Innovative Curatorial Projects – Paris / SingaporeLowave Collection
Lowave's film and video collection has been built between 2002 and 2014 and features over 250 video artists and filmmakers from around the world. The label has contributed to an important number of international exhibitions, biennials, film and video festivals, as well as academic programmes. As Lowave's activities evolve, we have stopped our film distribution and our catalogue serves now as an archive that documents over a decade of film and video art history. A selection of our DVDs is on sale at Re:Voir in Paris.
Jocelyne Saab
*1948, Beirut, Lebanon. Lives and works in Paris, France.
Journalist, war reporter, filmmaker, photographer and artist, Jocelyne Saab has directed more than 30 documentaries, as well as three feature films shown worldwide by French and European channels, NBC in the United States and NHK in Japan. She has shot films in Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Sirya, Kurdistan, Ex-Spanish Sahara, and Vietnam.
Raqs Media Collective
*Founded in 1992, New Dehli, India. Based in New Dehli, India.
Raqs Media Collective is a group of three media practitioners - Jeebesh Bagchi (New Delhi, 1965), Monica Narula (New Delhi, 1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (New Delhi, 1968) - who have been variously described as artists, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events (Venice Biennal, Dokumenta, Istanbul Biennial, Guangzhou Triennal etc.) locates them squarely along the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory – often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. In 2008 the members of Raqs have been co-curators of "Manifesta 7", The European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy and the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
http://www.raqsmediacollective.net
Jalal Toufic
*1962, Beirut, Lebanon, lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.
Jalal Toufic is a writer, thinker and artist. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), and ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented internationally in such venues as Artists Space in New York; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; the Na-tional Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. and the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) as part of the “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He co-edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World, and edited the special Discourse issues Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee and Mortals to Death as well as the Review of Photographic Memory (Arab Image Foundation, 2004). He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, USC, and, in Amsterdam, DasArts and the Rijksakademie.
Marguerite Duras
*1914, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. †1996, Paris, France.
Marguerite Duras needs no introduction. She worked in cinema as a dialogue and script writer, as well as a director. She made her first movie, Détruire, dit-elle (Destroy, She Said) in 1969, and produced several experimental films leaving the codes of narrative cinema behind. This is how Les Mains négatives (Negative Hands), Aurélia Steiner, L'Homme atlantique (Atlantic Man), and Césarée came into being. In the latter we find the caracteristic elements of her filming style which consist in long travelling shots in wide open spaces - in this case the Tuilerie Gardens - over which Duras places her deep voice, filled with intelligence and dignity. A close friend of Marcel Mazé, then programmer of the experimental section of the Hyères Film Festival, but also of Dominique Noguez whom she often meet there, she became a member of the CJC cooperative and a symbolic figure of "different" cinema about which she would say: "To make different cinema is above all refusing to put up with the cinema of consumerism. The place of different cinema is a tragic place, above all a place of denial."
Chui Mui Tan
*1978, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Chui Mui Tan graduated from Multimedia University Malaysia with a BA of Multimedia in Animation & Film. Her work is characterized by a poetic sensibility borne out of her small town upbringing and a keen eye for stories based on personal growth and redemption. Other than directing her own films, Chui Mui also produces films by other Malaysian independent filmmakers.
Taysir Batniji
*1966, Gaza, Palestine. Lives and works in Paris, France.
Born in Gaza in 1966, just before the occupation, and a graduate of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Marseille, Taysir Batniji has adopted a multidisciplinary approach to his work through painting, assembling of objects, installation, photography, video, and performance art. His artwork offers a distant conceptual observation of the political and historical events that have shaped his country as well as subjectivity in regards to their resulting impact on humanity. Emptiness, absence, disappearance, and uprooting are recurring notions in his work.
