EXILES: Kortfilm/kunstfilm program 2

Alle Exiles-filmene har gratis adgang.

Dette programmet med tre filmer vises fra kl. 21.00.

Salt Kiss III, 32 min
There is a saying that a song is never finished, it can only ever be abandoned. This is true of the Salt Kiss Trilogy. With Salt Kiss III, Shwan Dler Qaradaki chooses to leave us alone with his poem. The story is not finished, and will not be until the inevitable finish of all our stories, and in that sense there is great life and hope in this goodbye.

The narratives in part one and part two were suspenseful because we did not know what the fate of the artist would be. This is rapid response art in the truest form, where the artist is archiving and documenting his own history as it unfolds. The drama did not need to be over emphasised, as the artist waited to know what would happen to him. His fate was in the hands of heavy bureaucratic authority, and this gave great pathos to the works.

In Salt Kiss III, the artist should have found himself, as his residency is affirmed and he is now ‘safe’. And yet it is in this last extraordinary work that the years of confusion, anger, and great fear come through most powerfully. The very point at which the artist’s actual identity is (quite literally) confirmed, is the point at which he seems to lose himself. Salt Kiss III is a beautiful and painful story from the heart. Its honesty is chaotic and raw, and exquisitely disciplined, as Qaradaki abandons politeness, helpfulness, and lets his story unfold without margins for error, without explanations and paragraph headings. As an audience, we have grown with him. We no longer need to be introduced to geographical regions or times or places, we swim into them with the artist, as he remembers; the to-ing and fro-ings of true memory-where time-bends allow us to move through our history vertically as well as horizontally, where experience is not a to z, but up and down and round and through and back on itself.

Dler Qaradaki —for this is his real name —is a young man who has already lived an extraordinary life. His enormous talent, and mighty heart have made it possible for us to not only hear his story, but to find ourselves in it too.

I suspect I am not alone in understanding that I am a better person for knowing this artist, and for having seen his work.

Kate Pendry

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Refugee Talks, 33 min
Lange took her video camera to a reception centre for refugees in Norway. Awaiting confirmation or denial of their residency applications, the refugees ‘speak’ this state of ‘becoming’ through the medium of music. Exhibited at life-size scale, Refugee Talks asks the viewer to listen directly to these contemporary psalms and to reflect on the emotions and experiences being communicated. As they face the singing figures, language becomes less important than the nuances of expression. Viewers recognise the pubescent glee of the girls imitating their pop idols. They recognise themselves in the universal intimacy of the family portrait: a woman smiles as her children watch their father singing.

Refugee Talks is a work that emerges directly from an engaged humanist commitment. In acknowledging the humanity of the refugees, the viewer comes to an understanding that spaces once designated as separate and different – political space, geographic space, cultural space – can possibly be transcended through music and song.This is the promise of artistic space. But, of course, such a promise can be betrayed and this possibility underlies Andrea Lange’s work. It is what gives the work its acidic resonance. For the refugees, exile is not merely nostalgia nor simply existential. It is the present and the future. These are people waiting, their very civilian and physical security dependent on bureaucratic will and the see-saw of European popular opinion. What viewers are being presented with in Refugee Talks is, then, also a kind of audition, an attempt by the refugees to win them over and to convince them of their humanity. These people-in-waiting, not yet citizens of democracy, possibly never to be admitted to ‘citizenship’, are communicating in song the very act of accounting for oneself. The viewers’ initial identification is undermined by the vertigo of understanding that both their gaze, and more crucially, their judgement, emerge from privilege.

Christos Tsiolkas (extract from catalouge text for “Remembrance + the moving image”)

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Trygve med hjertet i postkassa, 14 min
It was the autumn Trygve turned 12 years old. The autumn the famous Norwegian skier Oddvar Brå had broke his ski pole and Norway was pointed out as the world’s best place to live – for the second time. This is a Norwegian short with Ethiopian refugees in the leading roles.