PRESS RELEASE
April 6, 2005
The Lectures Committee-
The University of Wisconsin-Madison
Venue: Elvehjem Museum of Art
800 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706-
Contact: Hrag Varjabedian
Tel: (608) 608-238-5610
E-mail: [email protected]
Website:
“Notions of Otherness: Between the Margins, the Frame, and the
Translation”- A film screening and presentation by Los Angeles film/
video artist Tina Bastajian-
On Thursday, April 14th the University of Wisconsin Madison will
present, “Notions of Otherness: Between the Margins, the Frame, and the
Translation” a screening and presentation by Los Angeles film/video
artist Tina Bastajian. This program is free and open to the public
and is located on campus at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, L140- at 6pm.
Sponsored in collaboration with the Lectures Committee and the Visual
Culture Studies Program, Armenian Students Association, the Department
of Art, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Communication
Arts, and the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia.
Informed by exilic and diasporan cinemas, Tina Bastajian’s work
deals with challenging topics such as cultural identity, belonging,
displacement, race and gender, and the passing on of traumatic
experiences through oral stories. Finding one’s place inspires both
her narratives and visual strategies. The totality of Bastajian’s
work presents notions of Otherness, which become prevalent between
the boundaries and structures of cultures, and the translations that
take place between them, in the process engendering the construction
of identities.
There will be a moderated talk with the artist showing her three
selected works, which include: “Pinched Cheeks and Slurs in a Language
that Avoids Her” – A triangulation of themes positing layers of a
monologue, mirrored images and a conversation heard and overheard as
a young girl questions her belonging to a culture and language that
is both familiar and alien. An ironic twist challenges racial slurs
through the wisdom embodied in the making of Armenian coffee and the
reading of coffee cups.
“Jagadakeer … between the near and east” is a cinematic meditation,
which forms an intricate series of transitions to explore memory,
nostalgia, displacement, erasure and reconnection to articulate a
fragmentary vision of the Armenian Genocide as a visual/aural backdrop.
The suppressed traumatic oral stories of the filmmaker’s survivor
grandmother are a point of departure, juxtaposed with stylized
tableaus, found footage and home-movies with recurring but disparate
narratives that are interrupted and staggered. These starts and stops,
like memory itself, frame the invisible to evoke a sense of homeland,
a lost and enigmatic landscape.
“Garden Dwelling” is a video essay that (re) visits the lost homeland
of the artist’s family in Eastern Turkey. Rather than dwell on the
travelers’ daily itinerary and the big sights, this journey takes us
to the spaces in between: the awkward translations, the mystifying
exchanges, the unspoken tensions that still linger across the closed
border between Armenia and Turkey. The film becomes a graceful,
nuanced treatment of the filmmaker’s ambivalent relationship to her
historic homeland.
This event is free and open to the public.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress