–5 MINUTES
-5 MINUTES, The International Biennial of Short Video
Tuesday, 10 November 2015, at 18.00
UGM Studio, Trg Leona Štuklja 2, Maribor
Presentation: Polonca Lovšin, head organiser and coordinator of the Biennial
We are pleased to present the screnning of the new edition of the International Biennial of Short Video -5 MINUTES that was recently opened in P74 Gallery in Ljubljana. The fifth edition is entitled Insomnia Dyslexia as proposed by this year’s guest curator Ece Pazarbaşı. From the 127 video works submitted from different continents, the international expert jury consisting of Ece Pazarbaşı (head curator), Eli Cortiñas (video artist) and Polonca Lovšin (artist, curator from P74 Gallery) selected eight works from the authors Bonnie Begusch, Neno Belchev, Anupong Charoenmitr, Heidi Hörsturz, Sanja Hurem, Local A., Dustin Luke Nelson and Guido Nosari.
The International Biennial of Short Video -5 MINUTES was first conceived a little less than a decade ago to respond to the great interest among professional artists in the medium of video. The first editions were mostly directed towards the local context, since we wished to open the doors to the largest number of young and not yet established artists. Afterwards, we gradually expanded the call gradually to include international artists. In 2012 we invited the German curator Silke Opitz, who proposed a theme and collaborated in the selection of works and in setting up the exhibition.
Likewise, with this year’s fifth edition, Turkish curator Ece Pazarbaşı proposed the theme Insomnia Dyslexia. The response to this year’s call was phenomenal, with submissions from over 127 individual artists and groups from around the world.
Insomnia Dyslexia is an unofficial term that defines the outcome when lack of sleep results in misspelling, mispronouncing or misacting. Dyslexia caused by insomnia prevents one from generating a coherent sentence in a conversation or a fluid movement in action. Insomnia can cause a mystified result in written, oral or behavioral acts, or in all of these forms. The notion is that a transformed product (dyslectic outcome) appears because of a human being’s basic broken (sleep) pattern. It appears as the very moment when what the mind thinks and what the body utters do not match. Although the thought and the said are not co-ordinated, at the same time their combination describes the reality of the current moment fully. Be it a Freudian slip or not, the transformed utterance/act (within its own system) is always as meaningful as the thought utterance/act. And both the transformed outcome and the dyslectic outcome stem from the same source, that is, from the same individual. Although the transformed outcome and the dyslectic outcome may divert from each other in terms of content, the presence of the source makes them compatible. That is, the act or the word from the insomniac source and what the act or word could have been coming from a “well-slept” source complete each other. The intended word/act and the dyslectic outcome are the two parts of a whole within their own concept. The act in the mind of the source starts anyway as a non-dyslectic act, yet when it is externally expressed, it becomes a dyslectic fact.
Ece Pazarbaşı works and walks on the merged borderline of curatorial practice and artistic research as her main profession. With 13 years of experience in the curatorial and art management field, she has realised many projects around the issues of alternative education, urbanism, digital and analogue public space, food, participatory art and the technology of the human body. She has collaborated with various institutions and events, including the New Museum’s Ideas City: Istanbul, ARTER Istanbul, Platform Garanti CAC, Tanas Berlin, and the Turkish Pavilion of the 52nd Venice Biennale. She had the privilege to take part in Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments with a special research grant. She is teaching and advising graduate students at Transart Institute in New York and Berlin. She lives in Istanbul and Berlin.
Production: Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.
