Photo historian and art critic Sofie Crabbé curated a program at the intersection of film and photography. She brings together audiovisual work by photographers/filmmakers who have explored themes such as family, intimacy and parent-child/child-parent relationships based on a personal narrative.
Welkom in het leven, lieve kleine is a self-portrait, family portrait and journalistic portrait. Ed van der Elsken genuinely portrays life with his then-wife Gerda van der Veen and their little daughter Tinelou: from Gerda’s pregnancy and the Nieuwmarkt district, a typical Amsterdam working-class neighborhood where they lived, to the birth of their son Daan Dorus. Unlike many of his colleagues, Ed van der Elsken doesn’t efface himself. He makes contact with the people in front of his camera and shows himself, accompanied by his own colorful commentary.
In Shades of Time, Annelies Štrba portrays the intimacy of her private life in the parental home in Melide, a municipality in Switzerland. Using archival material and self-made photographs, she covers the daily life, important events and familiar rituals of four generations: her mother and aunts, herself as a child with her sisters, her husband, daughters, son and grandson. Štrba combines the family images with photographs of places that mean something to the people she loves such as Brontë Country, the parsonage of the village of Haworth in Yorkshire and the moors of Wuthering Heights. Štrba is also fascinated by places of catastrophe and suffering, where history is palpably present, such as Kobe, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Birkenau and Chernobyl.
Bittersweet focuses on intimate family life, particularly the relationship between Sohrab Hura’s mother who was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia and her dog Elsa. What for the Indian Magnum photographer began as a way to escape his family situation turned into a method of confronting the realities at home. Photographed and filmed over a period of ten years, Bittersweet is a search for meaning and closure with Hura questioning and discovering the banalities of everyday life at home.
With the song Our Life is Full of Sunshine, the Chinese government wanted to introduce the one-child policy to the Chinese population in the 1980s as a solution to overpopulation. Cato Van Rijckeghem has a younger sister who was adopted from China as a baby as a result of the one-child policy. Our Life is Full of Sunshine sheds light on the shared story of young Chinese women born in a country with a one-child policy. The culture-specific preference for a son presented a challenging situation for the less desirable daughters. Through various media (photography, sound, text), she strikingly captures the social consequences of this policy. Specifically for this evening, she’ll present a redesigned projection of the work that will be shown for the first time at Art Cinema OFFoff!
In Magic, a portrait of Joris images sourced from different periods in time, are brought together. Worn out VHS footage filmed by the artist’s father is placed besides the images the artist filmed herself on 8mm. Both have the same subject, the boy as a son, for the other it is her brother. The desire to look and record is one and the same, however the shape it then assumes differs. By connecting images of then and now a new narrative of remembering is opened.
Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a touching, deeply human film about intergenerational trauma, migration and finding a home, based on a personal letter Shaima Al-Tamimi wrote to her late grandfather. Combining archival footage, video, text and animation, the film draws attention to a collective sense of statelessness among Yemeni (and non-Yemeni) migrants.
Shades of Time and Our Life is Full of Sunshine will each be shown as triple projections.
In the presence of Chloë Delanghe and Cato Van Rijckeghem
Introduction: Sofie Crabbé
On her website you can find additional image material of each of the works.
