Artist Film Festival
Somewhere above the seam line between art and cinema, historical research and political activism, low-resolution images and advanced technologies, a form of practice has taken shape in recent years that charges the moving image with new aesthetics, energy, and meaning.
This practice is familiar to us from watching video works, moving-image installations, and films presented in exhibitions and festivals in Israel and around the world. Yet because of its elusive nature, it is difficult to define it as a distinct artistic genre. It seems to be a hybrid, an illegitimate offspring born of two central turns that the art world has undergone in recent years: the cinematic turn and the social turn. These are two contradictory tendencies that responded, and continue to respond, to the global neoliberal order that has been emerging since the 1990s.
Within the cinematic turn, artists began creating works that increasingly resemble films, both in their carefully crafted production quality and in their presentation within exhibition spaces that have transformed from white cubes into black boxes. In contrast, the social turn marked artists’ growing interest in interpersonal relations and in marginalized and disadvantaged communities.
While the cinematic turn was directed toward spectacle – the impressive, the photogenic, that which adopts a seductive aesthetic while also critiquing it – artists associated with the social turn often chose to engage with political and social issues, doing so while abandoning the process of image-making, or at least assigning it secondary importance.
Out of this combination, many films have begun to appear over the past decade that deal with the economic, political, social, and cultural realities outside the studio. These are video works of varying durations and styles, moving constantly between different creative practices and diverse fields of knowledge. They include work with historical materials or existing images, a playful movement between truth and fiction, unconventional uses of the possibilities offered by the world of post-production, an emphasis on the performative-operational dimension of the image, and more.
The Artport Artists’ Film Festival was born out of the need to create a local platform that would support this new kind of artistic practice. Its main goal is to establish a framework for local artists that will allow them to present their work and reflect on their practice, while engaging in dialogue with creators, curators, and researchers from other fields.
Combining a film festival with an art event, the festival includes screenings of films by some of the most interesting artists working in the world today, as well as a series of performances, workshops, lectures, and conversations in which the visual image occupies a central, though not exclusive, place.
