Michal Kosakowski was born in Szczecin, Poland, in 1975.

He is a director and producer of numerous shorts, experimental films, documentaries and video installations. His work includes more than 70 films, which were shown in many international festivals and exhibitions and received numerous awards.

From 1997 to 2000 he worked as a freelance artist and independent filmmaker in the Italian artists’ workshop Fabrica, the Benetton Communication Research Centre in Catena di Villorba, in cooperation with the Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani and director of the Venice Film Festival, Marco Müller.

Over the last decade, Kosakowski completed various international artistic film projects that were hosted by venues as renowned as the Centre Pompidou Paris, Kunstwerke Berlin, Städtische Kunsthalle München Lothringer 13, the Rotterdam Film Festival, KunstFilmBiennale Cologne, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) Karlsruhe, Museo National Centro De Arte Reina Sofia Madrid, Pierogi Gallery New York and Soho Centre Beijing. His work has also been presented by many TV networks such as ARTE, CANAL+, ORF, and RAI.

For his experimental film Just Like The Movies (2006), Michal Kosakowski was given the award for best film and best original score by the international film festivals of Milan, Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile and Forli, Italy. The film was also acquired for the collections of the Library of the University of Amsterdam and the Danish Film Institute and is regularly presented at international symposia and film seminars. Just Like The Movies is also used as instructional film by the Universität Bayreuth, the Filmhochschule ESEC in Paris, the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Universität Mainz, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the university of Macerata, Italy.

Kosakowski has been collaborating with sundry artists and institutions such as Austrian artist Uli Aigner,
Italian composer Paolo Marzocchi, Dutch musician Francis Kuipers, Italian artist Alessandro Kokocinski, the Münchener Kammerorchester, Serbian writer Goran Mimica, French poet and author Joseph Denize, as well as the Kulturreferat Munich and Ortstermin (Kunst im öffentlichen Raum).

Since 2008, Michal Kosakowski has been active as a lecturer, teaching experimental films at the
M.D.H. (Media Design Hochschule) in Munich.

Shoppinghour would like to thank Mr. Kosakowski for his time and support

www.michalkosakowski.net

7th Sept – 2nd Oct 2010

View Two Gallery, 23 Mathew Street, Liverpool, Merseyside, UK

Chaosmos is an arts initiative that aims to research and develop the production of an array of mixed media artwork, animations, video and live art. It is curated by Chris Boyd, the Lead Artist, and platforms a collection of international and renowned art in a unique exhibition that investigates turbulent visual planes within the conceptual framework of Chaosmos (a Joycean coinage).

The exhibition attempts to map meta-physical states, track intermittent interference whilst revealing a preoccupation with the creative process, pictorial puzzles and the integration of traditional artist techniques with current post production methods.

Curator: Chris Boyd (Lead Artist)

Artists: Chris Boyd; Megan Chapman; Gordon Cheung; Mat Collishaw; Peter Eramian; C. James Fagan; Steven Heaton; Maggie Lambert; Lady Lillith Leveigh; Zan Lyons; Ashleigh Nankivell; David Ogle; Jonas Pihl; James Roper; Boo Saville; Masahiro Tomioka; Jane Ward; Boris Zakic and others

Writers: Peter Eramian; Penny Goring; Nina Miall; Kenji Siratori; Sam Skinner; Suzie Saw and others

Gallery opening times:

Thursday – Friday 12.00 pm – 4.00 pm, Saturday 12.00 pm – 5.00 pm

Viewing can be arranged by appointment for Sunday – Wednesday by contacting the Curator

Private View:

Thursday 09 September 2010, 7.30 pm – 10.30 pm

VJ Performances / Screenings:

Thursday 16 September 2010, 7.30 pm – 10.30 pm

Friday 17 September 2010,  7.30 pm – 10.30 pm

Artist Talks (in association with Culture Pool):

Saturday 18 September 2010, 1.00 pm – 3.00 pm

A blog by Philip Philippou

“And wordglitch is, first and foremost, a homage to words. wordglitch itself is an interesting – although inexistent, at least until this very moment – word. What is it meant to suggest? The moment when a new word comes to life is accompanied by a joyous eagerness to encompass its allusions to other words, its possible meanings, its resistance toward being thoroughly known. In that sense, it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that there is a fierce and strange force in words, something that renders them magical, something that pushes them ever onward toward the ineffable. Words are used in order to articulate the ineffable: yet each word is in itself a chunk of the inexpressible. That’s maybe why each word in itself seems to have limited power until it’s brought in the company of other words. Then it is curiously and miraculously strengthened, it attains a robustness that borders on the epiphanic, it revivifies all other words and the whole of language. Or maybe words are signals of a cunning and glorious irony.”

www.wordglitch.com

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A retelling of the cult American television series Little House on the Prarie.

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Shoppinghour in collaboration with Silent City are organising the launch of Shoppinghour Issue 07: The Rights Issue and Art & Activism. We are looking for films, video art and performances on the theme of rights and activism. Please send ideas and proposals to: info@silentcity.org.uk

Fortynine

Between 1996 and 2006 Michal Kosakowski produced 49 short movies on the subject of killing. 49 killings, dreamt up by inhabitants of the metropolis of morbidity – Vienna. In 1996, Kosakowski began to inquire into fantasies of killing – at first among his relatives and friends, then widening the circle to include artists, musicians and, eventually, actors.

Within a decade, Kosakowski made 49 short movies, an essential element of which is the fact that these killing fantasies were put into practice with the complicity of the respondents themselves and depicted in the 49 videos. The collaborations between Kosakowski and his fictitious killers and victims in scripting, acting and staging the films could not have been closer or more intense. Michal Kosakowski himself was in charge of directing, camera, editing and special effects for all 49 films.

The fantasies of violence, all of which seem to feed on the explicit violence omnipresent in film and television, are stunning. Not a single one of the 160 performers has a criminal record or was ever involved in any real acts of violence. And yet poisoning, torture, suicide, execution, ritual murder, violence by and against women, men, and children, murders motivated by sexual, political, and mental aberration come face to face with the recipients’ emotions, naked and uncensored.

What Michal Kosakowski grants us is the rare occasion to experience a genuine taboo of our times and our Western society – death. A death that, for the time being, seems to present itself exclusively in the contemporary guise of the incessant violence staged by the media.

Just Like The Movies

“It’s just like the movies!” was usually the first reaction of those watching the events of 9/11 in New York unfolding on their TV screens, no doubt recalling the endless number of catastrophes that Hollywood has proposed over the years. Now confronted with the reality of one such scenario – of unprecedented destructive and symbolic resonance – a feeling of déjà vu arises while looking at these images.

This paradoxical déjà vu presents a great challenge to our realism. If documentary images are graphic testimony of real events, then footage of 9/11 is evidence of the realization of the existing fiction.

Just Like the Movies is an attempt to re-construct the events of 9/11 by highlighting the parallels between the fictive worlds and the images of the real events.

The Heart Of It

“Novi Sad, Serbia. The portrait of an urban society, the Balkans, 21st Century. The people in the center – the people at the periphery. Post-war spirit, but only because we know what happened in Ex-Yugoslavia. The Heart of It? The work which has to be done, day after day. The fact that you have to stoop down to collect a potato, every sack of cabbages has to be tied by hand. Because it is the daily work of the hands which transcends the reality of the present and shows life in itself in its hypnotic stream between the past and the future.”

www.michalkosakowski.net

To support this project click here

What is फिलम फलम / fillum fallam?

फिलम फलम / fillum fallam is a film short-to-be, stemming from my interests in film and food. The short shall be shot on 16mm. Each frame of the short will be printed by hand as a laptopogram and glued back in digitally.

The script is also known as f(i||a)ll(u||a)m in certain circles.

What is a laptopogram?

Laptopograms, or, ‘Emulsion Transfers from Luminous Screens’, are images made by placing photosensitive paper on top of a laptop screen in the dark and exposing it to an image from within. The paper is then developed, stopped, fixed, and washed.

Any digital image may be thus exposed. More examples on laptopograminclude exposures of video, GUI, the Linux terminal, YouTube, Vimeo, YouPorn, glass negatives, poppy petals and film placed atop the monitor amongst others.

Here is an example: a print made by placing a glass negative from 1918 on top of my laptop screen while running dmesg within a Linux terminal:

A Synopsis of the Script

Film and food seem intimately related. Either they are cousins, in coitus, married, brothers, or ancestors. Possibly all of the above.

The name फिलम फलम / fillum fallam works best if written in Devanāgarī.

The protagonist of फिलम फलम / fillum fallam is a man who thinks of rolls of film as esoteric fruit.

He buys them ‘wholesale’, haggles with the shopkeeper, asks if the film is ‘fresh’ and checks expiry dates. He carries his film in a jhola (an old tattered bag) and stores them in the fridge.

He rips through the packaging as one might with an orange, and bites the caps off in the darkroom like you might do with a walnut. He washes them like you might wash a totapuri (an Indian mango). He drapes the developed film around his forearms and poses for pictures as a hunter might.

The complete script continues with similar themes of film and food.

How will I make this?

फिलम फलम / fillum fallam will be made on open-source software using photographic techniques in the public domain or of my creation. Prints will be made with an IBM R51 Thinkpad running Maverick Meerkat.

The film will contain some frames made out of edible materials as well. This includes anthotypes, casein prints, and individual frames developed in caffenol (coffee and vitamin C).

The following is an image printed as a laptopogram from a negative developed in coffee:

I reckon the final ~3 minute version of फिलम फलम / fillum fallam shall involve printing ~5000 frames by hand. The final version shall contain sound as well.

फिलम फलम / fillum fallam shall be shot and produced at independent locations and with equipment lent to me by my friends. Kickstarter pledges will be used to buy film, chemicals, photosensitive paper, for editing, and sound.

A Project by Ciscaucasus Xabarnama

Art as activism: should art be separated from activism?

Should art have a political value or function?
Should art be radical, critical, resistant or subversive?

Silent City in collaboration with Shoppinghour are looking for artists and writers for an online publication to be released in October 2010.

All articles should be no more than 1,000 words long and respond to the above question.

We are looking for journalistic pieces, academic extracts, experimental texts, art, poetry, plays, everything and anything which you feel responds to the above question.

Please email all submissions to info@silentcity.org.uk with the subject heading “Publication Submission”.

Silent City is a collective made up of three individuals, Cara Nahaul, Sally Mumby Croft and Emily Whitebread who plan to participate in and curate a series of group shows around four pillars of development policy – environmental balance, economic growth, social inclusion and cultural diversity. We are devoted to alternative interpretations of social issues. Our goal is to provide new experiences for contemplation and inquiry. Visit www.silentcity.org.uk for more information.

‘this is tomorrow’ displays an edited selection of international contemporary art exhibitions and projects. Our focus is innovative projects that challenge existing norms or formats of artistic thinking. Over time ‘this is tomorrow’ will become an archive of contemporary art, its value lying not just in providing access to current shows but in the history it writes.

‘This Is Tomorrow’ was a seminal art exhibition held in August 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Galllery, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.

www.thisistomorrow.info, Facebook, Twitter