Films in the program of Kumu Documentary accompany the exhibition 15th
Tallinn Print Triennial “For Love Not Money” at Kumu Art Museum.

2 February 2011
Kumu Documentary
Kiki Smith: Squatting the Palace
Dir Vivien Bittencourt, Vincent Katz, USA 2006, 45’
In English, Estonian subtitles

This film takes a circular approach to an artist who works in overlapping spirals of creative energy. Smith works in her home — not in a space specifically designed as a studio but on the 2nd floor of her East Village townhouse. There, amid her books, a pet bird, and tiny kitchenette, Smith goes from drawing to collaging to modeling clay to painting plaster casts and back, again and again, moving from one discipline to another in a way that can seem aimless to a casual observer, but which is actually the modus operandi of a highly sophisticated visual artist.
Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that many of the pieces Smith is creating — including sculptures, photographs, prints, and furniture fashioned from liquor boxes — are intended for an eight-room installation at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Italy, to open contemporaneously with the 2005 Venice Biennale. We see Smith collaborating with artisans fabricating her sculptures and observe her daily interactions with her assistants. We then follow Smith to Venice and witness the complex installation of her exhibition, which proves to be an integral part of the conceptual whole. The video culminates in a detailed look at the completed exhibition, Homespun Tales: Stories of Domestic Occupation, widely regarded as one of the most successful exhibitions that summer in Venice.
Kiki Smith’s work in sculpture, prints and drawings has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. Her graphic work was celebrated in Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things at MoMA, New York, and a mid-career survey, A Gathering: 1980-2005, organized by the Walker Art Center, traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

7. February 2011
Feature film
Serge Gainsbourg/ Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)¬
Rež/Director Joann Sfar, Prantsusmaa, USA / France, USA 2010, 130’
Estonian and Russian subtitles

‘Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)’ is a film about the life of the French singer and beloved pop icon, directed by a comics artist. There is lot’s of love, lot’s of sex, and even more music in the film.

9 February 2011
Kumu Documentary
About Jenny Holzer
Director Claudia Müller

Germany, Switzerland 2008, 52’
In English, Estonian subtitles

The American artist Jenny Holzer’s medium is language.
For more than 30 years, her name has stood for a conceptual art that calls into question our perceptions and the way we are influenced by media and politics.
Although her pieces can be found in all the world’s major museums, the roots of her work lie outdoors.
The LED signs we know from advertising are Holzer’s trademark. These text displays (originally created for political propaganda), with their rapid blinking and flickering designed to captivate and sway passers-by, have been repurposed by Holzer since the early 1980s. Programming them with messages of her own, she surprises, provokes and perplexes her public in a place where no one is expecting art: on the street.
Jenny Holzer is not a poet. Although her many text series, such as the famous “Truisms,” are always quite direct and clearly convey an attitude, it is the interplay of content and form that truly brings her texts to life. Where and how she presents these texts plays a significant role.
She never forces an attitude on the viewer.
Sentences like “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Money creates taste” express a reality even as they question its universality, demonstrating how difficult it is to find one’s own position amid the multitude of possibilities.

With her art, Holzer shows her public again and again how thoroughly we are seduced and manipulated by the visual and textual stimuli that surround us every day.
Though she is frequently categorized as a political artist because her work often deals with themes such as war, sickness and death, this description does not do her justice.
Her pieces, installations and objects have a powerfully sensual quality, allowing viewers to visually immerse themselves in her texts. “Text has different effects in different materials,” says Holzer, which is why she is always finding new ways of presenting it. Whether chiseled into stone or shining from a gigantic projector onto rivers, oceans or buildings in the landscape, her texts always elicit different emotions.
Claudia Müller’s film, which accompanies the artist over the course of 10 years, at work and in numerous exhibitions, makes Holzer’s art tangible as it traces her career, from the young artist putting up posters in New York in the late 1970s to the most influential female artist of today.
Jenny Holzer’s work demonstrates that, while art may not be able to change the world, it can heighten our awareness of what surrounds us every day.

12 February 2011
Festival „Täiuslik vaikus“
Documentary
Sounds and Silence
Rež/Directors Peter Guyeri, Norbert Wiedmer,
Saksamaa/Germany 2009, 90’

Peter Guyer’s and Norbert Wiedmer’s film is about the creator and soul of ECM record label, the best known producer of contemporary music in the world – Manfred Eicher, his work and creative path. Conversation with Manfred Eicher will follow the screening.

www.filharmoonia.ee
5 € (78 kr)

16 February 2011
Kumu Documentary
Richard Hamilton –Slip It To Me
Dir Jörg & Ralf Raimo Jung
Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Germany 2003, 43’
In English, Estonian subtitles

Richard Hamilton, born in London in 1922, is one of England’s most important living artists. He is acknowledged as the founding father of Pop Art, one of the most significant art movements of the post-war period. As long ago as the 1950s, Hamilton was introducing the ubiquitous images of mass culture and advertising into art, along with the newly developed technologies of the 20th century. With expansive installations in which he used a whole variety of media, he offered a provocative and sarcastic look at the forms that the affluent society might take in the future. From then on, the manipulative potential of the media never let him go. Today he is engaged – logically enough – with computer-generated pictures. The major retrospective at the Museum Luwig in Cologne from 12 July to 9 November 2003, a joint venture with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, is devoted to the development of his work from the 1940s right up to the present day. For the first time in ten years, his best-known pictures have been brought together in one place from all over the world, some 160 works on every topic with which Hamilton has intensively concerned himself over the years, including reconstructions of his legendary exhibitions ”Growth and Form” (1951) and ”This Is Tomorrow” (1956). At that time Hamilton’s ironic collage ”Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?” was already anticipating the most important elements of Pop Art.

The retrospective at the Museum Ludwig provides the occasion for a comprehensive review of Richard Hamilton’s career and artistic development. The portrait centres on a visit to the artist’s studio, a lengthy interview, and a collage of historical material.