After Cinema: Storytelling in Contemporary Media Art
By Heinz Peter Schwerfel
Published by Hatje Cantz (in collaboration with Dirimart), October 2024
“ Masks and disguises are a formal leitmotif in Alavanou's work. The masks have grimacing features that combine horror and carnival. In addition to an ambivalent mood, there is increasingly open criticism of social abuses in recent years paired with subversive humor. This is evident in her film The Hunter (2014) about the shadowy sale of a northern Greek gold mine and the privatization of this state-owned natural resource.(...)
Alienation also plays a major role in On the Way to Colonus, which was presented to an international audience in the Greek Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2022. Additionally, the film marks a break in her work. Everything autobiographical is left out, and, for the first time, she uses a technique that is unusual in art, VR 360° (panoramic virtual reality), to tell the story in a real and non-animated way. ”
excerpts from the chapter
"Immersion : A Journey Into the Collective Subconscious"
in 'After Cinema: Storytelling in Contemporary Media Art'
An informative, inspiring, richly illustrated book on contemporary moving-image art. This book sets out to use the latest technologies to short-circuit the universally understandable language of the mass media and to make art once again a critical mirror of its time. Around sixty artists from more than twenty countries are presented in eight chapters, that address social, political, and scientific themes (racism, climate change, capitalism, eccentricity, sex, zeitgeist, and fashionable and frightening technologies) in a way that is playful and innovative.
Heinz Peter Schwerfel (*1954) lives in Paris. He works as a journalist, filmmaker and curator, and is the author of books on artists (Georg Baselitz, Jannis Kounellis) and non-fiction books such as Kunst-Skandale and Kino und Kunst. As a filmmaker, he produced films about Christian Boltanski, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Christoph Marthaler, Annette Messager, Bruce Nauman, Cees Nooteboom, and many others, as well as TV series for the art channel ARTE (Design, Live Art). In addition, he curated exhibitions of work by Shirin Neshat, Julian Rosefeldt, and Loukia Alavanou (Greek pavilion, 2022 Venice Biennale)
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