[spectre] Sat. June 17 - Live Stream: Old Curtains, New Screens - Media, Minorities and Politics in Post-Communist Europe, De Balie, Amsterdam

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Old Curtains, New Screens

Media, Minorities and Politics in Post-Communist Europe

Symposium and Evening Program

De Balie - Centre for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam.
http://www.debalie.nl

Saturday June 17, 2006.
10.00 – 22.00 hrs

Live-stream at:
http://www.debalie.nl/live


The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 formally removed the separation  
that had divided Europe for decades. The post-Wall landscape has been  
quickly transformed by new forms of mediation: changing  
infrastructures, technologies, and aesthetic forms that range from  
print to mobile phone to satellite television networks. This media  
boom has linked the post-communist region to the circulation of  
Europe and the globe at large in the last fifteen years.

At the same time, new lines of separation, new curtains are also  
visible within policies and representations alike. We are  
particularly interested in how ethnic, gender, sexual, and religious  
minorities have been affected by the increased post-Wall attention  
that has been focused on them, and how they have been able to turn  
new media and social technologies into political and representational  
tools.

This symposium will bring together leading regional and national  
experts in the fields of broadcasting, visual art, new media  
activism, and film production to examine recent East and Central  
European media and political transformations. All panellists are  
involved in both the daily tasks of negotiating policy issues and in  
the theoretical work of understanding new identity formations that  
are no longer locked into national systems but are inevitably hybrid,  
sustained by and actively absorbing transnational affiliations. The  
event will be constructed as an interweaving series of engaging and  
informative short presentations, discussions, as well as film and  
video screenings.


Themes of the symposium and evening program, Saturday June 17, 2006:


Xenophobia and the Emergence of New Media Networks
17 June, 10:30 - 11:15

Tomász Kitlinski focuses on how new forms of xenophobia have  
accompanied the emergence of transnational gay, lesbian, and feminist  
media networks in Central and Eastern Europe. In the centre of his  
presentation is the "sexual dissident," whose coming out introduces a  
new voice into post-socialist literature, culture, and activism. The  
discourses of official media often dehumanize women and sexual  
minorities. Kitlinski addresses these forms of exclusion and the ways  
in which the groups involved try to challenge them through mobilizing  
new media networks.

Tomász Kitlinski is lecturer in philosophy at the Marie Curie  
University, Lublin, Poland. He is the author of The Stranger Is  
Within Us (Aureus, 2001), co-author of Love and Democracy:  
Reflections on the Homosexual Question in Poland (Aureus, 2005) and  
contributed to Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the  
National Interest (New York University Press, 2001). He contributed  
to 'New Europe, Old Monsters' and other texts on international and  
Polish new media.



Virtual Space and Internet Media:
Self-Representations of East European Women on the Web
17 June, 11:45 - 12:30

Arturas Tereskinas analyzes the visual strategies articulated by  
Eastern European women in their internet personals. What issues of  
self-representation, gender, body and sexuality do these images  
raise? What representational conventions do they employ? Examining  
the problems of fantasy, pornography and desire, Tereskinas argues  
that through these images women describe and specify not only their  
sexualities but also their longings, insecurities, yearnings and  
their movement towards new possibilities. Iconography and narrative  
of these personals offer imaginary forms of resolution for  
contradictions that exist in both Eastern European cultures and  
women's lives.

Arturas Tereskinas is Associate Professor of Sociology at Vytauras  
Magnus University and Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is the author  
of Bodily Signs: Sexuality, Identity and Space in Lithuanian Culture  
(2001) and Imperfect Communities: Identity, Discourse and Nation in  
the Seventeenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania (2005) and the  
editor of Public Lives, Intimate Places: Body, Publicity, and Fantasy  
in Contemporary Lithuania (2002) and Men and Fatherhood: New Forms of  
Masculinity in Europe (2005, with Jolanta Reingardiene).



The Role of European Institutions in Support of New Media:
The Case of Roma Media
17 June, 12:30 - 13:15

Valeriu Nicolae will discuss the role that European institutions and  
NGOs play in supporting media-related projects. He will explicitly  
focus on the ways in which Roma media have emerged in post-1989  
Europe, and how these media have started both to challenge mass media  
and to function as alternative sources of information.

Valeriu Nicolae is secretary-general of ERGO, the European Roma  
Grassroots Organizations Network, a network of Roma organizations  
from Slovakia, Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania, and an  
OSI fellow. From 2003 until March 2006, he was deputy director of  
ERIO, the European Roma Information Office in Brussels. He developed  
an educational project for Roma children in his hometown Craiova,  
Southern Romania.


Ghetto Entertainment:
Mainstream media and Minority Representation
17 June, 14:15 - 15:45

Anikó Imre will address the ways in which films and television  
programs that explicitly deal with minority issues have become  
central to public debates on minorities. In a case study, Imre will  
present a 'close-reading' of the film Nyócker (Hungary, 2004, 90 min)  
by the Hungarian director Áron Gauder. Nyócker is an animation movie  
on the conflicts between different Hungarian minorities and the  
municipality in the eight district of Budapest, commonly known as the  
'Roma ghetto'.

Anikó Imre is a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam School for  
Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. She has written  
extensively on East Central European film and media. She is the  
editor of East European Cinema (Routledge, 2005).



Governments versus Art? Art as Alternative Media Space
17 June, 16:15 - 17:00

Pawel Leszkowicz will look at the ways in which artistic  
representation functions as an alternative medium that  
counterbalances the one-dimensional gender structure of the official,  
often still state-supported media. The range of images of sexuality  
and gender projected by contemporary art might function as an opening  
into the hidden history of Polish subjectivity and society,  
supplementing and enriching the dominant media sphere.

Pawel Leszkowicz is lecturer in Contemporary Art and curator at the  
Department of Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Poland.  
He is the author of The Iconography of Subjectivity: Helen Chadwick  
(Aureus, 2001), co-author of Love and Democracy: Reflections on the  
Homosexual Question in Poland (Aureus, 2005) and contributed to Our  
Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New  
York University Press, 2001). He contributed to Polish feminist and  
gay collections and magazines, and curated the art exhibition Love  
and Democracy.


Special Evening Program:

Timescapes by Angela Melitopoulos
17 June, 20:00 - 22:00

Timescapes is a collective video project based in South-Eastern  
Europe that explores collective memory in video imagery and new forms  
of filmic representation through the possibilities of non-linear  
editing via the Internet. Timescapes' basis is a database built by  
five video artists/activists from Cologne (Angela Melitopoulos),  
Berlin (Hito Steyerl), Belgrade (Dragana Zarevac), Athens (Freddy  
Viannelis), and Ankara (Videa: media collective) who shaped different  
subject matters on the theme of mobility and migration-and memories  
thereof-in so-called "B-Zone territories" in South-Eastern Europe and  
Turkey. Angela Melitopoulos will discuss and screen her contribution  
to Timescapes, the artistic road movie "Corridor X".

Angela Melitopoulos is a video artist from Cologne, Germany. She  
studied fine arts at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf with Nam June  
Paik. She has worked with electronic media since 1986 and has  
experimented with single-channel-tapes, video installations, video  
essays and documentaries. Her video essay Passing Drama (1999) has  
won several prizes, among which the Prize of the Council of Europe  
(2000). Timescapes was exhibited as part of a larger exhibition on B- 
Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond at Kunstwerke Berlin earlier this year.



Film Program De Balie Cinema - 16 and 17 June
Special event


On 16 and 17 June De Balie Cinema will show the documentary The  
Danube Exodus by the Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács (A Dunai  
Exodus, Hungary, 1998, 60 min). Time: 20:15.

On 16 June the German film critic Jörg Taszman will interview Péter  
Forgács, and moderate a discussion with him and the audience.

Péter Forgács is a leading practitioner of 'found footage'  
filmmaking. Home movies and amateur films in particular serve as the  
sources from which he composes his stories. The Danube Exodus is a  
travelogue documenting the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before  
the beginning of the Second World War. In two ships, a group of 900  
Slovak and Austrian Jews try to reach the Black Sea via the Danube,  
and from there to go to Palestine. Forgács based his film on the  
amateur films made by the captain of one of the ships, Nándor  
Andrásovits. He filmed his passengers while they prayed, slept, and  
even got married. At the end of this journey, it becomes clear that  
the boat will not return empty: in an historical paradox, a reverse  
exodus takes place, this time the repatriation of Bessarabian  
Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich because of the Soviet invasion of  
Bessarabia. A fascinating personal and historical document.

Jörg Taszman grew up in East Berlin and Paris, finished the Budapest  
Film School in 1991 and lives in Berlin. He works as a journalist and  
film critic specialized in East European cinema.


Live Stream:

The program on Satruday June 17 can be followed live via:
http://www.debalie.nl/live

The live webcast will later be made available in the Balie on-line  
archive.


Organisers:

Old Curtains, New Screens is organized by the NWO Research group  
Globalization and the Transformation of Cultural Identities in  
Central and Eastern Europe (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis,  
University of Amsterdam), De Balie, The Netherlands Organization for  
Scientific Research (NWO), the Faculty of the Arts at the Vrije  
Universiteit Amsterdam, and Architecturalia.


De Balie, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 (near Leidseplein), Amsterdam.
http://www.debalie.nl/media

Entrée fee Symposium, 17 June: 5 euro (day progam); 5 euro (evening  
program); 7,50 euro (both).

Language: English.