Onassis
What’s OnFast Forward Festival 6
Part of: Fast Forward Festival 6

FFF6 | One Emerging from a Point of View

Wu Tsang

Dates

Prices

Free admission

Location

Onassis Stegi

Time & Date

Day
Time
Venue
Day
Sunday 5 - Sunday 19 May
Time
12:00 - 20:00
Venue
Exhibition Hall -1

Information

Tickets

Free admission with entrance tickets

Information

Language: in English with Greek subtitles

Duration: 42 min

Can two women cross paths and yet never meet? Collapsing the boundaries between documentary and fiction, Wu Tsang presents a video installation – commissioned by the Fast Forward Festival 6 – that offers a different take on the phenomenon of migration. Taken together with the performance “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune”, the two works enter into dialogue to create subversive images of contemporary reality.

Wu Tsang’s artistic practice explores states of connectedness and in-betweenness. This fluidity often manifests as collaboration or is amplified in the merging of disciplines, such as performance, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Reflecting her background in film, much of her work collapses boundaries between documentary and fiction as a way to continually question the relationship between sociality and its images.

In “One Emerging from a Point of View” (2019), the artist continues an ongoing exploration of a “third” space between two overlapping video projections, focusing on this overlap to create visual entanglement. As images cut and bleed into each other, two disparate narratives intertwine through synchronised camera choreography. Set on the northeastern shore of Lesbos, Greece, the work revolves around a scenario in which two women cross paths three years ago – although they never met. One is a young woman from Morocco (Yassmine Flowers), who arrives in Athens after many months of travel through Turkey and Lesbos’ Moria camp. The other is a photojournalist (Eirini Vourloumis), who is assigned to document the “crisis” and becomes personally involved with the fishing village of Skala Sikamineas, where locals have been first responders to the mass influx of refugees coming mostly from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa.

Since 2011, more than 850,000 refugees have crossed into Europe through the Greek island of Lesbos, located in the Northern Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. Rather than attempt to document “truth,” Tsang takes a magical realist approach as she works in collaboration with her subjects to create a hybrid fantasy. Drawing from history, mythology, and science fiction, her film situates the two parallel narratives within both real and imagined landscapes in order to tell the story of the island and migration across interconnected and overlapping space and time.

Fast Forward Festival presents Tsang’s new film commission alongside the live performance “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune” by her ensemble group “Moved by the Motion” (co-founded by Tsang and the performance artist boychild). The two works in parallel show Tsang’s ongoing and collaborative investigation of movement, affect, and storytelling, exploring the potentiality of making “impossible” images in the face of real-life and representational crises.

As part of her video installation, Wu Tsang presents a series of photographs by Eirini Vourloumis – a photojournalist based in Athens who appears in Tsang’s film as one of its leads. This highly personal series is a continuation of Vourloumis’ photographic work documenting the refugee crisis on the island of Lesbos, where she first found herself in August 2015 as part of a mission.

This work in progress takes its title from the novel “The Mermaid Madonna” (1955) by Stratis Myrivilis, a renowned author from Lesbos. Here, the series is presented as part of an ongoing dialogue between the two artists on photographic and cinematic forms of representation, and more specifically on their shared dedication to magical realism as a means of disrupting the documentary genre.

(Text originally published for Sharjah Biennial 14, courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation.)

Wu Tsang

"One emerging from a point of view" (video still), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Parallel event

Credits

  • Directed by

    Wu Tsang

  • Starring

    Yassmine Flowers, Eirini Vourloumis

  • Featuring

    Yiorgos Sofianis, Michalis Kyparissis, Kostas Pideris

  • Produced by

    Joyce Keokham

  • Co-Producers

    Tosh Basco, Eirini Vourloumis

  • Associate Producer

    Hypatia Vourloumis

  • Production Coordinator

    Bill Kouligas

  • Line Producer

    Nikos Filippakis

  • Assistant Line Producer

    Athina Kosmidou

  • Location Manager

    Manolis Filippakis

  • Director of Photography

    Antonio Cisneros

  • 1st Assistant Camera

    Ezra Riley

  • 2nd Assistant Camera

    Robin Pabello

  • 3rd Assistant Camera

    Giorgos Athanasopoulos

  • Gaffer

    Michalis Christoforatos

  • Spark

    Panagiotis Kagioulis, Georgios Athanasopoulos

  • Key Grip

    Carlos Sturmey

  • Assistant Grip

    Thanasis Karabelos, Giorgos Athanasopoulos

  • Sound Recordist

    Stavros Avramidis

  • Drivers

    Georgios Perlegas, Haralambos Kostantidelis

  • Set Designer

    Vinita Gatne

  • Set Builders

    Valentin Papana, Harry Rigalo, Trevor Twine, Vasilis Vidalis, Alexandra Koumantaki, Dimitris Gketsis

  • Set Electricians

    Spiros Ntallas, Dimitris Kefalas, Kostas Bakogiannis

  • Movement Director

    Tosh Basco

  • Costume Design

    Kyle Luu

  • Wardrobe Assistant

    Sofia Metsoviti

  • Hair

    Sara Matthiasson

  • Makeup

    Stellar, Daglara

  • Editors

    Wu Tsang, Anthony Valdez

  • Translators

    Ismail Alrifaie, Abdullah Hussein, Ziad Abdullah, Pavlos Zafiropoulos, Rima Musa, Daphne Karoutsos

  • Greek Subtitles

    Vassilis Douvitsas

  • Colorist

    Randy Coonfield / BlueLine Post

  • Composer

    Asma Maroof

  • Instruments & Vocals

    Yorgos Adamis

  • Shipping Coordinator

    Kashif Hasnain

  • Sharjah Coordinators

    Momen Al Ajouz, Lana El Samman

  • Onassis Stegi Coordinator

    Dimitra Dernikou

  • Filmed on Location

    Skala Sikamineas

  • Co-commissioned by

    Sharjah Art Foundation and Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

  • Co-produced by

    Sharjah Art Foundation and Onassis Stegi/Fast Forward Festival

  • With Generous Support from

    Gropius Bau / Berliner Festspiele, Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative (PCAI), United States Artists

  • Special Thanks

    PANAVISION, Lighthouse Relief

  • Thanks

    Aisha Butt, Athanasios Polychronopoulos, Claire Tancons, Dimitra Dernikou, Dimitra Kalogiannis, Dirk Meylaerts, François Quintin, Fred Moten & Laura Harris, Hoor Al Qasimi, Hypatia Vourloumis & Yiannis Hadjiaslanis, Isabella Bortolozzi, Jackie Abhulimen, Jakob Braeuer, Jennifer Kuwabara, Katia Arfara, Kika Kyriakakou, Nadia Gerazouni, Pari Laoumis & Theano Katakouzinou, Reem Shadid, Simon Wang, Stathis Panagoulis & George Vamvakidis, Stephanie Rosenthal, Triantafyllos Athanasopoulos

Co-produced by

Biography

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