Matjaž Ivanišin
Unfinished Stories about Encounters
Museum of Contemporary Ar Metelkova, +MSUM
18 January – 17 April 2022
In Unfinished Stories about Encounters, Matjaž Ivanišin is exhibiting his films Karpopotnik (2013), Playing Men (2017), and Oroslan (2019) in the form of three video installations. The films are a blend of documentary and fiction, with the lines dividing the real and fictional blurred in a way characteristic of and specific to the filmmaker. As he says, his aim is not to encourage viewers to try and guess which (part of each) film is documentary and which fictional, but rather to achieve some kind of presence, a life in the film, and to show how the actions a film opens with gradually evolve into stories, how quite simple, unassuming topics and events can be recounted with precision, and poetry found in the everyday. The three films all tell stories with other means; the emphasis is on the visual images, while the words or the text are often interrupted by pauses or silences, thus creating a characteristic atmosphere.
The installation at the MSUM reminds viewers that films can also be watched in a different manner, thus again separating the documentary and fictional narratives. In this way, the narrative processes and filmmaking strategies are exposed, becoming highly visible, offering endless possibilities of watching the films and reading the images, creating new meanings, and understanding film as an artistic medium. Ivanišin’s films were not originally conceived as video installations; they only became that through subsequent experimentation and reflection on film as a medium, the meaning of filmic images or the issue of fiction based on the image, and last but not least, on the shift in the language of film that places Ivanišin’s films in the context of the avant-garde, experimental “anti-film.”
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Matjaž Ivanišin, born in Maribor in 1981, graduated in film and television directing from the Academy of Theater, Radio, Film, and Television in Ljubljana. His films have been shown at major international film festivals such as FID Marseille, Locarno, Tribeca, and Rotterdam, and also as part of the film screening programs of museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MoMA in New York, and the ICA in London.
Curator: Bojana Piškur
