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Alexander Pavlov
Film critic, culture reseacher, philosopher

Vadim Rutkovskiy
Film critic, CoolConnections.ru editor

Vika Chuma
Art historian, presenter

Evgeniy Mayzel
Film critic

Ekaterina Miloradova
Art Consultant and Ambassador of the G1 Gallery

Elena Krylova
Expert in cultural marketing, Curator

Zelfira Tregulova
Art historian, curator of international museum exhibition projects

Ivan Antonov
Art historian, teacher, curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery

Ilona Lebedeva
Art historian, curator

Kirill Svetlyakov
Art critic, chief specialist in contemporary art at the State Tretyakov Gallery

Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro
Culturologist, senior research fellow at the State Institute of Art Studies, specialist in the history of Western European avant-garde

Milena Orlova
Art historian, art critic, editor-in-chief of The Art Newspaper Russia

Mikhail Sidlin
Curator, critic, expert, art historian, teacher, photographer

Nikita Slinkin
Art critic, historian of photography, head of the department of cultural and educational programs at MAMM, lecturer at the Rodchenko School

Nikolay Ryndin
Artist, author of the channel about art "Art Obstrel"

Svetlana Makeeva
Lecturer at the Faculty of History of the Lomonosov MSU, Senior Researcher at the State Institute of Art Studies of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation

Sergey Shutov
Artist

Tamara Vekhova
Author, Presenter, Art historian

Yulia Tikhomirova
Art critic

Yuriy Palmin
Teacher at the School of Architecture (MARSH)

AMFEST

We are introducing the new film program AMFEST ART&ARTISTS – documentaries about artists who have changed the cultural landscape over the past 150 years. Film screenings start in mid-October and are be held in more than 40 cities in Russia. These are films about star creators – and about people who have pushed the boundaries of the familiar. Among the heroes of the project are the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, whose idea of ​​the ready-made took over the world, and Roy Lichtenstein with his comic paintings. All the films are dedicated to visionaries who defined the art vectors of the future. Without the innovative photographs of galloping horses taken in the 1870s by Edward Muybridge, there would be no cinema (Gary Oldman will talk about this – as a collector of these unique photographs). The artistic experiments of Eva Hesse carried out in the 1960s – installations and sculptures from “garbage” materials – are hyper-relevant today. A special link in the program is two films about the creative dynasty of the Wyeths: Andrew, the author of the masterpiece "Christina's World" from the MoMA collection in New York, and his son Jamie, the portraitist of Kennedy and Nureyev. There is also a film in the program that poses a pressing question: will the profession of art critic survive or it'is "Out of the Picture"?..



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BENNING RETROSPECTIVE: March 29 - April 7

For the first time in Russia, a retrospective of a leading American experimental film director.

Who is James Benning? A documentary maker? Certainly. All of the seventy plus films he has directed (around a third of them are features) are technically documentaries, notwithstanding the variety of methods he used. Even when Benning invites actors to play real people (Landscape Suicide) and even when he casts a star like Willem Defoe (O Panama, co-created with Burt Barr).

Is he an artist? There is no question about that. All of Benning’s works belong to contemporary art as much as they do to cinema. Museum spaces are a natural environment for his films. He has also been creating installations since the late 1970s.

Is he a minimalist and a structuralist? Without a doubt. Benning has never made narrative films. They are often composed of long shots, landscape studies, and static observation without a storyline. Building on the experiments of the 1960s with avant-garde structuralist cinema, they invent a different film language.   

Is he a philosopher? Of course. Benning’s visual practice is rooted in the works of Henry David Thoreau. His art is a multi-volume epic reflecting upon the connections between history and nature, artificial and natural landscapes, the personal and the eternal.  

A documentary maker, an avant-garde artist, and a philosopher, he is also a cult figure in independent film, an educator, and a poet. All these descriptions are accurate and none of them is sufficient individually to describe a creative of Benning’s stature.

This program at Amfest is the first retrospective of James Benning’s films in Russia. It covers, as far as is possible, various decades in his career (some of the earlier works shot on 16 mm film, which Benning used until Ruhr, he chooses not to show in cinemas). It is not huge, but to cover Benning’s entire oeuvre would be an impossible task. Even the seven selected films require concentration on the part of the viewer, but they promise great spiritual rewards.   


 
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Art association CoolConnections and Garage Screen present AMFEST, a program of film screenings: January 24 - February 4
 
This year AMFEST is focusing on independent, experimental works and new names. Amanda Kramer, Winnie Cheung, and the duet of Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan have not previously featured on Russian screens and are here now thanks to the renewed AMFEST.Their films radically transform familiar genres: New Strains reinvents the romcom, Give Me Pity! is a mutation of a TV comedy special, and Residency turns the documentary chronicle inside out.
 
Other participants include Ricky D’Ambrose, author of the grandiose metamodernist film-novel The Cathedral, which received the silver medal at Sergei Solovyov’s Spirit of Fire International Debut Film Festival in Khanty-Mansiysk, and Sky Hopinka with Małni. 

Media Partners

«Искусство кино» : Гид по программе ART&ARTISTS
Афиша: Творцы, изменившие мир: про кого смотреть на Amfest Art&Artists
РБК Стиль о программе AMFEST ART&ARTISTS
Ричард Линклейтер о Джеймсе Беннинге (видео)
Беннинг и кольцо Тарковского: по направлению к Мандале | Лекция Евгения Майзеля