16 Jul 2009

MMC LUKA (Pula, Croatia) presents Architecture and Film: subjective spaces

Jonas Dahlberg, Ra di Martino, Ursula Mayer, Damir Očko
Curator: Branka Benčić

Cinemaniac is a sidebar program of the Pula Film Festival since 2002. The exhibition presents innovations and ideas concerning the presentation of moving images - works of film and video in the gallery context, where the infrastructure of the film festival provides a contextual and organizational platform as well as collaborative model. The exhibition works as an active context that enables the presentation of works of art. It is a meeting place that integrates social, cultural, technological, media, and aesthetic aspects, a meeting point for art, artists, institutions, and the audience. It investigates the relationship between film and visual arts by presenting recent Croatian and international production, as well as anthological videos, experimental films and multimedia installations.

Playing with the tensions between the dimensions of time and space, film codes and conventions create the view and the world, object and illusion, whereas alternative, experimental and artist' film explores and deconstructs internal laws and relations towards outer formative structures. This year's cinemaniac exhibition tries to point to a specific relation between the moving images (film, video) and architecture, and the meanings they produce, as it is formed around the manners in which specific films, film motifs or sequences, represent a suggestive, psychological and symbolic quality of architecture. It is in fact the interplay of (modern) architecture and film (cinematographic representation). The space here is perceived as one of the basic means of expression and as the place where the meanings are structured , whereas film language, with its means of expression and syntactic principles, enables special understanding of both space and reality. The space is thus the scene of a specific dramatic happening, a historic event or a life setting presentation and it becomes the object of an autonomous visual experiment.

In the exhibited works by four artists - View Through a Park by Jonas Dahlberg, August 2008 by Ra di Martino, Interiors by Ursula Mayer and The Boy with a Magic Horn by Damir Očko – presented spaces represent performance scenes for open narrative forms – places where camera movements, ambiance, architectural structures, music and dialogue meet with the protagonists. Relations between architectural structures and the possibility of social interaction, irrespective of whether a human being - a fictional character is present or not, can be discerned. In the scenes with or without dialogue, just like in spaces void of people and their physical presence, the presence of a subject is coded through the view, by means of a camera's technical characteristic – the lens – the intruder, a watching eye. The camera becomes an illusion mechanism for the creation of a renaissance space, a movement compatible with human eye and the presentation ideology that revolves around the perception of a subject. The darkness of the cinema auditorium or the setting of a dimmed gallery space play with the voyeuristic imagination of the audience and accentuate the illusion of sneaking into a private world.