Mute Doves and Beetles: The Films of Chen Sheinberg

Chen Sheinberg is a filmmaker, artist, and curator whose work has been screened internationally at festivals like Oberhausen. We are delighted to be showing three of Sheinberg’s films, Convulsion (1998), Blind (2001), and The Mute Dove (2012) at Screening Nature.

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The Mute Dove (Chen Sheinberg, 2012)

Sheinberg’s films observe and attend to the daily lives of ordinary creatures. By focusing on the small detail, the faltering and unspectacular existence of urban animals, ordinariness imperceptibly gives way to the extraordinary. Sheinberg chooses the common dung beetle, the dove who cannot fly, or a blind stray cat to express something about the heartbreaking creaturelinesss of the everyday.

Chen Sheinberg will be present to discuss his work.

Screening Nature: Symposium and Screenings Program

Our May 2013 launch events are coming up!

  •  SYMPOSIUM: Saturday 18 May 2013

Symposium on nature, animals, and the moving image: Queen Mary, University of London (10am-4.30pm), Arts One, Lecture Theatre. Keynotes & speakers: W. J. T. Mitchell, Claire Colebrook, Rose Lowder, Jody Berland, Silke Panse.

Admission: free; booking essential. To book, please visit our EVENTBRITE page.

SCREENING NATURE SYMPOSIUM

9.30am       Registration

10.00am     Introduction (Anat Pick and Silke Panse)

10.15am     Keynote: W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Art X Environment’

11.15am     Coffee and tea break

11.30am     Jody Berland, ‘A Visitor’s Guide to the Virtual Ménagerie’

12.10pm     Rose Lowder, ‘Interpreting Nature at the Present Time Within an Ecological Context’

12.50pm     Lunch break

2.00pm       Keynote: Claire Colebrook, ‘Sex and the (Anthropocene) City’

3.00pm       Coffee and tea break

3.15pm       Silke Panse, ‘Planes in the Plane of Immanence or: Who or What Moves the Leaves?’

3.45pm       Roundtable Q&A

4.15pm        Travel to Whitechapel Gallery for the 5:30pm screening programme

A mini-festival on cinemas of flora and fauna, at the Whitechapel Gallery (Sat 18 May 5:30-8pm; Sun 19 May 11am-7pm). Films by the Lumière brothers, Joris Ivens, Percy Smith, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Joyce Wield, Mike Marshall, Vladimir Tyulkin, Susanne Bürner, Rose Lowder, Helga Fanderl, Peter Kubelka, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Ed Chell, Mike Blow, Silke Panse, Erin Espelie, Johanna Hällsten, David Chapman and David CottridgeChen Sheinberg, Ian Wiblin and Anthea Kennedy, Lucy Powell, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Zalcock and Sara Chambers, and a selection of rarely seen early films.

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Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin, Elegy, 2001

Admission: Sat 18 May, £8/ £6 concs.; Sun 19 May £11/ £8 concs. (morning or afternoon programme), £20/ £15 concs. (full day).

Online booking available on the Whitechapel Gallery website. Booking essential.*

* Booking for the symposium and screenings is separate, and on a first come first served basis. Book soon! 

Curated by Anat Pick and Silke Panse.

E-mail us at: screening.nature@gmail.com

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The Cinema of Vladimir Tyulkin

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About Love (Tyulkin, 2005) will be screened as part of the Screening Nature Weekend, 19 May 2013, at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

This film about a woman caring for dozens of unwanted dogs in her tiny apartment is one of Tyulkin’s experimental documentaries that are intimate portraits of unusual people. Despite focusing on individual characters, Tyulkin’s films are pictures of post-Soviet life from a perspective rarely addressed in mainstream documentary. Compassionate and horrifying, sympathetic and frantic, excremental and otherworldly, About Love is dominated by the bodies and sounds (and even smells) of the dog pack. But, as its title suggests, divine love is at the centre of this film, making almost literal the God-dog anagram.

Vladimir Tyulkin will be present to discuss his work after the screening.