In collaboration with guest curators and international film archives and film festivals, we are launching a program of 16mm film nights. In addition to a curated program of screenings, each LOST AND FOUND film event will also be an open forum for artists working in 16mm to screen their works and open up discussion about working in this increasingly rare medium.

To mark the launch of LOST AND FOUND, we present our inaugural event as an exhibition coinciding with the Berlinale Film Festival:

A multichannel film installation screened on projectors from the 1920′s – 30′s.
Artists unknown (1920′s – 1940′s).
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Usually when we wish to recollect something from the past we see it as a still frame. It happens, that imagination about the far, often unknown past comes to us as an eye-blink, a single image hovering in time. Sometimes this memory of the image reminds us of something that we know or more often it has an accidental connotation. During the process of watching films, we usually transfer our private space into an unknown area, which could be unreadable for somebody from outside. Private stories that we could watch on the screen, go beyond both aesthetic and cinematic practices which are known from narrative and documentary cinema. An apparently chaotic plot, lack of dramaturgy, seems to be less interesting, but then again, this world without artistic qualities discovers for us an unknown or often ignored layer of representation.

Home movies evoke the world in which we as strange viewers, who have no access to the private stories played in front of the camera, become invisible participants. As such we recognize this thin layer, the border that divide the imaginary world from “here and now”. The process of recollecting events from the past works also in reverse: when we look at pictures taken by others, facts from our private lives are called to mind. Participating in this blaze of places and characters, we start to think that we, not the other, created these images – that we saw them like that, fooling our memories into occupying the space of the anonymous filmmakers. Following this logic, private stories carry on the dialogue with each other. Accordingly, screened images would somehow repeat the work that we as viewers have to do by ourselves in recollecting these disparate stories. Projecting our own experiences, we become the unknown eye behind the camera. The exhibition is structured as multichannel projections, all of the materials date back to the 1920′s – 1940′s and come from private archives, the people and places are a mystery. . .

Curated by Roman S.