katya yakubov
films / words / images
PHOTOGRAPHIC FILMS
(2015—2016)
Around 2015, I became interested in the idea that there is no such thing as an instant photograph; a duration is always written into the image. Because I was working with video, I began to play with various approaches of setting the photograph in motion, turning stillness into cinematic time. This culminated in three “photographic” films (which animate photographs in different ways) and one “flicker” film (which shortens each clip to such a brief duration that, between the changing images, the eye begins to see something else completely).
julio
2015, HD video, 9 min
“However skillful the photographer, however carefully he poses his model, the spectator feels an irresistible compulsion to look for the spark of chance in the photograph… to find that imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself, looking back we may rediscover it.”
–Walter Benjamin
Portrait in Time
2015, HD video, 5 min single channel loop
Suspended between a photograph and a moving image, this “portrait” questions what kind of time is unfolding, and leaves behind an unfixed image.
Maps to the In-Between
2015, HD video, 7.5 minutes
A mining of a digital space finds characters and forms in dialogue, and a playful hint of narrative begins to emerge in this twice-appropriated landscape. Eventually, the great Apparition lets it all fall down.
Screenings:
2016 Microscope Gallery, “Maps, Monuments, and Meditation”(Brooklyn, NY)
2016 Acre TV, “RE/NIGHT/LIVE/MARE”
2016 Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival (Ithaca, NY)
2016 Alternative Film/Video Festival (Serbia)
2017 FRACTO Berlin (Germany)
2017 Video Vortex XI, “Video in Flux: Art, Activism, & Archives” (Kochi, India)
2018 Uplink Theater, “In Between” (Tokyo, Japan)
2018 The W:OW Art Film & Video Festival (Madrid, Spain)
The Landing
2016, HD video, 5 min
As image-makers, we often photograph without purpose, out of compulsion, curiosity, or the sheer pleasure of seeing reality through a different prism. These personal archives of images begin to pile up and spill out of hard drives. The Landing was a way to ask these fragments, separated by time and intention, to dance with one another—a cannon ball’s messy trajectory from sky to earth, collapsing its subjects into a fortuitous whole, while holding each blinking frame as separate.
Screenings:
2016 Echo Park Film Center, (Los Angeles, CA)
2017 KLEX Fest (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
2017 Interference Festival (Gdansk, Poland)
2017 Antimatter (Victoria, BC, Canada)
2017 Arts and Literature Laboratory, Off the Wall Video Series (Madison, WI)
2017 Portland Underground Film Festival (Portland, OR)
2017 Alchemy Film Festival (Hawick, Scotland, UK)
2017 Walker Art Center Mediatheque, CAVEfest (Minneapolis, MN)
2018 Far Out Film Festival (Nashville, TN)
2018 Onion City Experimental Film Festival, (Chicago, IL)
2018 Gallery Night, Liv_Id Collective (Bankok, Thailand)