MG+MSUM

U3| PRESENTATION OF A DONATION | Nika Autor, Andrej Šprah, Nace Zavrl
Friday, 10 January 2020 | 18:00
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Chris Marker, Prime Time in the Camps, 1993

 

Newsreel Front Tribute: Prime Time in the Camps (1993)

Slon Tango (1993)

 

Presentation of the project

Friday, 10 January 2019, 6 p.m., Moderna galerija, MG+

Participants: Nika Autor, Zdenka Badovinac, Andrej Šprah and Nace Zavrl

 

You are kindly invited to the presentation of the Newsreel Front Tribute: Prime Time in the Camps (1993) and Slon Tango (1993) project.

 

Nika Autor is one of the artists invited to participate in the 9th edition of the Triennial of Contemporary Art U3. The Newsreel Front’s intervention consists in the purchase and donation of the above mentioned Chris Marker’s two films to Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, for inclusion in its collection.

 

Chris Marker, one of the most unique and well-rounded cineastes, documentary filmmakers, essayists, poets, journalists, photographers and multimedia artists, filmed the two short videos in Ljubljana a year before the first U3, without the broader cultural, film, gallery and museum scene knowing about it. Prime Time in the Camps shows the story of Bosnian refugees living at the Roška center for refugees at 40 Poljanska Street, who set up a temporary television studio and regularly edited and produced their news. Refugee Television, as the daily broadcasts were called, is a valuable document of the refugees’ emancipatory activities in the medium of television. Filmed the same year at the Ljubljana Zoo, Slon Tango [Elephant Tango] is a humorous nod to the famous S.L.O.N. collective (the Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles), an association of artists and filmmakers who established the fundamental principles of non-hierarchical collective work in the late 1960s.

 

The donation will be presented by Nika Autor, Andrej Šprah and Nace Zavrl.

 

Nika Autor works in the field of contemporary art practices. In 2008 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She is part of the Newsreel Front collective.

 

Andrej Šprah, head of the Research and Publishing Department of the Slovenian Cinemateque, Associate Professor of the history and theory of film and television at the Academy of Theater, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana, and Associate Professor of visual arts at the A.V.A. Academy of Visual Arts, is a film theorist and author of numerous essays and treatises about the phenomena of documentary film, global socially engaged film, Slovene film, and the cinema in former Yugoslavia. His most notable books include: Dokumentarni film in oblast (1998), Osvobajanje pogleda (2004), Prizorišče odpora (2010), Vračanje realnosti (2011), Neuklonljivost vizije (2013).

 

Nace Zavrl is a doctoral student at the Department of Art., Film and Visual Studies of Harvard University. His research explores the issues of postwar European cinema, film historiography and cinephilia. In 2017 he received his MA from Goldsmiths, University of London, having graduated before that from King’s College London. His texts are published in Slovene and international journals (Afterimage, Senses of Cinema, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Radio Študent, KINO! and Ekran). In 2019, he edited the reader Podoba-upor: militantni dokumentarec na bojiščih maja ’68, published by Slovenian Cinemateque.

 

The Newsreel Front intervention provides contextualization in the form of Newsreel Fragments, written by Andrej Šprah, Nace Zavrl, Andreja Hribernik and Nika Autor and available here.