Who's in town?
Jesper Just & Heinz Peter Schwerfel
Salt Beyoğlu
March 14, 2012 18.30
SALT Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema
Crime and Culpability
Jesper Just , whose work It Will All End In Tears (2006) will be shown in the context of Dirimart Garibaldi’s Storytellers: Art and Cinema Today series, will discuss his films – typically characterized by their sentimentality, film noir aesthetic and complex narrative style – with series curator Heinz Peter Schwerfel.
It Will All End In Tears is a work about America – “the United States of law and order” – but also about Puritanism and taboo. In three parts Just, born in 1974 in Copenhagen, uses narrative fragments, kitsch style and the overloaded atmosphere of classic Hollywood melodrama to tell an unclear and untold love story between an older and younger man. Hidden guilt and faked innocence, sincere redemption and moral punishment are the themes evoked in a film full of suspense and dreamlike images. Shot in 35mm with beautiful imagery and spectacular settings, the film works like a dark, subversive opera – without dialogue, but with sentimental musical effects and violent breaks in its narration. It Will All End In Tears is Just’s first work to be shot outside of Denmark, in New York, where the artist currently lives.
Just’s films are shown in numerous collections worldwide, such as the Arario Gallery (Seoul), Honart Museum (Tehran), Tate Modern (London) and MoMA (New York). The screening of It Will All End In Tears at Dirimart Garibaldi from March 15 to April 11 will be Just’s first in İstanbul. The artist’s works include This Nameless Spectacle (2011), Sirens of Chrome (2010), Romantic Delusions (2008), A Voyage in Dwelling (2008), A Vicious Undertow (2007), Something to Love (2005), Bliss & Heaven (2005), The Lonely Villa (2004), A Fine Romance (2004), The Sweetest Embrace of All (2004), No Man is an Island II (2004), Invitation to Love (2003), This Love is Silent (2003) and The Man who Strayed (2003). Continuing his exploration of the adventures of unconsciousness, the artist is currently at work on a film in Paris dedicated to author J.G. Ballard.
Independent art critic, author and director Heinz Peter Schwerfel, born in 1954 in Cologne, lives and works in Paris. His articles have been published in art, DIE ZEIT and Lettre International, among others; his books include Tango Urbano - Buenos Aires Intensiv (2008), Kino und Kunst (2003), Kunst-Skandale (2000), Kunst heute, Nr. 15, Kounellis (1995), Kunst in Paris (1990) and Kunst heute, Nr. 2, Georg Baselitz (1989). Since 1985, he has directed about 50 documentary films about art and culture, among them portraits of artists Christian Boltanski, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Bruce Nauman and writer Cees Nooteboom. He also created a TV series on design, and wrote essays about virtual reality (with Jean Baudrillard) and the utopias of the third millennium (with Peter Sloterdijk). Retrospectives of his films have been shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MoMA, and also in Buenos Aires, Helsinki, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. He founded the KunstFilmBiennale in Cologne, a festival for artists’ films, in 2002. His comprehensive book on the growing mutual influence between film and contemporary art, Cinema and Art – A Love Story (DuMont, Cologne), will be published in Turkey in 2012.