Programme:

1.Sunrise Fires - Lorenzo Gattorna2013, 16mm-to-digital, b/w and color, sound, 6.5mIn early September 1995 the Sunrise Wildfire was extinguished. 7,000 acres had burned during the peak of the tourist season yet nobody was killed. The aggravated assault swept from one side of Sunrise Highway to the other without the slightest hesitance. Another series of severe brush fires ignited 17 years later and became known as the Brookhaven Blaze. The outbreak left around 2,000 acres torched. The wild ruin and regrowth were revisited within The Central Pine Barrens, the largest natural area on Long Island and its last remaining wilderness.

2. The Sea [is still] Around Us - Hope Tucker4 minutes, HD, US, 2012The postcard of a vacation spot usually enhances the reality. The contrast is more stark in Corinna, Maine, a former woolen mill town on the shores of Lake Sebasticook, where unregulated dumping of pesticides and industrial waste contaminated the water supply.

3. Morning at Xuanwu Lake - Chris H LynnSuper 8mm to digital, b/w, silent, 2.00 MinutesLyrical views are captured on an early morning at Xuanwu Lake in Nanjing, China

Kunsthall Oslo is very pleased to present the work of the renowned American filmmaker Barbara Hammer to a Norwegian audience for the first time.

Barbara Hammer will introduce her work and the Kunsthall Oslo retrospective with a talk, "Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life", on Friday Novermber 29th at 7pm.

For over four decades, Barbara Hammer (born 1939) has been making formally experimental and culturally groundbreaking films exploring cinema, biography, history and sexuality. She has made more than eighty film and video works, and Kunsthall Oslo will present a selection of work ranging from the 1970s until today. Her breakthrough 1974 film Dyketactics has been called “the first lesbian lovemaking film made by a lesbian” and the Museum of Modern Art in New York describes her as one of the key experimental filmmakers of her generation. A review of Hammer’s recent Tate retrospective concluded: “It’s glorious, all this fresh energy.”

"The Basis of Make-Up I-III" by Heinz Emigholz16 mm film transfered to video, color, sound, 90', 1983-2005

The Basis of Make-Up I-III is the  primal soup that stands behind Heinz Emigholz abundant body of work. This  life-size film compilation, depicts  two decades of notebooks in an unstoppable flickery  flow. The blend of collages,  workaday writing  and  filming  is intersected by elaborate drawings halfway between medical and technical illustrations which somehow encapsulate the author's highly personal time and vision.

"An image vortex where Ideas fall" - Alexandre Estrela after Ezra Pound

Irish cinema has never been renowned for harboring a vibrant underground or experimental film scene. There have been significant exceptions (most importantly, aspects of the Irish “First Wave” of the 1970s), but it’s only in recent years that a body of films has emerged that offer a powerful rebuttal to that perception. While to announce a fully-fledged “movement” would be premature, it is safe to say that the work of the four filmmakers featured in this series – Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain, Dean Kavanagh and Michael Higgins – represent an important new direction in Irish cinema.

Working with minimal and usually non-existent budgets, primarily on video, with zero crew and casts typically drawn from friends and family, all four filmmakers have been developing at a prolific rate over the past few years. Between them, they have produced 32 features since 2008 – though it must be admitted Rashidi, who in 2012 alone directed 9 features and 76 short films, has been the most insanely fertile contributor. All the filmmakers are members of the Experimental Film Society, an international organization founded by Rashidi aiming “to produce and promote films by its members” who are “distinguished by an uncompromising, no-budget devotion to personal, experimental cinema.” As this series will make clear, they have also been known to appear in each other’s films, and even collaborate on film projects together from time to time. (Strangely enough, Rashidi, Le Cain and Kavanagh have even released three albums of sound art together, under the collective moniker “Cinema Cyanide”.)