A special night showcasing 2 artist filmmakers, who, in very different ways, use personal biography as a point of departure to explore how knowledge is constructed.

The first film will be correspondence by Olga Kaliszer and following a short interval the second film will be Tenant by Grace Schwindt. There will be an opportunity at the end of the evening for a question and answer session.

Correspondence (2012, Dir. Olga Kaliszer, 57 min, Blu-ray, English, UK)

In correspondence, the artist’s father narrates his experiences as a young man during the occupation of Warsaw by the Germans in 1939 and his subsequent escape. Such testimony is not only mediated by the memory of the individuals who have experienced such historical events but also by the memories of these traumatic events in the psyches of subsequent generations of their descendants. By combining two disparate narratives, one visual and one spoken, separated in time and place, the artist provokes a dialectical comparison, actively engaging the viewer conceptually with the imaginative space between them.

Tenant (2012, Dir Grace Schwindt, 78 min, Blu-ray, English, UK)

In Tenant, the family home becomes the stage to re-enact a scripted dialogue that takes as a starting point a story about Mrs. Schumacher who was the lodger of the artist's grandfather in Berlin during the Second World War. She was a communist and helped Vladimir Lenin travel from Switzerland to Russia in 1917 after the February Revolution broke out. The relationship between language and physical movements explores roles that these two elements play in the creation of knowledge and social relations.