About Media Forum
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Exhibition "Mocumentary: Reality Is Not Enough"
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About XIV Media Forum
Organized by: MediaFest, MediaArtLab Centre for Art and Culture, Mediafest
Exhibition co-organizer: Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Lecture programme co-organizer: Museum Exhibition Complex "Manege"
Partners: Goethe Institute in Moscow, The Embassy of Israel in Russia, The Embassy of France in Russia, "Pro Helvetia" Foundation, Triumph Gallery, Holiday Inn Moscow Lesnaya
Curator of the exhibition projects: Olga Shishko (art historian, curator, director and founder of the MediaArtLab, director of the MIFF Media Forum)
Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) is held since 1959 and gradually it has become one of most respectable and prestigious film-forums in the world. In 1973 MIFF was registered by the International Federation of Film-producers associations (FIAPF) as an «A» class film festival alongside with those in Berlin, Cannes, San-Sebastian, Karlovy Vary and Venice.
This is the 14 year Media Forum is organized as part of the Moscow International Film Festival. The role of new media in audiovisual art and culture received due recognition and Media Forum was immediately introduced into the official program of MIFF. Media Forum as action is an exchange of ideas, infusion of new forces into contemporary culture and vice versa. It is an attempt to demonsrtate the logic of new thought and new communications. At the moment it is inside media culture that new ideas go through trial and approbation, ideas that cannot be realized in contemporary art context.
For the fourteen years that the Media Forum programme has existed its organizers had to explain in almost every interview what the project wholly dedicated to visual art is doing on the territory of cinema. What do sound performances, video art, multi-channel installations and net art have in common with the film sphere? Each year Media Forum tried to explain this in its events: Peter Greenaway delivered a whole lecture on death of cinema for the triumph of visual art, artists, filmmakers and critics at Media Forum panels discussed the border-line aesthetics, Media Forum guests, such as Eve Sussman, Gary Hill, Jesper Just and others have each year and with very programme brought to Moscow their premiers on the edge of cinematic and fine arts. And finally the organizers decided to answer all questions summarily with a large-scale project demonstrating the flow of forms, subjects, themes, meaning and ideas from one sphere of the visual into another.
Olga Shishko (art historian, curator, director and founder of the MediaArtLab, director of the MIFF Media Forum):
"The Media Forum is a programme at the Moscow Film Festival which has been created especially to expand the familiar borders of cinema and to show that it can vary not only both in content and artistic construction of the text, but also from the formal point of view, the technology of its making and the viewing situation. The language that Media Forum uses to talk to its audience belongs to both cinematic and artistic principles, enriching them both equally.
Mocumentary: Reality Is Not Enough exhibition focuses on application of the mockumentary practices both as a creative technique and as a means to make an artistic statement. In contemporary art the genre provides an opportunity to question the truth behind the visible and the transmitted and to deconstruct established historical paradigms. With the help of fakes and simulations modern artists play out the wide-spread myths, false stereotypes and generally accepted facts. The main goal of the experiment is self-criticizing of the audience, propaganda and misinformation in media, the finer points of the social contract and painful historical experience.
All 20 artists presented in the framework of the Mocumentary: Reality Is Not Enough exhibition work with imperceptible transition from reality to its distorted reflection in the age of television boom of media consumption, as well as the growing passivity of the audience in fact analysis. They represent a critical overview and an active political position, creating the new legends by means of video, editing, special effects, and dramatizations. And in their hands all the tricks of the documentary turn into an unbeatable weapon of art play for rewriting history, exposing the complexes and definitions of pain thresholds of individuals, society, eras and nations. Mocumentary: Reality Is Not Enough displays the cutting-edge contemporary art research in the man's place in history, the substitution of reality by skillfully crafted illusions and the boundaries between the historical and political statement.
Exhibition "Expanded Cinema — 3: Reality Is Not Enough" in the framework of the XIV MIFF Media Forum
Exhibition dates: 25 June — 26 July 2013. Opening for press — 24 June 2013
Venue: Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Gogolevsky Boulevard, 10)
Curator: Olga Shishko (art historian, curator, director and founder of the MediaArtLab, director of the MIFF Media Forum)
Producer: Elena Rumyantseva (programme director of the MIFF Media Forum)
Participants: Harun Farocki, (Germany), Omer Fast (Israel), Milica Tomic (Serbia), Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg (Switzerland), Walid Raad/ The Atlas Group, USA—Lebanon), “Janez Jansa” (Slovenia), Nonny de la Pena and Peggy Weil (USA), Dmitriy Venkov (Russia), Dina Karaman (Russia), Roman Mokrov (Russia), Jack and Leigh Ruby (Australia), Ranbir Kaleka (India), Vladimir Arkhipov (Russia), Nikolay Onishchenko (Russia).
The third installment in the MIFF Media Forum Expanded Cinema series – Mocumentary: Reality Is Not Enough presents the cutting-edge selection of contemporary art works in the genre formed in-between cinema, video and media art. The exposition curated by Olga Shishko (art director of Moscow Media Forum of MIFF) is compiled of the masterpieces of the modern artists from Russia and abroad, utilizing pseudo documentary and mockumentary strategies in their creative practices. Mocumentary: Reality Is Not Enough poses the question of blurred borders between fiction and reality in the era of media addiction, information pollution and uncritical consumption of data and images.
Mocumentary, a genre long-established and well-known to the audience, gathers significant attention among contemporary artists as an active critical strategy. It first appeared in cinema more than 50 years ago as a one hundred per cent fiction made with accordance to the documentary rules and parameters of the quality historical evidence. Just a well made documentary film, a work of mockumentary contains a story supported by facts, witness interviews, recordings from the scenes, material evidence and expert opinions. But in contrast to the qualitative study characteristic of the documentary film, mockumentary replaces all the elements of the narrative with false or parody to create a comic effect and becomes a false story from beginning to end — events that never happened, fraudulent facts, fake experts and counterfeit records.
Lecture programmes
Lecture Programme Dates: 21—26 June 2013
Lecture Programme Venue: Open School "Manege/MediaArtLad" (Manezhnaya square, 1)
In addition to the exhibition, the 2013 Media Forum programme includes a series of lectures and workshops of the Reality Is Not Enough artists. The lecture programme of Media Forum-2013 is not only an opportunity to learn about the development of mockumentary as an active artistic strategy, but also direct collaboration with leading contemporary artists who create the alternate reality of pseudo documentary. Nine of the project’s participants — Omer Fast, Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg, Milica Tomic, Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil, “Janez Jansa”, Radoslaw Pater — will come to Moscow to meet the audience in person and give practical advice to young artists.
Also, in collaboration with the MIFF Documentary Film Program, held a retrospective of mockumentary classics will be held. The opening of the Media Forum 2013 will be marked by the arrival of the French director Manuela Morgaine and her mockumentary premiere, Lightning, featured in Rotterdam Film Festival this year. There also will be a contest of modern strategies in a video documentary parallel to the exhibition and film program.
Expanded Cinema — 3 research catalogue
The Expanded Cinema 3: Reality Is Not Enough experience will be enhanced by the exhibition catalogue with a collection of analytical essays by world experts, curators and critics, as well as in-depth interviews, unique illustrative materials and study of creative practices of the contemporary artists who chose the work at the intersection of documentary, fiction and creative play as their method.
Venues
Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Gogolevsky Boulevard, 10
http://www.mmoma.ru/
Open School "Manege/MediaArtLab"
Manezhnaya square, 1
http://www.moscowmanege.ru/
