ARTIST DOUBLE BILL: VIVIENNE DICK & MARYAM TAFAKORY
SHORT FILM PROGRAMME
FRIDAY 15 APRIL
4.30pm – 6.00pm
A special double bill focussing on the work of two artist filmmakers: Vivienne Dick and Maryam Tafakory. Both are uniquely individual and distinctive in their respective approaches, while sharing concerns related to gender and religious identity, feminism, otherness and aspects of performance. Their works are presented together here as an invitation toward dialogue around these themes, for audiences and filmmakers alike.
Both artists will be present for a Q&A at the screening
Vivienne Dick (b.Ireland) Between 1977 – 1982 she lived in New York, part of a group of filmmakers whose affiliation to the music and aesthetic of punk became known as ‘No Wave’. Working mainly on Super 8, Dick’s films from this period feature many musicians from the punk movement in NY with performances and music from Lydia Lunch, James Chance, Pat Place, Adele Bertei, and Ikue Mori.
Dick moved to London in 1985 and lived there till 1999. While there she was a member of The London Filmmakers Coop and produced a number of films in 16mm, and in video.
Her films have been screened at cinemas, museums and film festivals internationally, including Tate Britain, Moma and the Whitney in New York, IMMA in Dublin, and recent festivals include London, Copenhagen and Oberhausen. She has received a number of Production Awards from The British and Irish Arts Councils and has had work commissioned by Ch 4 and BBC and RTE. She had a retrospective at Crawford, Cork in 2009 and at Tate Modern in 2010. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Archives, NYC and the Irish Film Archives.
She lives in Dublin and continues to make films.
(text courtesy of Lux Online)
See: www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/vivienne_dick/
Maryam Tafakory (b. Iran) is an artist filmmaker living and working in London. Her work draws on the notion of ‘personal as political’ in a fractured narrative that involves a subtle negotiation between factual and fiction, exploring allegorical forms of visual narrative, using abstracted, symbolic and textual motifs and their on-screen representation.
Part performance, her work draws on womanhood and rites of passage, interweaving poetry, (self)-censorship and religion, combining a formal minimalist syntax and figurative mode of representation. Sharing an Islamic Persianate identity, the narratives she develops are closely tied to her own recollections and experiences of being brought up in post-revolutionary Iran.
Her work has screened and exhibited internationally including, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival,Zurich Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, British Film Institute, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Barbican Centre London, Ciné Lumière Institut Français, British Animation Awards, BBC Three.
The Irreducible Difference of the Other
Vivienne Dick / Ireland / 2013 / 00:26:45 /
This experimental film embodies an implicit critique of the male paradigm where the fetishisation of property and privilege has resulted in a global ethical deficit. Features Olwen Fouéré.
Red Moon Rising
Vivienne Dick / Ireland / 2015 / 00:15:00 / Scottish Premiere
A celebration of the carnivalesque, through dance, performance and the spoken word.
The film reaches towards a renewal of our embodiment with the Earth as a response to a belief in invincibility, and the desire of Man to dominate the planets. A red moon is both a beacon, and a warning.
I was five when I became a woman
Maryam Tafakory / United Kingdom / 2014 / 00:05:00 /
An emotional tapestry that invites you to briefly share the life long torment of genital mutilation still forced upon many young girls around the world.
Taklif
Maryam Tafakory / United Kingdom / 2014 / 00:10:00 / Scottish Premiere
An abstract yet lyrical story of religion as forced into a girl’s life, seen from the perspective of a child. It conveys the violence of early marriage and rites of passage.
Fragments of a letter to a child unborn
Maryam Tafakory / United Kingdom / 2015 / 00:05:00 / Scottish Premiere
Using gesture and textual fragments, unknown guilt, fear and the strangeness of singular becoming plural are retold as a voiceless, anonymous narrative. Text becomes the body for a hand in an umbilical dilemma.
Poem and stone
Maryam Tafakory / Iran / 2015 / 00:10:37 / UK premiere
One experiences and records the present through sensations that hold memories. The desire to remember, embeds the past involuntarily within the present.
