Portrait of Karl Marx As A Young God | Gernot Wieland | 2010 | 0:59 min.
   

The film "Portrait of Karl Marx as a young god" consists of collages and drawings which are presented as a slideshow with voiceover comments. The images visualize specific reminiscences from recent German history, while the voiceover extends and counteracts these images with a multitude of interpretations. These 'fictitious miniatures' are treated as documentations which never took place, but which just as well could have happened.

Gernot Wieland (b. 1968) lives and works in Berlin. He works with film, lecture performances, drawings and objects in order to
examine psychological conditions in society and in human beings. His work has appeared in exhibitions at Musée du chateau des ducs de Wurtemberg, Montbéliard; Kaleidoscope Project Space, Milano; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Liverpool Biennale; 27. Kasseler Dokumentar- und Filmfestival, Kassel; Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin; CEAAC - Centre Européen d´Actions Artistiques Contemporaines, Strasbourg, EASTinternational09, Contemporary Art Norwich, Norwich; Kunstmuseum Thurgau, Ittingen. His work will be on show in CCB, Lisboa and Essays&Observations, Berlin.


 
  Convite para Jantar com o Camarada Stalin | Ricardo Alves Junior | 2007 | 10:00 min.
   
Two elderly sisters spend their last days together. Between dreams and death, Olga and Marilu await a dinner guest.

Ricardo Alves Junior was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Graduated in Film Direction at Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His first work, the short movie "Material Bruto" (Raw material), received over 10 awards at international festivals, besides being selected for the "Video Zone"and the International Video Art Biennial of Israel and VideoBrasil. "Convite para jantar com camarada Stalin" (Invitation to dinner with Comrade Stalin, 2007), Ricardo's second work, won the award for Best Experimental Short Film at the International Short Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro; Best Short Film, Best Director and Photography at the 40th Film Festival of Brasilia, plus Special Mention "Film of Tomorrow" at the International Festival of Short Films, in Belo Horizonte. He's participated in over 20 international film festivals such as Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Karloy Vary, Paris Cinema, Munich, and Torino Film Festival. In 2011 Ricardo released his third film entitled "Permanences", official selection at Cannes Critic's Week.


  Birth of a Nation | Daya Cahen | 2010 | 10:54 min.
   

Fascinated by mass psychology and indoctrination, Dutch artist Daya Cahen has been making work in Russia for years now. In 2006, she went looking for Stalin`s grandson in The Stalin that Was Played by Me, and in 2008 she got the rare opportunity to film in a summer camp of Putin`s youth movement for the film Nashi. This time around, Cahen goes to Cadet School Number 9, a unique military academy in Mosow, where girls age 11-17 learn how to become the ideal Russian patriot and the ideal Russian woman. She does not interview anyone, but tells the story by placing as many as six different images on the screen at the same time. We see girls doing their hair, cooking, ironing, marching and learning to use weapons. The footage reveals various aspects of their personalities while simultaneously posing the question of how all those aspects can be seen independently of one another. While they sing the praises of the great Russian nation, we cannot help but notice the contrast between military indoctrination and youthful innocence. Does patriotism require us to renounce any form of independent thought and action? Do these girls really know what they are doing, and is that even possible at their age?

Daya Cahen was born in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). She makes photographs, videos and video installations. She studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (2002-2006) and was selected in 2009 as one of the 4 most promising recent graduates to have the opportunity to present her work at "Rietveld Arsenale" during the Venice Biennale. Cahen's work revolves around propaganda, indoctrination and and the manipulative powers of the media.

 
  40 000 000 | Zbyniek Baladrán | 2010 | 7:23 min.
   

40,000,000 is a short video essay linked content-wise to the artist's older films Socio-fiction and The Theory of Work. Using similar visual means, the artist contemplates the undercurrents of capitalist society and his personal role in all its self-motion.  A starting point for the work is Jan A. Ba?a's book We're Building a Country for 40 Million, a Fordist version of the future of First-Republic Czechoslovakia. In the video-essay the artist analyses on several levels the way capitalist society currently works. The motives of capitalism's hidden processes mix with individual desires and the trajectories of human beings, who, despite their singularity and apparent independence, are part of the system they help create. An important line of narrative is also the level of drawing attention to the filmmaking process itself, conceived as instructions for thinking. A contingent space in which thoughts and images mix with personal subjective feelings.
Zbyniek Baladrán (born 1973 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is an author, visual artist and curator. He studied art history at the Charles University Philosophical Faculty in Prague from 1992-1996, and from 1997-2003 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of visual communication. He is one of the co-founders and a curator of Galerie display, which was established in Prague in 2001, and in 2007 merged with tranzit.cz into tranzitdisplay, where he continues to oversee the exhibition program. Baladrán is part of the team of curators (Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Chamber of Public Secrets, and tranzit.org) for Manifesta 8, which will be held in Murcia, Spain in 2010.

 
  Workers Leaving the Googleplex | Andrew Norman Wilson | 2011 | 11:00 min.
   

Workers Leaving the GooglePlex investigates a top secret, marginalized class of workers at Google's international corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. As Andrew Norman Wilson documents the mysterious "yellow badge" Google workers, he simultaneously chronicles the complex events surrounding his own dismissal from the company. Workers Leaving the GooglePlex is a narrative video that sparks critical thought around issues of labor, capital and information in a time of global and corporate expansion.

Andrew Norman Wilson currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. Past exhibitions and presentations include the De Young Museum, The Banff Center, UCLA, UCSD, The Academy of Fine Arts Finland, The Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The TINT Arts Lab, threewalls Gallery, video_dumbo, The Abandon Normal Devices festival, and Extra Extra Gallery. He is a 2011 recipient of the Dedalus Foundation MFA fellowship and the Edward Ryerson Fellowship.

 
  The Tracks of my Tears 2 | Axel Petersén | 2011 | 14:00 min.
   
Saddam Hussein's palace is looted in Baghdad 2003. A red Ferrari Testarossa disappears from his garage. Years pass by and cars from the same garage are found around the world; some crashed, some in mint condition. The Testarossa is still out there, ghostriding through the neverending desert.

Axel Petersén, born in Stockholm 1979, is a story teller and a visual artist. Educated at FAMU, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and took his MFA at KKH, the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

 
  Imagine | Liselot Van der Heijden | 2011 | 2:00 min.
   


Liselot van der Heijden is a visual artist who produces installations, videos and photographs. From the Netherlands, she currently lives and works in New York.Recurring themes in van der Heijden's works are control and power of the gaze and 'Nature' as a cultural/political idea and anthropomorphic projection. Her work suggests that representations of nature reveal more about human beings, culture and ideology, than about nature itself.