Film Retrospective of Ema Kugler
DIVA Station Presents
Series of screenings and discussions

Thursday, 30th September 2010 at 7pm
The screening of Homo Erectus will be followed by the discussion between film director Ema Kugler and art critic Mojca Kumerdej.

Thursday 7th October 2010 at 6pm
Second screening of Homo Erectus film

Udarnik Cinema, Grajski trg 1, 2000 Maribor

SCCA-Ljubljana presents monthly series of video screenings from DIVA Station archive in the frame of the Udarnik Cinema programme AV/time: Time Horizons of Audio-visual Art. The series will show longer video works that are suitable for presentation in a cinema context from formal, typological and content point of view.

The series DIVA Station Presents will start with a retrospective of video films by director Ema Kugler. The first screening will be dedicated to Homo Erectus (2000) for which the artist had received numerous local and international recognitions: Vesna Award at Slovenian Film Festival in Portorož, Gold Remi Award at World Fest Huston and Award for best experimental film at Independent Film Festival in New York. In the coming months the screening of her other works will follow: Hydra (1993), Visitor (1995), Taiga (1996), Station 25 (1997), Menhir (1999), Phantom (2003), Le Grand Macabre (2005) and For the End of Times (2009). The first screening will be accompanied by discussion with the artist about her work that will be conducted by Mojca Kumerdej theorist, writer, journalist and an in-depth expert of Ema Kugler's works.

Ema Kugler: Homo Erectus, ZANK Production, 2000, 43'28''

"Homo Erectus is a film without words. Only music and images. Ema Kugler declares her moving pictures: 'are like a gloomy, surrealist dance of everyman with its own death. I have seen all this images. They had arisen from the darkness of my subconsciousness, they inhabited me and possessed me. " (Source: Republic Slovenia Film Fund)

The artist amounts images and music that provoke a sense of infinity and divine and lour us into the abyss with no possibility of return. The images lead us to the borders of our being and veil us into the darkness of the unconsciousness, into the inevitable oblivion of the memory. There are no words in the film, there are only music and images, but the story line is still clear. The images are silent witnesses of human's entanglement into the world of automatism – birocracy and authority. The god and the ruler lead us into senseless wars, killings and death. An individual is powerlessly trapped in these violent forces.

"With her work the artist proves that gesamtkunstwerk is the ultimate artistic expression. In her work a tension between life and death is staged to nearly tangible presence. We experience her work sensually on the performances in vast industrial halls, factories, stone-pits or on projections in full darkness, filled with sound or/and images that avoid any typological definitions. Experiencing her events leave deep sensual imprints on us. The images would appear to us in the true senses of this word. They appear to us as phantoms much later, after we are hardly able to remember the time and place where they inhabited us – in the sleeping dreams or the dreaming with eyes wide opened. Ema Kugler is a master of phantoms." (Jurij Krpan, Explenation of Prešeren Fund Award, 2008).

Entrance fee 2 euros.

DIVA Station is an internet and physical archive of video art, developed by SCCA-Ljubljana from 2005 with the purpose of researching, documenting and archiving video and media art. In Udarnik Cinema we are preparing a series of screenings by individual artists, focusing on certain themes and typology of video works, especially video film and documentary video genre. We will present genuine audio-visual production by local artists, accompanied by discussions with the artists themselves.

Udarnik Institute Maribor, City Center for Arts
Udarnik is a newly established independent center for cultural production, offering quality alternative to the predominant pop-culture production and opens up to numerous local and international artists. A broad specter of various cultural events is connecting different art forms that enables emergence of completely new ideas and works. Udarnik aims at connecting independent culture in Maribor and bringing new cultural contents to the local surroundings while bringing creative ideas closer to the needs of the public.
For more information: http://zavodudarnik.wordpress.com

We kindly express gratitude for invitation and cooperation to Udarnik Institue, Marko Ornik and Mojca Kumerdej.

SCCA-Ljubljana programme is supported by Ljubljana Municipality, Ministry of Culture RS, Department for Culture.

[Published September 29, 2010]