“The opening frames present three men… In the middle distance is a dark young man with dark hair… Nearer the camera is another man with a faintly more WASP look. Nearest the camera is a very nasty looking type posing without a shirt… He wears exhibitionistically tight, and very dirty, white jeans that glare a bit in the lens… Bluntly, he looks like he knows 42nd Street… His face and body have the strungout wiriness, the tough, undernourished gracelessness of a slum escapee who survives on street food, on sausage sandwiches bought at greasy open-air stands, hot dogs, Pepsis, and amphetamines…” — Stephen Koch

Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh PA 1928 – New York NY 1987). “I always thought I’d like my tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.” — Andy Warhol

Haircut (No. 1) is selected for Media City by Mary Popovich and Martin Deck.

Inside a care home, two elderly women are eating. One is the artist’s mother.

“The film is characteristic of Friedl vom Gröller’s project to break down the separation between daily life and the making of art, being a particularly compelling example of her recent works that meditate on the process of aging.” — Mark Webber

“A contrast between the intimacy of the act of writing and the publicity of its presentation. The difficulty of the undertaking, selling poems in the subway, shows the difficulty of material survival for poets. The double breaking of the rules on which the film is based (both selling and filming are forbidden in the subway) exposes both poetry and filming as criminal acts, thus revealing the true status of poets and filmmakers.” — Nicole Streitler

“St. Louis, a city on the delta of the Senegal River and the first French establishment on the African continent. Two movements that recharge one another are superimposed through double exposure: a pan in slow motion across a huge square, and portraits, panning from person-to-person, of one old man and several young men gazing into the camera.” — Madeleine Bernstorff

“A portrait of a group of women, recorded in medium close-up, as torsos from the waist up, seen through a fence. The shared years of the seven women, the wire mesh of the fence intersecting the image and the line up of their bodies creates an arrangement of a homogenous surface. The self-conscious blankness of the women behind the fence raises the question: guilty of what?” — Sylvia Szely

“Adama Diouf is an acquaintance, a neighbour and a scholar; a covert mayor of Ziguinchor in southern Senegal. He is a philosophy professor, heavily influenced by French existential literature, and is well known and highly esteemed in his city.” — Friedl vom Gröller

“[I]t is a profound act, to show people in movement, and one cannot err when doing so.” — Djibril Diop Mambéty

“ ‘This afternoon I arrived in my maid’s uniform, wearing my little bonnet and apron and tight black skirt, my hair pulled back… The apartment is furnished in an ordinary kind of way: a small sofa, bookshelf, vases, candles, a beautiful table. I prepared the bowl of cherries, filled the carafe with water, laid out the bodice and patent leather underpants for Madame and Monsieur’.” — Madeleine Bernstorff

Friedl vom Gröller (London, England 1946). Studies at Graphic Instruction and Research Institute Vienna. Photography exhibitions at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Frankfurter Kunstverein, etc; Austrian State Prize for Photography (2005). 40+ films since 1968; screenings at Austrian Filmmuseum, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives (New York), etc. Founder of School for Artistic Photography and School for Independent Film, Vienna. 6th appearance at Media City including retrospective screening and exhibition in 2010. Lives in Vienna, Austria.

A hand-processed Super 8mm film shot in the private garden of a high-ranking Thai army officer. The film is constructed from more than twenty years of the artist’s observations and memories about groups of conscripts who worked in this garden.

Mont Tesprateep (Bangkok, Thailand 1978). Studies at Chelsea College of Arts (London). Four films and sound installations since 2008; screenings at Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Les Rencontres Internationales (Paris / Berlin), etc. First appearance at Media City. Lives in Bangkok, Thailand.

Colour-saturated images of flowers forcefully create a sensory and optical phenomenon, vibrating on the verge of explosion.

Karen Johannesen (Chicago IL 1974). Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago and San Francisco Art Institute. 15 films since 2001, all on Super 8mm; screenings at venues including the IFF Rotterdam, San Francisco Cinematheque and as part of the “Big as Life” small-gauge retrospective at MoMA NY. Programmer of The Chicago 8 Festival 2011-2015. Fourth appearance at Media City. Lives in Chicago.

Oona Mosna