in collaboration with
Townhouse Gallery and Rooftop Studios
March 2010
Workshop Leader: Aras Ozgun
Curator: Angela Harutyunyan
Coordinator: Mariam Mekiwi
Windows Project is a collaborative video workshop and video exhibition conducted by Aras Ozgun during his residency at Performance and Visual Arts Department of American University in Cairo in March 2010. 15 students, film makers, artists, academics (with or without prior experience in video art) participated to the workshop and collaboratively developed the exhibition with the works they produced. The exhibition opened at the Rooftop Studios of Townhouse Gallery on March 25th, 2010.
The project provided an open framework (literally, "window frames") which combines and cultivates different experimental narratives, aesthetic techniques and method that are possible in video. It encouraged the audience to relate to the physicality of windows both as (un)demarcators of private and public spheres as well as subjective and social borders or unbound situations through which the subject relates to the surrounding world.
The window is understood as a liminal space, as a metaphor, as a form of experience, as a social function and as a poetic device. Each video contains an "event" that relates to the situation by utilizing narrative or non-narrative form/technique that works with windows: An off-screen voice or dialogue conveying a story, or audible/visible clues of something that takes place in the room behind the camera --or at the outside, or a small act in front or outside of the window, or just an interval of time.
Each video itself is a space that opens to another one, each video contains an "event" that takes place in this opening --a view or a story that relates to a slice of time. None of the videos directly connect to the others: together they
form a heterotopic space, a multiplicity of places, identities and narratives --a room with many views. While each contributors' work remains an autonomous piece, it nonetheless resonates with the others and forms a collective and participatory body of work at the same time.
For the videos, click here.
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