SAW Video Media Art Centre presented a joint screening with artist Eva Marie Rødbro (Copenhagen) and Canadian artist-duo Duke + Battersby (based in Syracuse, New York). The evening featured a screening of three of their recent films, a discussion with the artists, and a question and answer period with the audience. While these artists differ greatly in their approach the moving image, they are unified by a sustained interest in adolescence, and specifically young women, who played the central protagonists in each of the three presented films.
We Chose the Milky Way
Scenes from life on another planet, where a hedonistic civilisation of young women decorate themselves with artificial nails, white clothes and a fake tan before taking the limo to the city. But Eva Marie Rødbro’s film is from the suburbs of Copenhagen, and is shaped by its environment. In other words, an unplaceable, anthropological mutation of a bling hip hop video, social-realist science fiction and a documentary version of ‘Spring Breakers’, whose surreal shock cuts place us as participants, rather than mere spectators, in a world where everything is artificial except the friendships. In a number of films, Rødbro has documented the restlessness, fragility and self-destructive feeling of invincibility of youth and early adulthood. Her film school graduation film lives up to all the promises that her previous work of photographs and short films has made, and is an extremely style-conscious and intelligent study of a lifestyle and an environment, where pure excess is elevated to an existential principle.
Dear Lorde
Bone collector Maxine Rose, a 14 year old teenage girl, is looking for validation from her heroes, amongst them the primatologist Jane Goodall, bishop Desmond Tutu and the New Zealand teen pop Star Lorde. Offering them a gift of language, Maxine Rose stands for the desire to be visible and understood, not unlike the desire of an artist. We are particularly impressed by the multilayered story telling structure, the freshness of the characterization, and the honest exploration of an artists` vulnerability.
Program
I Touched Her Legs, Eva Marie Rødbro (2014 | 15min)
Dear Lorde, Duke and Battersby (2015 | 27min)
We Chose the Milky Way, Eva Marie Rødbro (2015, 27min)