Kino B: Contemporary Cinema by Berlin-based Artists

AUSTERITY MEASURES by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell

(2012, 16mm, color, silent, 8:40)

A color-separation portrait of the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, made during the Anti-Austerity protests in late 2011. In a place thick with stray cats and scooters, cops and Molotovs, ancient myths and new ruins; where fists are raised like so many columns in the Parthenon, this is a film of surfaces - of grafitti'd marble streets and wheat-pasted city walls - hand-processed in red, green, and blue.

Born in France 1978, Guillaume Cailleau is based in Berlin. His works range from 16mm film and HD video to multimedia installations and performance. He researches common everyday processes and occurrences with the intent to expose details that tend to be overlooked but can be very revealing if isolated and transposed into another context, that of a gallery, a museum or a theater. He is a member of the collective LaborBerlin, devoted to preserving and developing the creative possibilities of the celluloid film format and DIY processing, as well as Hanna's Atelier for Sonorous Arts Ljubljana (Slovenia), an institution promoting and researching sound based art forms. He also collaborates with several choreographers and performers, creating video for the stage.

Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is an itinerant media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, visual anthropology, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a "psychedelic ethnography."

He has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale and the Museum of Modern Art NY. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient for his feature film Let Each One Go Where He May, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL, toured with film/video/performance programs world-wide and performed in a double-drum trio called BEAST.

Curated by Caroline Koebel for Aurora Picture Show         (Kino B program)