The project Cinematographies of Resistance lead by curators Dina Pokrajac and Leila Topić as a joint venture of Subversive Festival and Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb for three years running, presents film authors whose oeuvre emerges on the crossroads of contemporary art and film strategies and practices, combining the expressive possibilities inherent to art house film, essay film and openness to experimentation.
The new edition of Cinematographies of Resistance presents Nicole Hewitt and the multimedia exhibition Women Minor Speculations, sequence 5 (Mutations). Through a personal narrative the exhibition recounts the invisible and unspoken history of the representation of women. The exhibition opens on Wednesday June 2nd at 7 p.m. in the MSU Black Box and it will remain open until August 31st 2021.
Cinematographies of Resistance are interested in authorial positions which resist mainstream canons and whose approach is characterized by intermediality and intertextuality as well as openness towards various current topics. The resistance contained in the title is manifested through discovering new models and possibilities opposed to usual contemplative models applied to the film medium, expanded photography, and cinematic and multimedia art. Previous editions presented works by French cineaste Maud Alpi (2018) and young Croatian artist Sabina Mikelić (2019).
Women Minor Speculations, Sequence 5 (Mutations) is one of the iterations of a project vibrating between historiography, documentary, object analysis, travelogue and speculative fiction. The project explores notions of remains as evidence, landscapes as witnesses, the intertwined biographies of archaeologists, their objects and subjects of enquiry (Neolithic figurines, constellations, concrete, ceramics, music, gossip) within a time span of 5000 years.
Sequence 5 is the last in a series of public rehearsals and presents material gathered around, behind and at an oblique angle to the main axis of the eponymous film. The project concerns memory, history, speculative hauntings appearing where real and imagined artefacts of material culture produce confusion and hallucinations in relation to public memory and mnemonic technologies. The project weaves a tentative narrative through minor histories, minor stories, minor fragments and minor technicalities. Sequence 5 recombines existing rejected or found material, simultaneously processing and generating new materials in the form of slide projections, video, sound and text in response to the specific site of the museum space, its technical and spatial specifications in order to metabolise the space and time it occupies. The material will continue to be actively generated during the exhibition, presented in the form of a live performance, and thus mutated remain in the space.
The feature film Women Minor Speculations (2021) by Nicole Hewitt is composed of materials from the previous sequences of the project and it will be screened as part of the 14th edition of Subversive Festival which will take place from 3rd until 17th October 2021.
Nicole Hewitt was born in 1965 in London. Her work explores the possibilities of documentarian language inside a fictional structure, examining the specificities of cinematic, that is linguistic, statement, and the relation between representation and rhetoric, between fictious and real time. Since 1986 she has made animated and experimental films which were regularly screened at international festivals and exhibitions. Her recent work, such as the series of performance / texts This Woman Is Called Jasna is more focused on the performance of language through fiction, recital, song and testimony. Apart from her visual art practice she does scientific research of contemporary art theories and practices. In 2013 she gained her PhD in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her previous education includes an MA in Fine Art Media also at the Slade School, a BA in Visual and Performative Art at the Brighton Polytechnic Art College and a specialization in Animated Film at the Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague. Hewitt teaches at the New Media Department of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb.
***
The author of the project Women Minor Speculations is Nicole Hewitt in collaboration with Ivan Slipčević. The other collaborators on the project are Hrvoslava Brkušić, Hrvoje Nikšić and Jason Mulhausen.
The exhibition curators and authors of the project Cinematographies of Resistance are Dina Pokrajac and Leila Topić, while Vedran Grladinović is the executive producer of the exhibition.
