Sunday, May 03, 2009

FILM: Ursula Biemann in Conversation and a Screening of Black Sea Files (2005) (berkeley.edu)

Ursula Biemann in Conversation and a Screening of Black Sea Files (2005)

Film - Feature | April 30 | 4-5 p.m. | 142 Dwinelle Hall

Deniz Göktürk, Associate Professor of German and Film Studies, UC Berkeley

Ursula Biemann, Zurich- based artist

Website: www.geobodies.org

Film Studies, The Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits, The Working Group on Contemporary European Performance, German, Department of, The Multicultural Germany / Transnational Europe Project, European Studies, Institute of


Zurich-based artist, theorist, and curator Ursula Biemann interrogates in her video-essays how migration and technologies of mobility are reshaping our world. In videos such as Performing the Border (1999), Remote Sensing (2001), and Europlex (2003), she exposes the gendered dimension of migrant labor and the precarious position of global sex workers. Her award-winning work has been shown worldwide in solo exhibitions, art biennials, film festivals, and activist conferences. Biemann’s 2005 project Black Sea Files explores the sociopolitical and cultural effects of oil extraction in the Caspian Sea, focusing on the daily practices of oil workers, farmers, refugees, and prostitutes living along the building site of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The video-essay combines an experimental aesthetic practice with the investigatory fieldwork of anthropologists and journalists to expose how visual intelligence is detected, withheld, and circulated. Black Sea Files is part of a larger visual research project with Angela Melitopoulos and Lisa Parks called B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond.

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