02/18/2020
Highlights include the screening in 35mm and 16mm at the Filmoteca de Navarra of the four shorts making up Tacita Dean's programme
The contemporary focuses spotlight monographic programmes of artists who work with the moving image and that are rarely featured at non-fiction festivals. Filmmakers like Guy Sherwin, César Vayssié and Iván Argote have headlined Punto de Vista’s contemporary focuses in previous years.
Featured this year are the Mexican-based Belgian Francis Alÿs, Briton Tacita Dean and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz from Puerto Rico, with sessions where they will be showing their latest work.
Francis Alÿs was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1959 and studied architecture. In 1986 he moved to Mexico City, where he has lived and worked ever since. Art, architecture and social practice converge in his work. He explores everyday life through public actions, installations, performance art, video, painting and drawing. He himself has described his work as a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors and parables. Across different media, Alÿs presents his distinct sensibility towards anthropological and political concerns; and probes urbanity, spatial justice and land-based poetics. He contrasts geological and technological time, and examines individual memory and collective mythology. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London, MoMA, New York, and the Venice Biennial.
Two programmes will be screened: the feature-length “Sandlines. The Story of History”, recently premiered at the Sundance festival, and the shorts “Reel-Unreel”, “The Silence of Ani”, “Children’s Games #10 / Papalote”, “Children’s Games #12 / Sillas” and “Children’s Games #16 / Hopscotch”.
Tacita Dean. “The films, drawings and other works by British artist Tacita Dean are extremely original. Her film portraits express something that neither painting nor photography can capture. They are purely film. And while Dean can appreciate the past, her art avoids any kind of academic approach. Dean‘s art is carried by a sense of history, time and place, light quality and the essence of the film itself. The focus of her subtle but ambitious work is the truth of the moment, the film as a medium and the sensibilities of the individual.” - The Frith Street Gallery.
A programme will be screened featuring the shorts “His Picture in Little”, “Providence”, “Edwin Parker (Cy)” and “Portraits”. The screening will be in 35mm and 16mm at the Filmoteca de Navarra.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist whose expanded moving-image work is entangled with Boalian theater, experimental ethnography and feminist thought. She tends to work with non-actors, and incorporate improvisation into her process. Her recent work is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, and on everyday poetic work in the Caribbean. Recent solo exhibitions include "Gosila" in Der Tank, Basel; "Rodarán cabezas" in Espacio Odeón, Bogotá; "That which identifies them, like the eye of the cyclops at Western Front"; "A Universe of Fragile Mirrors" at the PAMM in Miami and "Song Strategy Sign" at the New Museum. Recent group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2017, New York; Prospect 4, New Orleans; 8th Contour Biennale, Mechelen; Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie, CAPC-Bordeaux. She has received the Herb Alpert Arts Award, and a 2015 Creative Capital visual artist grant.
A programme will be screened featuring the shorts “Gosila”, “Marché Salomon”, “Matrulla” y “Oneiromancer”.
