Artists' Film International: DIASPORA #2

Note: This film is shown at Kinobox, first floor, Prostneset Havneterminal, Tromsø.

Artists’ Film International is a partnership of 18 international organisations that celebrates moving-image. Every year, each organisation selects a film from an artist connected to their region, based on a collectively agreed theme. In 2023, this was Diaspora.

Branching out from the theme of DIASPORA, the films selected explore the act of dispersal, in relation to people, geographies, information and networks.

In this second programme, the films use individual perspectives as gateways to map ideas around systems of cultural belonging; thinking through both cultural creation and alienation. Further films will be screened at Kinobox in the spring.

Ships with goods and materials from all over the world bump the Bibby Challenge with their waves, Adnan Softić and Nina Softić, 2020, 12 mins (Selected by Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein)

The Bibby Challenge, where Adnan Softić once lived, was a hybrid of cruise ship and container ship that was anchored in Hamburg from 1993 to 2006 to house refugees. In this poetic video essay, Adnan Softić and Nina Softić explore issues of exterritoriality, tracelessness, and the struggle of “unwanted” people to find solid ground. The work also reconstructs life on the ship, which is addressed as both a place and a non-place; a floating, highly mobile vessel that knows how to navigate the boundaries between national and international waters.

The artist duo, Adnan Softić and Nina Softić, are based in Berlin and Sarajevo. Their collaborative practice explores the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and ecology, focusing on phenomena such as problems of communicability, exile, extraterritoriality, invisibility, culture, and violence. Their artistic work process is research-based, interdisciplinary, and a hybrid of poetic and philosophical- scientific explorations.

House-They-Europe, three songs from the opera performance I Don’t Know That Word ...Yet, Dejan Kaludjerović, 2022/3, 20 mins (Selected by Cultural Centre of Belgrade)

House-They-Europe presents 3 parts of the ongoing operatic project I Don’t Know That Word…Yet. Over 10 years Kaludjerović has interviewed children from different socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, across 7 different countries, on political issues such as social exclusion and inclusion, foreigners, language, isolation, war, money, poverty and work.

The assemblage of witty and insightful answers from the children become the ideal material for the operatic arias. Through musical combination and repetition, they offer unexpected outbursts of lucidity, humour, poignancy and even ominousness, becoming a litmus test of the societies and our current moment in time.

Dejan Kaludjerović (b. Belgrade, Yugoslavia) studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna in the class of Erwin Wurm and gained an MA in visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 2004. In 2017 he co-founded a Vienna based arts and cultural organisation Verein K.

Artists’ Film International (AFI) is a partnership of 18 international organisations that celebrates moving image: Bag Factory, Johannesburg; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Belgrade Culture Centre, Belgrade; Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan (CCAA); Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires; GAMeC, Bergamo; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; MMAG Foundation, Amman; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; NBK, Berlin; Para Site, Hong Kong; Project 88, Mumbai; Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø; Whitechapel Gallery, London