Expert | Jean-Luc Vilmouth | 2007 | 6:30 min.
		During a visit with Anchor Wat in Kampuchea, I met a young man who had had the luck to survive the explosion of an anti-personnel mine. He suggested that he might explain to me the different types of explosives and his own personnel experience. Jean-Luc Vilmouth is born in Creutzwald (Moselle) in 1952. He lives and works in Paris. Vilmouth has exhibited in galleries, museums, biennials and festivals internationally and is represnetd by Aline Vidal, Paris. Very early on, Vilmouth has been interested in issues relating to the origins of objects and, subsequently, in our relationship to the environment. In his work, an object in the source of an investigation of the human social construction: the artist explores the processes that generate meaning and value by establishing links –either formal or historical – between the various constituents of our everyday life. The “formal” reference may be borrowing from the ready-made. This is, however, the limit of the similarity that may exist between the work of Duchamp and that of Vilmouth. In a like manner, one could see references to minimal and conceptual art ; however, these might more be the result of a certain way of establishing new meaning with familiar references, and that is precisely the focus of Vilmouth’s work. In proposing other types of links between objects and context, he offers a different viewpoint on the relationship the “viewer” maintains with the objects on display.[...] (Benjamin Weil)
Dirty Pictures | John Smith | 2007 | 14:00 min.
		Episode 7 of Hotel Diaries, between Bethlehem and East Jerusalem: a hotel-room ceiling, a camera and the Palestinian territories. John Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. Since 1972 he has made over 40 film, video and installations works. His films have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world and awarded major prizes at film festivals in Leipzig, Oberhausen, Hamburg, Cork, Geneva, Palermo, Graz, Uppsala, Bangkok, Ann Arbor and Chicago. One-person presentations of his work include exhibitions at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), Pearl Gallery (London), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany) and retrospectives at the Venice Biennale and Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Regensburg and Winterthur international film festivals. John Smith is Professor of Fine Art at the University of East London.
Untitled | Kendel Bennett | 2008 | 5:00 min.
		A woman moving in the water and the gaze of a man, both seen from beneath the water, elaborated by the vectorizing force of sound, lead the viewer toward an effervescence of feeling – a desire for merge among the knowledge of separateness. Leighton Pierce uses film, video, and sound to create experiences in transformative time. He creates multi-channel site-specific installations as well as single channel works. His award-winning short films and videos have been exhibited in major art museums and film festivals throughout the world including The Whitney Biennial , The San Francisco, New York, and Rotterdam Film Festivals. He has had retrospectives at The Lincoln Center, The Cinémathèque française, Festival Nemo, and Pompidou Center in Paris, and at The Lisboa Bienal of Contemporary Art. Most recently, Pierce has been working with video installations that have been shown at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, Museé d’art contemporaine in Montréal, and at Boudin College Art Museum. A major 13 channel, 5500 sq. ft. video installation, Warm Occlusion, was presented in 2006 at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Pierce has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Camargo Foundation.
Acknowledgment #2 | Einat Amir | 2007 | 2:41 min.
		A lesbian Israeli artist is kissing a gay Palestinian man. The kissing act, that looks passionate at first, turns out to be awkward and artificial for its participants, and maybe even more so, for the viewers. The lengthy kiss is photographed in cyclical motion, like a quote from a romantic film, yet displaying difficulty and distress. As the kiss drags on, it becomes more and more disturbing to watch. This work deals with the Israeli – Palestinian conflict in a very personal way, ends up leaving the viewer confused and with contradictory feelings. Einat Amir was born in 1979 in Jerusalem, Israel. In 2004 she graduated from The Midrasha School of Art in Israel, where she was the recipient of several grants and a full fellowship from the Ministry of Education. She has exhibited her work widely in Museums and galleries in Israel, as well as in New York and London. She currently lives in New York, and will earn her MFA degree from Columbia University in 2009. She works primarily in video and engages with political questions of our day regarding sexuality and post colonialism. Despite the seriousness of these questions, her work often displays a humorous methodology.  Einat had also curated several shows and edited an Israeli Magazine regarding feminism in Israeli art.
It is springtime and I am still living in Cyprus | Lia Lapithi | 2008 | 2:00 min.
		The film shows glimpses of Ledra Street being a reflection of the recent history of Cyprus. Ledra Street is in the centre of the last divided city of Europe, Nicosia that had been closed off since 1963 and re-opened in spring 2008. An allegory on the way we live today is portrayed via the father and son cycling through the new check-point passage from one side of Ledra Street to the other. Cypriots are overall peace-loving people, in the film, the father and son do not sing in their local language, a reflection of how “adaptive” the Cypriots have had to become as a result of the millennia of the occupation of different forces and colonial powers. Lia LAPITHI Works in multi-media installations/video/photography in Nicosia, Cyprus www.lialapithi.com BA Art and Environmental Design UCSC, California, USA Mphil Art Lancaster University, UK Diploma of Architecture Canterbury Institute of Art and Design.
Recipe for marinated crushed olives | Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou | 2006 | 3:00 min.
		Local olives in Cyprus are prepared in this way as early as the Byzantine era. The film makes an ironic paradox between the Cyprus problem and the making of Crushed Olives; that it is split, salt has removed bitterness, and has been marinating since (1974). This recipe is filmed on a daily Cypriot newspaper with the following headings: a) The European parliament has obliterated the Cyprus problem, the Cyprus problem is not a priority, b) We are not as similar as we think… Lia LAPITHI Works in multi-media installations/video/photography in Nicosia, Cyprus www.lialapithi.com BA Art and Environmental Design UCSC, California, USA Mphil Art Lancaster University, UK Diploma of Architecture Canterbury Institute of Art and Design.
Electricity | Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou | 2006 | 2:30 min.
		Electricity is part of a Tetralogy of four interconnected short films on contemporary Cyprus. The films oscillate between narrative politics, archive documentary and the experimental. Electricity is a short experimental documentary starts with CyBC-radio music of Occupied Cyprus, continues with electricity manufacturing sounds and ends with an Ottoman military march beat. An experimental documentary of the islands separate identities, impregnated with my own personal sadness and disbelief; the last time I felt sad was when the largest flag in the world, 1000m, was placed in my back garden. The flag is on the North Pentadactylos Mountain, the Turkish National flag and has written underneath ‘so happy to be a Turk’ and in reverse colors is the ‘Turkish-Cypriot’ Republic flag. This flag all through every night at 8pm lights up and is extremely provocative to an unresolved Cyprus problem. [From 1963 to 1974 the Turkish Cypriots were given free electricity. This continued also after the invasion of the Turkish army in 1974 at a cost of US dollars343 million, even though apart from the Turkish Cypriots the consumers now included the Turkish occupation forces. The Cypriot authorities still supply the occupied areas and their army with their energy needs.] Lia LAPITHI Works in multi-media installations/video/photography in Nicosia, Cyprus www.lialapithi.com BA Art and Environmental Design UCSC, California, USA Mphil Art Lancaster University, UK Diploma of Architecture Canterbury Institute of Art and Design.
Horizon | Jesal Kapadia | 2006 | 2:30 min.
		The video begins with a poem written by the exiled Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, translated by the immigrant Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, and their passionate words laden with love for their respective homelands. I use this poem as an allegory of the disjuncture in the lives of the many immigrants who cannot escape the feeling of nostalgia and longing for their homeland while away. You ask me about that country, whose details now escape me, I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history. And should I visit it in memory, It would be as I would a past lover, After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion, with no fear of regret. I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy. Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Pakistani poet, born in India in 1911, d. 1984)
	Straight Stories - Part 1 | Bouchra Khalili | 2007 | 10:00 min.
		On both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, youngsters dream about life on the other side. Their ignorance and gullibility make the differences between dream and reality painfully clear. Whereas in ancient timesthe Mediterranean used to be a binding cultural factor, today it is a dividing line. The landscapes look similar, the dreams of the prospective travellers too, but migration between the first and third world is hampered by laws as well as social, cultural, and political complications. Bouchra Khalili (Morocco, 1975) is a video artist and photographer graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy. Exhibited her works in the La Vitrine gallery in Paris. In 2000, was invited by the Palais de Tokyo to produce the video “L'antichambre” (The Hall), exhibited in Paris and on the Palais de Tokyo website. At the end of 2002, there was an exhibition of her works “Appuntamento” (Appointment) and “A Rebours” (Back to Front). As a videomaker, she took part in Meetings Video/Plastic Art of Herouville, Meetings Paris/Berlin (2003); and in the Nights of the Shorts Seville, Spain, among others. She has also published texts in collective books. She currently lives in Paris where she studies Film at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and teaches Film History.
Borderline Disorder [1 to 6] | Gabriela Monroy | 2008 | 10:00 min.
		What do energized bunnies crossing the border, US border patrol uniforms made in Mexico and Mexicans training parkour have in common? A video-series about the U.S.–Mexican border and its immigration politics. Gabriela Monroy is a Mexican videoartist and video curator living and working in New York and Mexico City. In 2001 she received a Masters in Film and Video from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. In 2001 she was awarded the National Foundation for Culture and Art Fellowship for Young Emerging Artists. In 2002 she was selected with a four channel video installation, as part of the 10th National Biennal of Photography of Mexico. She continues working with interactive video installations as well as live video under the name MOSTRA in collaboration with Caspar Stracke since 2002. In 2004 they were awarded a NYSCA Film and Media Production Grant for the production of an Interactive video installation for cinema space. She has participated in exhibitions in Mexico, Europe, Korea and the US.