WHAT IS

curated by Kim Donaldson, 21th of August, Scala

What is Australia like? There are those that are interested in sport, those that are political, those that like to travel, those that like to just sit and watch, others who don’t mind waiting and those that like to do. There are also those who are interested in popular culture, others who are into architecture and others still who are into sci-fi or environmental issues. There is also a lot of space and it never really gets cold.
This program is not about narratives but about what is.

Afterwards
Becker reads Kaurismäki



Marbo Becker, acclaimed actor, director and curator for Directors Lounge reads from Aki Kaurismäki´s I Hired a Contract Killer. With musical accompaniment.

expand for details



WHAT IS

Artists: Sanja Pahoki, OSW, Brie Trenerry, Lyndal Jones, Laresa Kosloff, Taree Mc Kenzie, Janenne Eaton, Sue Dodd, Kim Donaldson, Jo Scicluna, Russell Kitchin, Jarrah de Kuijer and Santina Amato. 80 min

program starts at 9pm, doors open 8pm

See you at the Scala, Berlin, Friedrich Str. 112 A, 1st floor

Thobias Faeldt

Thobias Faeldt collects photographs and compiles them, like notes in a diary, into stories and narratives. It is never clear whether they are his own images and experiences or simple collations of found imaginery. Together they culminate in a one fictional year of a life, Year One.

i heart photograph: this photo takes what looks like a snapshot and makes the viewer slow down and think about what he or she is looking at. to what extent is this planned in advance and what is the role of staging in your work? is suggesting a narrative important to you, and if so, how do you bring it into your photographs?

thobias faeldt: none of the pictures from my series, ‘year one,’ are planned or staged—they’re always snapshots—but i try to frame the picture so you don't know where it's taken and you don't get any geographic information; no answers are given.

maybe it will kill the picture when i tell you this, but the cabbage picture is taken in my girlfriend klara's old apartment and she is watching a swedish criminal tv-series called "lasermannen" (a very good series based on a true story about a serial killer in sweden in the beginning of the '90s). when klara watches movies she can't do anything else—she is totally in it—and that's why she has those mysterious eyes. she was also into eating cabbage as a snack during this time.









I take thousands of pictures but i always stick to shooting only one frame of every photo 'cause i don't know how to choose otherwise. and i can't look at the pictures directly after i have taken them because if i do that i have such a strong feeling of the moment when i took it. it can only be a "picture" for me when the feelings from the moment are gone and all that is left is the picture as you see it. then i can choose. i'm always looking for pictures that have more than one layer of feeling. when i found the cabbage picture i felt sadness, happiness, and humor, so i chose it. so yes; suggesting a narrative is the most important thing for me in my work.

i see suggesting a narrative as the moment of build up in a story. the story comes with the pictures that, together, make something to be told; i make up the story afterwards.

when the moment of sensation is gone (the reason to take the picture in the first place) i look at it again to see if it has potential to be something more, not just a nice/sad/humorous moment but something that is a combination of it all together.

Interview taken from I heart photograph





















Thobias Faeldt . Year One

Gatochy's "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

The "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award, created by Mariana Pinheiro of Gatochy-fame, is a way to counter-attack Blogger's censorship of erotic blogs, by drawing attention to the fact that many of these have quality content. More and more often you can´t visit fine blogds without the ridiculous splash screen by google/blogger that states that "Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is objectionable...". This stupid content warning suggest in it´s quiete objectionable wording that porn, hate or racism lurk behind, where instead engaged bloggers present fine art that may (OMG) contain nudity.

I wish there was this list of sites censored by Blogger. I'd bet good money that they are ALL, without exception, censored for sexual content, and that not a single one is racist, or homophobic, or anything else like that would actually be a good reason for considering it offensive.
Mariana Pinheiro


expand to meet the first four laureates of the "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award.

Gatochy's first "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

art nudes



The internet has really influenced fine art photography in that the visual vernacular of pornography is being increasingly referenced. Sometimes the references are ironic and critical, sometimes celebratory, and sometimes fine art photographers shoot work that is simply pornographic. This is particularly true of ‘fetish’ photography, as it is by nature full of photographic potential. Psychologically, it’s about power relationships, sexual politics, and violence. Visually, it’s got great dark moody themes, shiny latex and all the various accoutrements that go along with it. Nonetheless, I seldom post that type of work, unless the photography is exceptional

Michael Barnes art nudes

Gatochy's second "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

Au carrefour étrange



My last blog has been censored because there were a pic of Brassaï when you could see a tit… a 1930’s pic with no pornographic content at all… and I didn’t want to delete the picture… So this time I prefered to anticipate the censors…it’s just SAD but I prefer to do that that to see hundreds hours of work disappear in 5 seconds…To describe my site in english is complicated… let’s say that this place exists to show that connections exist between surrealism, erotic popular expressions, science-fiction, B-movies etc… And this is a crossroad where all this cultures can be found. To me the crossroad is a place of magic and creativity.

Losfeld, Au carrefour étrange

Gatochy's third "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

fine Nudes



This blog was from the beginning on something like my personal collection of fine nude photography, something like the book I would print if I had the chance to do so, or the pieces I would like to hang on my walls. It is my very own definition of what I believe to be art in this specific genre. This definition of art is not only very personal, it is also something that is beyond language, something that cannot be defined by tags, labels or rules.Anyone who tries to approach art by using terms like objectionable or NSFW hasn´t understand anything at all.

fine Nudes

Gatochy's fourth "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

A Flower A Day



photo by Ray Bidegain

This award is my way of showing solidarity with fellow bloggers whose sites have been censored by Blogger for puritanical reasons that, in my view, are just not justifiable. It's common for bloggers who have been tagged with the dreaded "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" splash screen to lose at least half of their usual visitors, because people just assume the screen must be there for a reason -- a good reason. If this award can in some way help to dispel that prejudice, I'll be happy.
Mariana Pinheiro

this just in

Madonna´s Home Destroyed By Jesus

Switzerland To Be Devoured By Black Hole

my inbox would be nothing without the spammers

Cities, Memory and Urban Development

China in Freiburg

Under Construction by Liu Zhenchen, 2007, 9 min

City planners decide to pull down parts of Shanghai’s old town in order to regenerate the city. Every year over hundred thousand families are forced to leave their homes and moveinto buildings on the edge of city. This video is a 2 and 3 dimentional flight across the now destroyed living areas of Shanghai which shows how random and brutal decisions can affect peoples’s lives.
Liu Zhenchen is a video artist who studied at Le Fresnoy art school who lives and works in China and France.

Marina Foxley, long time curator for Chinese independent cinema at Directors Lounge, is coming to Freiburg today (Tuesday) presenting a dedicated program of short documentaries at the Kommunales Kino. The subject deals with cities in China (Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou) and the urban development. Included are some of this years highlights of the February Lounge, like Under Construction and The Bridge.
Don´t miss this screening if you are in town

“The Bridge” is a non-narrative documentary on the border to the cinematic essay, comparable perhaps to the films NYC and Belgrade films we had seen on Monday, but with a decisive political undertone. The film's subject is the gigantic Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, which is not only a important part of Nanjing's infrastructure, but also a kind of monument to the Chinese People's Republic's engineering potential. Xu Xin's film, though, ignores the heroic aspect of the bridge, focussing rather on small scenes of people somehow associated with the bridge or simply passing by, like a young tourist couple taking pictures, some workers whiling away time in their cabin or a man in a raincoat trying to cross bridge at a traffic light, which – judging from the display attached to the lights – is set to just 7 seconds, so crossing it within the allocated time frame and not getting stuck in the middle of the road seems like a veritable feat in itself. Obviously – besides taking pictures for your album –, the bridge is not intended for any kind of true interaction between architecture and the people; a problem often plaguing institutions and structures in political systems which have to put the identifier “People's” into their denomination, as the connection between “people” and “society” might be eventually overlooked otherwise. There is an irony to the social realist statue depicting the traditional warrior/worker/doctrinaire standing on the side of the bridge, shown at the beginning of the film – it should have rather been a miniature replica of the bridge itself, or maybe the Chinese mainland (think of Ai Weiwei's sarcastic “Map of China”, carved from the remnants of a destroyed historical temple), instead of any kind of even aesthetically & politically streamlined individual. Unsurprisingly, the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is a popular suicide venue in China; Xu Xiu states a number of 2000 people at the end of the film, a supposedly unauthorised but still shocking statistic.

Jacob Birken

expand for program and location details



Cities, Memory and Urban Development

Kommunales Kino, a film art house theater in Freiburg (in Germany), organizes a special evening on China on Tuesday, July the 22nd 2008 from 7:30pm. A program of recent short documentaries proposed by Fragments will be presented and the subject deals with cities in China (Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou) and the urban development. The screening will be followed by another screening of the film Fish and Elephant by Li Yu (2001).

Under Construction (Liu Zhenchen, 2007, 9 min)
Rice and Coins (MaiZi, 2007, 1 min)
Floating Memory (Liu Wei, 2001, 10 min)
Up and Down (Wang Wo, 2007, 12 min)
The Bridge (Xu Xin, 2007, 16 min)
Lead To (Zhao Dayong, 2007, 12 min)
Perform (MaiZi, 2007, 1 min)
Empty Room (Zhang Xuezhou, 2006, 5 min)

full program (pdf)


Kommunales Kino,
Urachstr. 40, 79102 Freiburg, Germany

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