[Neighborhood X.0]

[Neighborhood X.0]
An exhibition on the project ARTUP!
Media Art in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey

The exhibition [Neighborhood X.0] aims to rethink and re-evaluate common perceptions and philosophical discourses on the topics of
"neighborhood" and "hospitality" by exploring the possibilities of a new art and language of neighborhood and hospitality. For a detailed
curatorial statement, please see the end of this document.

[Neighborhood X.0] is part of the media art project ArtUP!, initiated by
the Goethe-Institutes in Ankara, Athens and Sofia. The goal of ArtUP! is to inform on the media art scenes in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey and to
initiate collaborative media art projects between the three countries.

Location of the exhibition: Goethe-Institut Ankara
Date: 27.09.2012 – 03.11.2012
Additionally, the exhibition will be shown on the project’s website ArtUP!, scheduled to go online on September 27th, 2012

Curator: Ege Berensel, Ankara ([email protected])

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
(in alphabetical order, as by 30/08/2012)

Can Altay (Turkey)
“Foxes” / 2008 / 10‘14‘‘ / Single-Channel-Video
Can Altay's “Foxes” video is a becoming-animal, a neighborhood
investigation. Becoming-animal is not imitating an animal, nor
identifying with it. Becoming-animal is about obtaining molecular
particles from existing forms; is about establishing movement and rest,
speed and slowness relations that are getting closer as much as possible
to what's happening between those particles, and that are mediating
becoming. It is a desire process, it is producing a principle of
neighborhood. His video goes through a becoming-fox while intending to
record Foxes visiting people's living areas to find some food. This is not
video imitating fox, but inventing a metaphor. Video, with the speed of
fox's image, forms something that has to do with the fox. As a result,
the idea of neighborhood comes true which makes the utterance of
where the border lies between the animal and human impossible.

Personal Cinema (Greece)
The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game / Online Game
The Making of Balkan Wars: The Documentary, duration 79’35’’
The making of Balkan wars: The game is a Personal Cinema project
primarily focused on the social and cultural issues within the Peninsula
and on the creation of a network between artists, art critics, writers and
curators from South eastern Europe. It presents new media works
created by the 51 participating artists that investigate the Balkan
territory and way of life. In the real-time of global networks, and in
video games, the simplification of cultures and history is itself a form of
violence. The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game is intended to
counteract the sensational spectacle of war presented by the media by
deconstructing stereotypes, focusing on the distortion of identities, and
revising the dominant logic of explanation.

George Drivas (Greece)
“Empirical Data” / 2010 / 34’ / Single-Channel HD Video
“Empirical Data” is a film that deals with someone’s relationship with an
environment that is “alien” and often hostile in a sense. The script
comes from the personal experience of David Malteze, an actor of
Georgian origin who nowadays lives and works in Greece. Τhe film
reproduces on a fictional basis, his arrival as an immigrant, and his
trajectory from entering the country to taking up acting, an event that
eventually led to his professional recognition and subsequent
“integration” into the Greek society. Malteze himself plays the main
part.

Genco Gülan (Turkey)
“Frigo” / 2008 /26’32’’, “La Mer” / 2008 / 5’50’’ / 2-Channel Video
Installation
Taken to sea in leaking boats or stowed away in airless containers,
refugees and migrants around the world risk their lives every day in
desperate attempts to find safety or a better life. 2 Videos tell us a story
of unauthorized border crossing to Bulgaria and Greece from Turkey.

Oktay İnce (Turkey)
“Behind The Mountain” / 2005 / 27’ / Double-Screen Video Installation
Timescapes/Zaman manzaraları is a product of a collective video work
and a collective video montage project which researches the non-linear
fiction possibilities with the purpose of creating new narration styles for
the documentaries and dramas through internet. “Behind the Mountain”
is edited with the common images picked up by the artists from various
countries located between Germany and Turkey along the axis of the
“old” Europe between Berlin and Ankara, the two cities which used to
regulate the political alliance strategies in Europe before the World War
I. The collective work created by Angela Melitopoulos from Cologne,
Freddy Viannelis from Athens, Dragana U. Zarevac from Belgrade and
videA from Ankara and Ege Berensel’s images will be produced. Behind
the Mountain aims at deterritorializing the images and languages
rootless and stateless on this axis.

Anna Lascari (Greece)
“Landscape – Tones” / 2005 / Video – Documentary / 05’32’’
Organized in omni-positioned vignettes, “Landscape-Tones” documents
an intersection in central Athens, Greece, where immigrants from the
Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent
congregate to socialize and conduct business in their new homeland. In
slow motion, vivid images of buses intersperse to illustrate the
transporting of dreams and desires, while the animated alphabet and
the voiceover express both the desire of those who immigrated to
Athens, and Lascari's proclivity to return to her original homeland.

Jenny Marketou (Greece)
“Looking Out Of My Window” / 2012 / Single-Channel Video
The video is comprised of a database of streaming videos, which have
been captured online from “you tube” and other social networks, using
an application that has been specially designed to randomly capture
online and to manage the videos data into a metadata of moving
images. Each streaming video features “neighborhoods” from a diverse
range of geographical locations, where the past years have witnessed a
wave of global unrest in which the architecture of violence, protests,
fear, militant and police repression, control and brutality have
transformed into “war zones”. My impulse to produce an “open form”
video without narrative is a reversal and a formal transgression to the
“control system” of military and control societies and specifically on how
demonstrations and artistic practice are not isolated nor disconnected,
but can share a similar language of resistance.

Ivan Moudov (Bulgaria)
“Abfall” / 2009 / 4-Channel Video Installation / 10‘ 53‘‘
During his six months' stay in Switzerland, Ivan Moudov started his own
waste removal business. Not unlike a garbage mafia group, his
enterprise exported household trash to Germany, contributing to the
cleanliness of Swiss territory. Moudov collected his clients' garbage bags
at their homes, loaded the bags into his car and crossed the border. On
German territory he disposed of the bags in the containers of rest areas
along the motorway and then drove back to Switzerland.
For 10 CHF per bag, Moudov’s clients not only bypassed local waste
disposal laws but also participated in an artwork.

Zeyno Pekünlü (Turkey)
“Balkan Shadows” / 2012 / One-Channel-Video / 20’’ / loop
“While traveling in Balkans I was mostly impressed by the fact that the
history of one country is always overlapping with the next one.
Independence day of the one country is probably the mourning day of
the other. The shadows of history are transparently crossing the borders
and bounding the countries in a weird way. 'Balkan Shadows' is a video
work formed by a collection of shadow pictures from Balkans.”

Alper Şen (Turkey)
“Poison in the Soil” / 2012 / Six-Channel Video Installation
Since 1985, more than 2000 civilians died and 5000 civilians were
wounded because of the landmines and free explosive materials in the
southeastern region in Turkey. Currently it is suspected that
approximately 1.000.000 landmines are still under the soil in this region.
This video installation was prepared from interviews with civil victims,
wounded from the landmines and free explosive materials in this region.
After generations, those landmines will be also evaluated as the most
visible proof of the poison against the people's coexistence in this
region, which we were supposed to be proud of.
(Camera: Alper Şen, Fethi Kahraman, Oktay İnce, Veysi Altay, Editing:
Alper Şen, artıkişler)

Raycho Stanev (Bulgaria)
“The Great Excursion” / 2009 / Interactive Installation
Interactive installation contains memories of Bulgarian Turks, hundreds
of thousands of whom were expelled from Bulgaria in 1989. A shameful,
hidden chapter of European history, almost unknown in the West, it is a
reminder of what happens when DNA, rather than our shared humanity,
is the focus of attention. The Great Excursion gives a fascinating and
disturbing insight into what happens to a community when politics takes
over from reality. Is it where you're from, or where you're at, that
matters?

Krassimir Terziev (Bulgaria)
“Battles of Troy” / 2005 / 51' / experimental documentary
“Battles of Troy” is a study on the internal economy of today’s globalized
cinema production, seen through the eyes of the lowest unit in the
hierarchy of movie making - the extras. On focus here is the Warner
Bros motion picture “Troy” (2004), and more specifically - the secret life
of the extras in the movie. The project is based on the fact that 300
men from the “specialized” extras in “Troy” are Bulgarians, who have
been flown to the Mexican coast to spend 3 months in training and
shooting massive battle scenes as background of the feats of arms of
Eric Bana and Brad Pitt.
This background is the subject of “Battles of Troy”.

Borjana Ventzislavova (Bulgaria)
“We Shall Overswim” / 2008 / 15-Channel Video Installation with 2-
Channel-Sound
Can European identity be defined? What parameters and elements
dictate our understandings of 'European identity'?
The specific questions on which the work is based are about the subject:
'at home'. What does it mean to 'feel at home'? What or where could be
'at home'? Does a geographical location or national belonging today
define 'at home'? Is it possible that identity is affected by nationality in
times of global transformation and migration processes? These issues,
seen from the perspective of the migrant, are central to this work.
15 stories and 15 languages have been re-distributed so that each one
is performed by different person and in a different language than the
accordant 'original'.