance performance film Watermotor (1978) shooting the solo of New York dancer Trisha Brown with a special dramatization of filmic time.

In her photographic work of the 1970s Mangolte focused on an intellectually and artistically invested style of performance documentation, interacting through her still camera with such characteristic and varying artists such as Richard Foreman and Robert Whitman coming from experimental theater and (minimal) performance protagonists Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and many others. The collaborative spirit of the time is further reflected in the incident that Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass and other personalities of the Soho scene of these days appeared as actors in Mangolte's own debut What Maisie Knew, portraying scenes of 'conceptual intimacy'.



Mangolte's work has widely been contextualized within the framework of institutional exhibitions presenting New York's dance, performance, and theatre scene and it is precisely her 'anthological' photographs that enabled generations to familiarize themselves with the work of the aforementioned artists. Her film work has been presented in numerous international film festivals and museum's film programs, e.g. at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. A new film installation of the artist recently premiered at the Berlin Biennial 5.



The independent Babette Mangolte presentation as part of the cinemania[c] exhibition organized within the 55th Pula Film Festival is the first presentation of the works of this special artist in Croatia. The exhibition includes her early films and photographs from the mid-1970s in which she explores the relationship between photography and film, as well as space, film language and subjectivity construction.



The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Anke Kempkes and New York based BROADWAY1602, a gallery representing the archive and work of Babette Mangolte.