Exhibition duration: 18-28 January 2011
Opening hours: Monday – Friday: 14.00-21.00, Saturday: 14.00-18.00

Beton7 presents works of contemporary video artists and film makers. This month Beton7 presents two films by Angela Melitopoulos from the collection of Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art.

Passing Drama
Director: Angela Melitopoulos
Germany, 1999, 66 min

Synopsis: "Passing Drama describes the auditory picture conveyed in my family of a migration that finally leads to guest workers in Germany, earlier passing through the stage of forced labor under National Socialism, and first describing the exodus of the Greeks from Asia Minor. In the video, the fleeing movement lasting for three generations and traversing four countries is constructed from the very short fragments of incisive voice melodies that I put together from long interviews with the refugees in my father’s village. The sentences of the “stone generation,” as the refugees from Asia Minor were called in Greece, compose a collective recollection, the memory of a scattered community that withstood the policies of suppression of all the nation states they had to deal with. Passing Drama sketches the interweaving of a narration in which “forgetting is never merely individual. Every forgetting mixes with the forgetting of the past world and combines with it in countless, uncertain, shifting connections in ever new monstrosities.“

The Language Of Things
German title: Die Sprache der Dinge
Director: Angela Melitopoulos

Germany, 2006, 2007, 33 min

Synopsis: An attempt to translate Walter Benjamin's theory "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man" into a montage using images from Tokyo's hightech amusement parks and artificial environments: precisely calculated acceleration and merry-go-round machines, sophisticated wave pools affecting bodies with promethic rhythms – how does the language of man and the language of things read in relation to the industrial development of hightech amusement parks and the calculability of sky-reaching affects? (Angela Melitopoulos) „There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents on language as such and on the language of man.“ (Walter Benjamin: "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man")

Angela Melitopoulos, artist in the time-based arts, realizes video-essays, installations, documentaries and sound pieces and curates exhibitions and seminars. Her work focuses on duration and mnemonic micro-processes in documentation. She studied fine Arts with Nam June Paik. Her work was awarded and shown on many international festivals, exhibitions and museums (Antonin Tapies Foundation Barcelona, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, Manifesta 7, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum New York, among others). She is collaborating in political networks in Europe and Turkey and publishes theoretical articles on her artwork and on mnemopolitics. She is currently teaching in the University of Arts Berlin.

Websites:
http://Liminalzones.kein.org
www.videophilosophy.de
http://translate.eipcp.net/

In cooperation with ARSENAL-Institute for Film and Video Art

Media sponsor: Culturenow.gr