ARTension: Straight forward with
...Tobias Wendl!

We warmly invite you to the screening of the documentary Helping Things to Reappear– Conversations with Minnette Vari (Video 43 min) by Thorolf Lipp and Tobias Wendl. It is the first part of a series that portrays three leading South African artists (Minette Vari, Tracey Rose and Johan Tom) who work with their own body, documenting, altering and irrealizing their performances with video.
Subsequent to the screening, Tobias Wendl will be present for further discussion and an open talk.

Minette Vari, born 1968 in Pretoria, is a South African media artist who obtained her M.A. in fine arts from the University of Pretoria in 1997 and currently lives and works in Johannesburg. She critically engages with digital technologies, focusing on problems of representation within mediated images and mass media. She creates surreal scenarios with alien-like characters and her play with the untrust- and untruthfulness of media leads to the consideration as to what extent this could be the essential feature of media itself.

http://minnettevari.co.za/

Thorolf Lipp is an anthropologist, filmmaker and the owner of arcadia film production in Berlin. His research focuses on the Oceania and Sub-Saharan Africa, portraying the local media and art scenes as well as the topics of religion (myth, ritual) and intangible cultural heritage.

www.thorolf-lipp.de

Tobias Wendl is professor for the art of Africa at Free University in Berlin and filmmaker. Over the last two decades he has produced award-winning documentaries on African artists and cultures. Before being appointed as professor at the FU in March 2010, he was the director of the IWALEWA-Haus, Bayreuth, an important research and exhibition center in Germany for African cultures.

www.tobiaswendl.com

ARTension

Artension is an open platform for a critical discourse on and between artistic, scientific and other socially relevant positions. We invite guests to present their projects and discuss their subjects of interest in a public debate. We create a space for direct and intense engagement with concrete ideas, as well as a possibility for a first-hand experience, which can be meaningful for the audience.