Content Description
a summer evening with felice naomi wonnenberg
With her film and video work, Felice Naomi Wonnenberg has chosen not to take the easy route. Her style oscillates between the tradition of Avant-garde and the realism of TV documentary. Also, she does not just employ different styles as a means for telling different messages. Instead, it is her intense curiosity for the buried messages and meanings in images, a curiosity for a second and third reading, and a curiosity for the pictures of her own obsessions, which drives her image making and editing. She thus overcomes preconceptions and deconstructs simplified views, even if dealing with the entrenched theme of the relations between the West and the Middle East.
The pronounced denial of a young Israeli against seeing tragedy in bomb attacks in Israel and the early, violent memories of treating turtles of a young Palestinian come together in the film "A Turtle’s Life in Middle East". The two statements are being melted with images of dwellings, shelter and injury photographed in Greece and Tunis. The coherency of this assemblage makes the viewer follow references to further existential thoughts and stimulates a rereading of the just seen and heard.
Similarly, the film "On the Edge of Swans" opens up a larger realm of associations, larger than the possible first impressions of a surrealist collage seem to convey. The suggested stories of erotic and pictorial entanglement, the ambivalence of male and female metaphors and the failing relations between sexes are being disclosed with an irresistible pictorial curiosity that urges us second feelings rather than second thoughts.
Her decision to live in Israel for now 2 years (with a second residency in Germany) surely plays a role in her image production. We may detect an approximation to metaphors of the Middle East in her work, and we also find a discussion of the Western views onto the "Orient". However, we find one other driving force in Felice Naomi Wonnenberg's, surely not being the least: a desire for beauty.
With her work in art and film, she thus takes (with a quote from Hildegard Knef, German singer songwriter) "den langen Weg"‘the long route’, which we luckily may follow up for some parts, now on the film screen.
Felice Naomi Wonnenberg lives and works in Israel und Berlin. She will personally present her films at Z-Bar and be available for Q&A after the screening. This program is part of the Sommerscreenings "A Summer Evening With..." of Directors Lounge. It has been curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr.
Program
felice naomi wonnenberg
cocoon and other swan songs
Sunday, 26 August 2007
21:00 h
Z-Bar
Bergstr. 2
10115 Berlin-Mitte
Program:
Kvetshing (Complaining) to Gertrude Stein
Mini video, 1 min, 2007
Jewel Garden
Experimental documentary, Digital video, 9 min, 2006
The Orient through Western Eyes
Video collage, 7 min, 2007
Cocoon
Video performance, 9 min, 2007
Weber C fracture
video installation, 5 min, 2007
A Turtle’s Life in the Middle East
video, shot on 16 mm film and Super 8 black/white and color film, 10 min, 2003
On the Edge of Swans
video, shot on 16 mm film and Super 8 black/white and color film, 12 min, 2000
felice naomi wonnenberg
The Tel Aviv and Berlin based artist has been showing her video works and experimental films internationally since 1998, among others in the MoMA Museum of Modern Art New York (2007), The Israel Museum Jerusalem (2007), the Jewish Film Festival Berlin and in Goethe Institutes worldwide. She was awarded the ARTE / 3Sat prize for artistic innovation, her work was repeatedly screened on 3SAT (German speaking art TV channel) and in over 30 international film festivals. In 2001 she graduated from the Masterclass of the Berlin Art Academy (HdK Berlin UdK). She lives and works in Israel and Berlin as an artist, art critic and in museums since 2005. Her experimental films are shot on 16mm film, and she also works with digital video.