ReCNTR X Glued & Screwed Film Screening + Q&A: Sabine Groenewegen & Riar Rizaldi | 10 May 2023 | 20:45 | Filmhuis (The Hague)
We are delighted to team up with Glued & Screwed for this screening of the works of Sabine Groenewegen and Riar Rizaldi! The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artists, moderated by Jo-Lene Ong. The evening will conclude with the opportunity to catch up with the artists around a drink.
Date & Time
Wednesday 10 May 2023 | 20:45
Location: Filmhuis (Spui 191, 2511 BN Den Haag)
About the programme
The program approaches the question of race and colonialism through the prism of the materiality of radio and video transmission. The metaphors of parasitical frequencies and interrupted communication serve different purposes: for Sabine Groenewegen, the narrative works as a modality of distanciation and de-naturalisation of everyday forms of domination; for Rizaldi, the relation between technology and nature, mediated by actors on various sides of the colonization process, serves as a key to interrogate relations of power and human nature. In both works, a signal lies dormant within the waves, biding its time to manifest into a meaningful message.
Odyssey (Sabine Groenewegen 2018, 71min). Two undefined intelligences are intercepting earthly footage of humans living in an area known as the Low Lands. The researchers exchange their findings through a visual feed, in an attempt to understand the occurrence of extraordinary apparitions. The onlookers’ efforts to understand an enchanted human world are interrupted by another signal which imposes itself on the unfolding investigation, resulting in a play with the logic of the production of meaning. Through a combination of found footage, sci-fi and poetry, Odyssey interrogates the visual rhetoric of whiteness in the specific Dutch colonial project and evokes questions about the stories we’re told and our possibilities to disrupt them.
Tellurian Drama (Riar Rizaldi 2020, 26min). Mount Malabar in West Java, Indonesia, shows us a spectrum of human-nature relationships: the Dutch colonial government saw the mountain as a suitable spot for an antenna for radio transmission; for indigenous communities, the mountain itself is a partner for spiritual communication. In Riar Rizaldi’s eclectic essay film, archival history collides with personal narratives on the history of technology, nature and colonisation. A shaman’s breath-taking zither performance brings us a moment of clarity.
About the filmmakers
Sabine Groenewegen is an award-winning filmmaker, editor and artist. Her found footage science fiction feature Odyssey premiered at Doclisboa in the International Competition, won the 2019 Doc Alliance Selection Award for Best Film, and the Istanbul Experimental Award for Best Feature. The genre-bending film travelled festivals and art venues including FIDMarseille, New Horizons Visual Front, ICA London, and BOZAR Brussels. Her work at the intersection of cinema, visual art and research has received support from institutions including The Netherlands Film Fund, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, British Arts Council, and Danish Art Foundation. Sabine is a Core Tutor at the Willem de Kooning Academy Piet Zwart Institute Master Lens-Based Media. She is a regular lecturer at the Master of Film at the Netherlands Film Academy, Goldsmiths University London and Department of Film at Aalto University in Finland. In fall 2022 she presented Under Erasure as part of her Missing Scenes project in 1646 experimental art space in The Hague.
Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly with the medium of moving images and sound, both in the black-box of cinema settings as well spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between capital and technology, labour and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various international film festivals (including Locarno, IFFR, Viennale, BFI London, Cinema du Reel, Vancouver, etc) as well as NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, Centre Pompidou Paris, Times Museum Guangzhou, Istanbul Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, Biennale Jogja, and National Gallery of Indonesia amongst others. His short film Tellurian Drama (2020) won Silver Screen Award for Best Southeast Asian Short Film at Singapore International Film Festival 2020 and awarded Honourable Mention at DOK Leipzig 2021. He holds a PhD in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong.
Q & A Moderator
Jo-Lene Ong is a curator in Amsterdam of Malaysian-Hokkien heritage. Her practice engages with counter-colonial ways of sensing, remembering, and organising. Recently while in-residence at Delfina Foundation she began recovering and confabulating family history lost to the British psychological warfare against the communist resistance. Jo-Lene is program advisor for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale and teaches at Gerrit Rietveld Academie where she is part of their Urgent Ecologies working group. Past projects include Beautiful Soup, 5 Inclusion Tactics for 7 Curators (Arts Council Korea/De Appel), Slippery Tongues Sliding Horizons (Arts Council Korea/Dutch Culture), Elsewheres Within Here (Framer Framed), Practice Space (De Appel/NAME Publications), SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now (National Art Center, Tokyo/Mori Art Museum) Jo-Lene is recipient of Ishibashi Foundation/Japan Foundation Research Fellowship 2023 and De Appel Research Fellowship 2018/19.
Wysiwyg’s Glued & Screwed
Glued & Screwed is organised by experimental screeningplatforms and is as film night a platform for experiments for (young) artists, designers and other creators, international as well as local. Especially, the films that are missed in the regular film environments are offered a stage here. Think of it as a journey to a more experimental environments, an exploration of visual vocabularies.
Post photo credit: Odyssey (Sabine Groenewegen)
