New Media Screening & Talk Series #49 | Monika Czyzyk

New Media Screening & Talk Series #49 | Monika Czyzyk
Friday, Dec 1, 2017 – 7 pm
New Media Projects – Tehran

Monika Czyzyk (b.1989, PL) is a visual artist living and working in Helsinki, Finland. She is a graduate of the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts and the Helsinki University of the Arts. Czyzyk works with various forms and lengths of the moving image. She relocates and participates in hybrid socio-institutional formations seeking out topics and materials created within these collaborative communities. In September 2016 Czyzyk had her first solo show – BOdyssey at Exhibition Laboratory in Helsinki. Czyzyk was a resident of Signal Culture in Owego/NY and Limbo Limbo in London. Her videos have been screened at WRO 2017 Biennale: DRAFT SYSTEMS, Wroclaw/Poland,  Union Docs NYC/NY, November Film Festival, London/UK, EMAP 2016: The 9th Ewha International Media Art Presentation, Seoul/SK. BOdyssey was awarded a grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Young Artist Grant from the Finnish Art Society.

BOdyssey Prologue, Film HD, 21:17 min, 2017, Finland, UK.

BOdyssey Prologue,  is an experimental film that features global female participants and asks them to speculate on a variety of subjects including 21st century feminism, politics, family, media art, technology and the advancement of post-human kind. The device at the center of the video collaboration is a toy camera: the Videogirl. Videogirl is a 2010 special edition Barbie doll with a video camera and playback unit embedded in its body. I use Videogirl for its symbolic content and as an actual recording device. The film intends to build upon the role of re-imagined female characters in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This seminal work constitutes the stepping stone for Astronaut Barbie’s quest into the future of the human species. During filming I had the chance to meet fascinating women, either professional filmmakers or everyday heroines, of diverse cultural origins and unusual perspectives on life. I have invited them to participate in the project by providing them with their own Video Girl and the request to film their unique viewpoints, stories and personal perspectives of the times we are living in.

I sent him a rabbit, Film HD, 22:21 min, 2015, Finland / Germany

The film presents a personal account of the moment in my life when I lost my video archive. I return to the places where I originally filmed and by doing so, I find new material in the form of the DV tape archive of German filmmaker Reinhard Lorenz. The project was a very intense experience that randomly brought together two filmmakers, both dealing in their work with memories of past digital lives, intertwined into a new fiction. The film is composed of original documentary found footage, experimental recordings of Skype conversations, stop motion animation, as well as sound design consisting in a unique song specifically created for the video.