Artists’ film programme: part 1

Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann are working in collaboration, creating works in the audiovisual field, installation and performance. They live and work in Brussels. Sirah and Eitan’s practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image. In their work they aim to mark the spatial and durational potentialities of reading of images – moving or still; the relations between spectatorship and history; the temporality of narratives and memory and the material surfaces of image production. Their works have been shown in duo exhibitions in Kunsthalle Basel; Argos, Brussels and CAC Delme; at group exhibitions in Argos; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Portikus, Frankfurt; Jeu de Paume, Paris and STUK, Leuven. In film festivals such as EMAF, Osnabrück; Atonal, Berlin; Doc Lisboa; Oberhausen Film Festival; Rotterdam Film Festival; Les Rencontres International, Paris and Berlin; New Horizons, Wrocław; Images, Toronto ; 25FPS, Zagreb. Sirah and Eitan are currently teaching at ERG, Brussels.

João Pedro Rodrigues is a native of Lisbon. After studying biology at Lisbon University he attended the Lisbon Film School, where he obtained his diploma. His public film career began at the 54th Venice Festival in 1997 with the short Parabéns!, which won the Special Jury Prize. In the same year he made Esta É A Minha Casa and Viagem à Expo, a two-part documentary. In 2000 he directed his first fiction feature, Phantom, which was screened in the 57th Venice Festival’s Official Competition. In 2005, Odete won several awards including a Cinémas de Recherche Special Mention at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. His feature project To Die Like A Man was selected in 2007 by Cinéfondation forL’Atelier in Cannes and was released in 2009.

Dani ReStack is an associate professor of art at Ohio State University. In 2009 she received an MFA in film/video from Bard College, and in 2003, an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has screened her single-channel videos at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, PS1, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Lincoln Center, and Anthology Film Archives, among others. ReStack on her own work: I show my reality but I don’t consider my work diaristic because I am using the camera for understanding the world rather than simply recording it. Also I don’t consider myself unique – which means using my experience can reflect the viewer’s experience.

Sheilah Wilson ReStack was born and raised in Caribou River, Nova Scotia and is currently Associate Professor Photography at Denison University. She has BFA from NSCAD University and MFA from Goldmiths College. Most recently she has been working on projects analyzing the traces between history, story and the land. She uses photography, video, and text as performative and documentary tools to pick through the seams of narrative and image.

Liina Siib is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Tallinn. She studied printmaking and photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts and has taken longer study trips to London, New York and San Francisco.Over twenty years Siib has made experimental documentary videos and short fiction films, that have been presented as installations and as works of expanded cinema in the art context both at solo and group exhibitions.The topic of her works ranges from social space to different manifestations of people’s everyday practices and daily routines. She deals with characters, spaces and situations that tend to go unnoticed due to their ordinariness or are silenced or ignored. In 2011, her project A Woman Takes Little Space represented Estonia at the 54th Venice Art Biennale.

Tõnis Jürgens is an artist and writer based in Tallinn. He holds a BA in culture theory from Tallinn University and an MA in new media from the Estonian Academy of Arts. He’s also spent a year studying at the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague (UMPRUM). In 2022 he was awarded the Eduard Wiiralt scholarship. He is currently a guest lecturer and PhD candidate at the Estonian Academy of Arts. His artistic research practice involves themes such as surveillance capitalism, digital ruins, and apophenia, or the inadvertent emergence of meaning.

Laida Lertxundi is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works between the USA and the Basque Country. Combining conceptual rigor with sensual pleasure in a process she calls Landscape Plus, her films establish parallels between landscape and the body as centers of pleasure and experience.Her films have been screened at numerous festivals such as Locarno, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, BFI, TIFF Toronto, Gijón, San Sebastián or Edinburgh among others. She’s a professor at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and at Universidad del País Vasco.

Ren Ebel is an artist and writer from Los Angeles, California. He works in a range of media including video, sound, text and drawing. He received his BFA in film and video art from the University of California, San Diego, and his MFA in studio practice from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. His art has been shown at Gattopardo Gallery, DESCALE and Now Instant Image Hall in Los Angeles, the Spectacle Theater in New York and Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, Spain.His writing—fiction, essays and art criticism—has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, X-TRA, Public Parking and Nativa, and in exhibition catalogs for Gattopardo Gallery, OPAF, La Taller Gallery and Artspace Aotearoa.