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      Sculpture of colonial officer’s ‘angry spirit’ returns to DRC as Dutch urge reckoning

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 14 February - 05:00

    Carved wooden figure at Venice Biennale aims to spark debate about colonial blindspots in the art world

    A statue depicting the angry spirit of a Belgian officer beheaded during a 1930s uprising in the Congo will go on display at the Dutch pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale, seeking to spark a debate about colonial blindspots in the art world – and the Belgian pavilion next door.

    The carved wooden figure of colonial administrator Maximilien Balot will not be physically present at the world’s largest art event: a screen will show a livestream from a gallery in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the artefact will be on display for the six-month duration of the festival.

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      ‘Living in Brixton allowed me not to be judged non-stop’: Zineb Sedira, the artist who makes people feel at home

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 11 February - 11:00 · 1 minute

    The child of Algerian parents who grew up in France and found artistic freedom in London on family, ideas of belonging and how she and close friend Sonia Boyce came to be the toast of 2022’s Venice Biennale

    In the late 1960s, in a poor suburb north of Paris, Abdelrahman Sedira was in the habit of taking his little girl Zineb to the local cinema on his day off. Abdul Sedira worked as a cleaner in a factory. He was illiterate in both French and his native Arabic having hardly been to school, but he and Zineb shared a love of film. The cinema was the place where Abdelrahman met other working men, some like him from Algeria, some also with their children in tow. Father and daughter’s favourite films were spaghetti westerns, or schlocky Egyptian epics about Cleopatra. In place of subtitles an Arab speaker might stand at the front and shout out ad hoc translations. Those afternoon adventures stayed with Zineb Sedira, opened up worlds for her.

    Fast forward to 2022, and that same little girl, now a resident of Brixton in south London, is selected to represent France at the famous Venice art biennale . There are some protests at her appearance from conservative voices in Paris – what does this daughter of Algerian immigrants, an exile in London, know of French culture? But Sedira doesn’t listen to any of that. As part of her pavilion, she recreates the rough old cinema in Gennevilliers in which she and her father had spent those 1960s afternoons. And she doesn’t stop there. She locates films of Algerian émigrés like her father arriving in France in hopeful berets and somehow inserts herself in among them. She brings to life a famous celluloid bar-room in exacting detail – in order to recast a celebrated, taboo-breaking scene from the movie Le Bal in which a Parisian woman dances the tango with an Algerian man (Sedira sashays as the woman). And she remakes in loving homage the living room in Brixton, with its retro 1960s furniture, its vinyl records, its film posters, in which these vivid memories had settled in her head.

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      Streaming: the best films set in Venice

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Saturday, 19 August, 2023 - 07:00 · 1 minute

    As the Venice film festival turns 80, we pick the titles that capture the city’s allure, from desolate Don’t Look Now to romantic Summertime and Top Hat’s cheery glamour

    This time next week I’ll be packing my bags for Venice, where the 80th edition of its annual film festival will unveil new films by Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Yorgos Lanthimos, David Fincher, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bradley Cooper, the late William Friedkin – an especially glistening lineup for an event never short on gloss. But even without such attractions, Venice would remain my favourite festival: it’s the faintly unreal allure of the city itself, the spray from the Vaporetto as you leave the airport, the sense that you’re arriving into an eternal film location rather than just an industry event.

    You can’t arrive on the Lido, the drowsy barrier island where the festival unfolds, and not recall the yearning melancholy and faded finery of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice – that the Grand Hotel des Bains, where Dirk Bogarde’s wilting composer Gustav von Aschenbach saw out his days, has been unoccupied since 2010 underlines the isle’s ghostly air of glamour. Although Visconti’s film is set in summer, you’d be forgiven for remembering otherwise. It’s Nicolas Roeg’s devasted, desolately wintry Don’t Look Now (ITVX), of course, that best captures Venice in its off-season. Its misty, depopulated maze of alleys and canals laden with threat match the mindset of Donald Sutherland’s grief-stricken parent.

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