"[re]:collection, documenting memory and remembering - lest we forget" was presented by Seawall Productions as a one-day event featuring film, visual art, and video by three women artists: SADAA E ZAN (Voices of Women), Renée Bergan's award-winning debut film, "Paintings and Sculpture" by Alison Ming Korte of Hunter College, and "Sleep", a 15-minute video installation by UK based Italian artist Emilia Telese.
SADAA E ZAN (Voices of Women) is an intimate look at the contemporary challenges facing the women in Afghanistan. Shot entirely in Afghanistan in March 2002, SADAA E ZAN offers an astonishingly unsentimental view of post-Taliban life. The film is composed of testimonials from women and girls who describe firsthand what it was like to live in fear for over five years, stripped of all rights and denied any access to education or meaningful work. Despite the consequences, many engaged in daring efforts to provide medical care and underground schools for women and children. The film offers no easy answers, the future of Afghanistan is anything but clear, but it captures the resilient spirit of these women as they bravely emerge from the rubble of tyranny and oppression, determined to reach freedom.
Renée Bergan Biography
Director, Producer, Cinematographer & Editor
Sadaa E Zan is Renée Bergan's award-winning debut film. She received her degree in film from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1993 and studied cinema in Paris, France in the year 1989. While attending UCSB, Bergan received a Corwin Award for her short documentary, Persistent Discretion, a 16mm film about domestic violence. Sadaa E Zan, received the Social Justice Award for Best Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2003.
renee@renegadepix.net
Alison Ming Korte:; University of California, Santa Cruz BS Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Studio Art at Hunter College.
Artist Statement on Paintings and Sculpture:
"Despite any issue of intention, the psychological impact of a moment can be so difficult to disguise. In the moment of creation, a state of mind is inadvertently captured and documented. A color, a shape, an image, a touch emerge out of an enigmatic space and become an image that floats in time. Whether it speaks of a fragment of a memory of a real experience or is simply a reflection of what is imagined out of hope or imagined out of fear, the visual manifestation becomes its own entity. That object of creation then stands alone as an encrypted slice of the mind."
Alison@amingkorte.com
Emilia Telese: "Sleep" - video installation.
Sleep is a 15 minute video piece forming part of UK based Italian artist Emilia Telese's multimedia and digital sculpture installation Sleepwalking. In Sleepwalking, the artist reconstructs the journey her father made to the New Forest (UK) shortly before his death, while affected by an illness which altered his sleep patterns. A journey she did not make. Emilia Telese slept for a month in the New Forest on the same places where her father slept. She filmed herself while asleep. The artwork resulting from her experience is a daughter's attempt to recreate lost memories, share the unshared and celebrate her father's life. It is also an insight into the sensory implications of sleep and its quality during illness.
Emilia Telese is an Italian-born crossover artist based in Brighton, UK. Born near Pompeii, Italy, in 1973. After a first degree from the Fine Art Academy in Florence in 1996 and various art exhibitions and performances, moved to the UK in 1997.
www.emiliatelese.com
emilia@emiliatelese.com